By Ken Stone

Reprinted with permission from Times of San Diego, a member of the San Diego Online News Association

Photo:  Chabad of Poway Rabbi Yisroel Goldstein speaks at gravesite of slain Lori Gilbert Kaye. In a White House visit, he praised President Trump as a “mensch par excellence.” Photo by Chris Stone

August 26, 2019 (San Diego) - A week before the November 2018 election, 17 San Diego-area rabbis signed a letter denouncing Rep. Duncan Hunter‘s “fear mongering” attacks on the Palestinian ancestry of Christian opponent Ammar Campa-Najjar.

By Miriam Raftery

February 17, 2015 (San Diego’s East County)—Last week,  a young Jewish man was shot and killed outside a Copenhagen synagogue. In Paris, as many as 250 Jewish graves were desecrated.  At the University of California in Davis, California earlier this month, swastikas were sprayed on a Jewish fraternity house after a demonstration by pro-Palestinian students, one of whom  proclaimed on Facebook that Hamas and Sharia law had come to the campus, prompting 23 organizations to demand an investigation to protect Jewish students’ safety. These are the latest in a string of hate crimes targeting Jewish people around the world.

It's a violent start to the New Year that continues a chilling trend.  Last year, 2014, was a year of unprecedented anti-Semitic violence worldwide, the Simon Wiesenthal Center reports. That report found that due to violent anti-Semitism, Jewish people worldwide now face the greatest challenges since the end of World War II, when 6 million Jewish people were exterminated in concentration camps by the Nazis.