By Aaron Bandler in Jewish News Syndicate

“The Los Angeles riots will soon be looked upon as a big nothing,” which only affects a small percentage of the nearly 4 million people who live in the city, according to Rabbi Dov Fischer, of the Young Israel of Orange County, a Modern Orthodox congregation in Irvine, Calif.

“Three lithium-battery Waymo cars aflame on the 101 Freeway look like Dresden but are only three empty cars,” Fischer told JNS. He said U.S. President Donald Trump was “wise to have called in the National Guard and the Marines anyway,” which “prevents the efforts by the state’s radical, left-wing governor from San Francisco to replicate Tim Walz’s 2020 failure during the George Floyd riots.”

The governor, who was the Democratic candidate for vice president, “signaled to anarchists that Minnesota would not provide adequate law enforcement to quell minor disturbances,” according to Fischer.

“Certain civil disturbances do contribute to shuls’ security concerns, but this is not one of them,” he said of the violence in Los Angeles. “If anything, the anarchists’ demanding that Trump reverse his legitimate border policies gives us all a week’s respite from their usual demands instead of eliminating a Jewish state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.”

“Countries should protect their borders from people invading to do them harm, whether Arab street rioters in Paris, Greta Thunberg in Gaza or South American gang members in America,” he said.

According to the most recent Economist/YouGov poll, 34% of respondents approved of Marines being deployed and 38% of the National Guard being dispatched to Los Angeles in response to the protests, while 47% disapproved of the former and 45% of the latter. More than half (56%) think that state and local authorities should lead responses to the protests, while 25% believe that the federal government should do so.

(The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement had a favorability rating of 45% in the survey, compared to a 43% unfavorable one.)

Rabbi Henry Hollander of the Der Nister Downtown Jewish Center, a synagogue and culture center, told JNS that he has participated in some of the “unorganized things” going on downtown and some of his congregants “have been at the organized protests.”

“We have helicopters over us, we have sirens, sometimes continuously. We have explosions going off. It becomes a hard place to be,” he told JNS. “We have more people in the area graffitiing things up. We’ve had some looting, which is never good, because it brings down the neighborhood.”

The rabbi told JNS that a friend passed an older Latino man scraping anti-ICE graffiti off a building. “So it’s like, is this what you wanted?” he said. “It’s frustrating because there isn’t actually leadership out there.”

The only organizing that Hollander saw was “knucklehead anarchists, who were trying to organize a more confrontational situation with the police, which was exactly what was not needed.”

“This is why you need people to show some leadership,” he said. “It’s very frustrating for us, because we have lots of police. But we don’t have the mayor or the governor or any of the city council people.”

“It’s just like, they’re going to just stay away and talk on TV,” he said. “For us downtown, we’re kind of on our own.”

Downtown Los Angeles, where Hollander said nearly 100,000 people live, should be treated like a real place, not a “backdrop for federal politics and cosplaying anarchists,” he told JNS. “There’s a real legitimate thing at stake here, and for the people that live here, including a lot of undocumented people, the response just doesn’t add up.”

In addition to calling for more leadership from elected officials, Hollander said he is “surprised at how little the Jewish community has involved themselves in this.” He added, “I have not heard anyone articulate what the Jewish values are in this situation.”

The way he sees it, Jews ought to “be supportive of people who are being attacked in the way we were attacked,” noting that at present, “people are rounding people up in the streets for slim reasons and breaking up families.”

‘Disturbing overreach’

Alex Weisz, senior rabbi of Temple Beth Israel of Highland Park and Eagle Rock, which is part of both the Conservative and Reform Movements, told JNS that only a few of the synagogue’s members live downtown. Many have contacted him about wanting to mobilize.

“They are very much taking to heart the mitzvah of ‘loving the foreigner’ and protecting their rights, and so if anything, we are just working quickly to mobilize as an institution,” he told JNS. “We’re going to take that one step at a time.”

Weisz’s community ranges from those participating actively in the protests to those “who obviously aren’t thrilled with the situation but may not want to immediately go and get their hands dirty from an activist standpoint.”

None of his congregants have been impacted by the violence or the looting, he said.

“Folks are just trying to let their voices be heard and stick up for what they believe is right,” he said, “which for the vast majority of folks in our community is a disturbing overreach from the federal government.”

The Board of Rabbis of Southern California, which is supported by the Jewish Federation of Los Angeles, stated on Tuesday that it decries “unwarranted federal immigration raids and the deployment of the National Guard,” as well as “violence, vandalism and actions that endanger public safety.” It also affirmed “unequivocally” the right to protest peacefully.

The board said there is a “profound moral reckoning in Los Angeles.”

In its view, “the unwarranted federal immigration raids and the deployment of the National Guard, despite clear objections from state and local leadership, are sowing fear in vulnerable communities and raising grave concerns about justice, due process and the appropriate use of force.”

It continued, noting that “the images on our screens have been deeply troubling. They are reminiscent of times in Jewish history when Jews were scapegoated and blamed for whatever troubles befell the nation in which they were living, and they were summarily punished or expelled.”

“Such behavior undermines both our shared principles as well as the message of the protests and is entirely indefensible,” it said. “We call upon all protesters to remain peaceful and demonstrate respect for law enforcement.”

The local American Jewish Committee chapter stated on Tuesday that it has a “long-standing belief in an immigration system that upholds human dignity, respects due process and reflects our nation’s core values.”

“America’s strength lies in its diversity, and our policies must reflect that enduring truth,” it said.

Photo credit: ORiot Poice Push Protesters Up Broadway Street, Oakland Riots, 2010 by Thomas Hawk, with CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 license on Flickr