With conflict escalating around her and her husband called to active military duty, Chaya Shaul and her five children left their home in Israel this week to stay with her parents in Chicago’s West Rogers Park neighborhood.
“I came here and thought it would be safer,” she said.
Thursday night, just down the block from her parents’ home, an unidentified gunman opened fire on an Orthodox rabbi, then sped away in a car. Despite bullets in the door and headrest of the rabbi’s car, he was unhurt.
At least two other Jews in the neighborhood, meanwhile, were targeted by teenagers firing marbles from slingshots, police said.
For Shaul and many other Jews and Arab-Americans around the city, the continuing Israeli and Palestinian bloodshed causes the real anguish. Most predicted that the prevailing ethic of tolerance that marks Jewish-Muslim relations in Chicago would overcome the emotions of the day.
But Friday, some wondered uneasily whether a little of the violence of the Middle East could spill over into the streets of Chicago.
Authorities worked fast to make sure it did not.
As Muslims went to Friday afternoon prayer gatherings, and Jews began the weeklong celebration of the harvest festival Sukkot after sundown, police in Chicago and a number of suburbs stepped up patrols and heightened their visibility around mosques and synagogues. Mayor Richard Daley and community leaders called for calm.
Worshipers of both faiths said they trusted that Thursday’s incidents were isolated. But their confidence was marked with a note of wariness.
At the Mosque Foundation of Bridgeview, Imam Jamal Said denounced the violence in the Middle East and in Chicago, telling 1,500 fellow worshipers to make their voices heard peacefully. Outside the southwest suburban mosque, Sabri Samirah, president of the United Muslim Americans Association of Chicago, called the news from West Rogers Park upsetting.
“I’m against violence, but in such an environment, you can’t control how everyone will act,” Samirah said.
The Chicago Board of Rabbis sent its members a reminder Friday to take basic safety precautions during the holiday of Sukkot, when much of the religious observance takes place in outdoor tabernacles at homes and synagogues. The board also called upon members to make their booths “Sukkat Shalom,” or tabernacles of peace.
“In retrospect, what happened in West Rogers Park should have been predicted. Emotions are running high,” said Rabbi Ira Youdovin, executive vice president of the board. “But it does come as a shock.”
For neighbors, authorities and the entire Jewish community, Thursday’s episodes resonate more acutely because they took place within blocks of where white supremacist Benjamin Smith shot and wounded six Orthodox Jews on July 2, 1999.
Three teenagers were charged with multiple counts of felony hate crime and assault in connection with the slingshot incidents, in which the suspects allegedly drove up to two separate men, asked if they were Jews, then fired the marbles from inside a minivan, authorities said.
Amjad Asaad, 17, Saidsaukri Zatar, 17, and a 14-year-old juvenile, all of the Northwest Side, identified themselves as Palestinians and gave written confessions that they targeted their victims because they were Jews, police said.
Police declined to classify the shooting as a hate crime, because they have been unable to find the suspect. But Rabbi Avrohom Brownstein, who was heading to a Talmud class at a nearby synagogue when the shots were fired at him, said there was little doubt in his mind.
“I look Jewish, and if somebody’s shooting at me, [a hate crime] is the first thing that comes to mind,” Brownstein said.
In nearby neighborhoods, some Jews who were preparing for Sukkot said it was more the grim news from overseas than their personal safety that had them concerned.
“Unfortunately it’s like a huge poker game. Every bit of violence is like upping the ante, upping the ante,” said Jeremy Kraff of Evanston, as he gathered a bag of bread, wine and meat at Hungarian Kosher Foods in Skokie. “It will definitely tone down and reduce the joy of the holiday.”
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At Sager Solomon Schechter Day School in Northbrook, middle school Principal Robert Tecktiel said extra precautions were being taken, in addition to an extensive security system installed after a 1999 shooting in a Los Angeles Jewish community center.
Most of the chatter in the hallways, however, was about the ongoing student council elections and the early dismissal for Sukkot.
As the students left the school, worshipers gathering at the nearby Islamic Cultural Center said they would do all they could to keep the foreign woes away from their community.
“We strive to get the Middle East politics out of the relationships here between Jews and Muslims,” said center President Imad Almanaseer.
Mustafa Abdalla, a board member at the center and participant in many interfaith efforts, held out hope that local relations might even improve: “A lot of work has been done. If anything, the incidents in the Middle East will make us stronger.”
Palestinian activists gathered downtown again Friday afternoon for a rally that began at 2:30 and had drawn more than 1,000 participants by 7 p.m.
The protesters gathered outside the Tribune Tower, chanting slogans in Arabic and English and waving Palestinian flags. Twice they marched across the river to the sidewalk in front of the Israeli consulate, 111 E. Wacker Drive, where organizers exhorted the crowd to make sure their chants could be heard inside.
The gathering also heard speeches and testimony, including the story of Rula Manasra, an 18-year-old student from the beleaguered city of Ramallah on the West Bank.
“I spoke to my parents yesterday and I could hear the air raid sirens going off,” Manasra said. “I am really scared for my family and I pray for an end to the violence.”