Kol Ami News

Utah Jews have spent weeks preparing their homes, their synagogues and their lives for High Holy Days, which begin Friday with Rosh Hashana, the Jewish new year, and end 10 days later with Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.

It is a time of celebrating and greeting, praying and preaching, renewing and reflecting, forgiving and being forgiven.

For Rabbi Samuel Spector of east Salt Lake City’s Congregation Kol Ami, it is the “Super Bowl” of Jewish holidays.

Sadly, it also has become a time for all rabbis to worry about security at their synagogues amid a rise in antisemitism.

“We have to hire two or three police officers for all our services,” says Spector, adding that they are held “pretty much around the clock.”

Larger congregations, including the one he served in Los Angeles, have full-time security officers, but Kol Ami cannot afford that.

The congregation is spending a half-million dollars in the next few years to beef up the synagogue’s security features, including a wall around the sacred structure’s perimeter, ballistic film on the windows and additional cameras.

While Kol Ami hasn’t experienced any violent attacks, it has received threatening emails, calls and letters.

“We want to prevent people who should not be in the building from getting in,” he says. “It’s a sad reality that is happening all over the country.”

Two years ago, a swastika was etched into the glass entrance door of Chabad Lubavitch of Utah, a synagogue in Salt Lake City’s Sugar House neighborhood.

Antisemitism is “not worse here than other places,” Spector says, “but we are not immune.”

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