Bomb threats were sent to Jewish schools and synagogues across Southern California this week, as a wave of antisemitism continues.
Breitbart News sources indicate that 20 Jewish institutions in Los Angeles received bomb threats on Tuesday, causing those Jewish schools that had been scheduled to open on January 2 to remain closed.
In San Diego, six synagogues (or temples) were threatened, as the San Diego Union-Tribune reported Wednesday:
Six Jewish temples in San Diego County were threatened Tuesday morning after someone sent a message saying a bomb was hidden in their respective buildings.
The local synagogues were among 91 total Jewish houses of worship in California that received similar threats, according to officials.
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Most of the synagogues have some form of preschool education on their sites, officials said.
Though the threats were hoaxes, they exacerbated fears in the Jewish community in the wake of an outburst of antisemitic rhetoric and violence since the Palestinian Hamas terror attack on Israel on October 7.
In November, a college professor was arrested in connection with the death of a Jewish pro-Israel protester following a confrontation during dueling protests in Ventura County, near Los Angeles.
Jewish community institutions have been hit by hoax bomb threats before — notably, in 2017, when a wave of such threats was widely blamed on supporters of Donald Trump, but turned out to have been largely the work of a disturbed Jewish teenager in Israel, and a left-wing former journalist angry about a breakup with his girlfriend.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the 2021 e-book, “The Zionist Conspiracy (and how to join it),” now updated with a new foreword. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
