Kol Ami News

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Rabbi Samuel Spector no longer asks Jewish Utahns how they’re doing. The leader of Salt Lake City’s Congregation Kol Ami already knows.

“Nobody,” he said, “in my community is doing well.”

Since the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas on Israeli civilians and Israel’s subsequent bombings in Gaza, he said, the east-side synagogue has received a bomb threat and a slew of threatening calls and emails “saying just horribly vile stuff.”

Utah Muslims, meanwhile, are facing “hate at unprecedented levels,” Luna Banuri of the Muslim Civic League said, explaining that the reports of hate incidents to her organization have quadrupled in the past five weeks. This rise in Islamophobia comes despite the fact that the violence occurring in Israel and Gaza represents, she said, “a political war,” not a religious one.

Conversations with her and Spector, as well as other Jewish and Muslim leaders in the state, revealed two minority faiths reeling from the effects of individuals they say have been emboldened in their hate.

Ron Zamir is the vice president of community relations for the United Jewish Federation of Utah. In addition to having family members who were killed or left in critical condition during the Oct. 7 attacks, he and other members of his Jewish community confront a level of fear when going about in public or to worship at the synagogue that they haven’t known in a long time, if ever.

“I’ve lived here 20 years,” he said. “This is the least safe it has ever felt.”

According to Rabbi Spector, some members of his synagogue have stopped attending services out of safety concerns, while others have pulled mezuzahs — a small box containing Torah verses — off their door frames, or stopped wearing their kippahs, also known as yarmulkes, and other outward signs of their Jewish faith.

“At the same time,” Spector said, “we have people coming to the synagogue more now because they need that support and want to support their Jewish community. Some people are wearing kippahs because they don’t want the people trying to scare them to win, and are actually becoming more involved and present here, and are more openly sharing that they’re Jewish.”

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