DENVER — At Temple Emmanuel in southeast Denver Monday, services for the Jewish holiday of Shavuot came just one day after Sunday’s terror attack on Pearl Street in Boulder.
Senior Rabbi Joseph Black explained Shavuot is “about the receiving of the Torah, and it's a holiday that you study all night, and then we pray and give thanks in the morning.”
Black led those prayers Monday, even with his congregation shaken.
“There's a moment in the service where we pause and think about those who are in need of healing,” he said. “Everybody is thinking about the fate of those who were injured so brutally and so horribly yesterday. So we had special prayers for them as well.”
- JEWISHcolorado has set up a fund to help those who were injured in Sunday's attack. If you'd like to donate, follow this link.
On Sunday afternoon, the local group from the organization Run For Their Lives held its weekly walk to bring attention to the Israeli hostages held in Gaza. The Boulder group walks every Sunday and planned to do so at 1 p.m. at the corner of 8th and Pearl streets. Sunday was the start of the Jewish holiday Shavuot.
The suspect, Mohamed Sabry Soliman, 45, of Colorado Springs, is accused of throwing Molotov cocktails into the crowd of demonstrating people, injuring 12 of them, and yelling "Free Palestine," according to a federal arrest affidavit Denver7 obtained and Boulder County District Attorney Michael Dougherty. A state arrest affidavit added that witnesses saw him using a commercial weed sprayer filled with a flammable substance as a makeshift blowtorch.
Nobody was killed in the incident, which the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has labeled a “targeted terror attack.”
Black said the Jewish community as a whole also feels attacked, and while Sunday’s reaction from the community was “shock,” Monday it was “still processing… a lot of fear, a lot of anger, a lot of uncertainty.” Black said that has led to a response he’s never seen in a 38-year career.
“We had to increase the security around our building,” he said. “It's a new normal.”
“It's very frightening for members of the Jewish community, that in America — a land of opportunity, a land of freedom, a land where my mother fled Germany in 1938 to come here — is now a place where Jews are in danger and we need to have armed guards in our synagogues.”
Black’s congregation is taking that step to protect a place of refuge.
“My main concern right now is making sure that my congregants, my people, feel that they have a place to go, to find common ground, to find safety and to express their grief and their fear,” he told Denver7.
- Below is a map of 2024 antisemitic incidents in Colorado. Locations are broken down by city — locations are not exact.
But Black said there’s another outlet for those who are struggling: their neighbors.
“I’ve received very few phone calls from my colleagues who are not Jewish,” he said. “If you have friends who are Jewish, check in on them, see how they are doing. Because we are grieving, we are in fear, we are angry, and we're feeling isolated and alone.”
Sunday’s attack comes amid escalating discourse surrounding the Israel-Hamas war.
“This was a march on behalf of hostages, people who are in captivity in Gaza, and somebody felt it was justified to try and murder people who were peacefully protesting the fact that innocents were being held captive in Gaza,” Black said. “You can't justify that, and people are trying to, which is horrific for me as well. The rise in ignorance, in antisemitism, is alarming.
“Unfortunately, we see that Israel, Zionism, and the Jewish people are all intertwined, and it is very frightening for the Jewish community,” he added. “We are grieving. We're grieving for the loss of the 1,200 people who were brutally murdered and the thousands more who were injured [during the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack]. We're grieving about the fate of the hostages, those who were killed in Hamas captivity. We're grieving for the fate of innocent Palestinian civilians who were caught up in this horrific war. We want the war to end. We want the hostages returned. We want to find a way to make peace.”
- Denver7 anchor Jessica Porter sat down with Dr. Micheline Ishay, director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Denver, to discuss the latest on the Israel-Hamas war and the remaining hostages.
