On one of the holiest days in the Jewish calendar, Rosh Hashanah, bomb threats were sent to multiple temples across New York, including ones on Long Island. One of the temples that was threatened was Temple Beth Am: The Reform Jewish Congregation of Merrick and Bellmore located in Merrick. On Sunday, Sept. 17 at 4:23 a.m., the synagogue received an email saying, “I placed multiple bombs inside the Jewish center. The bombs I placed in the building will blow up in a few hours. Many people will lay in a pool of blood.” The sender also gave a phone number.
The synagogue had seen the email at 7 a.m. and immediately contacted the police, who came and surrounded the building. Then, the bomb squad, bomb sniffing dogs, and x-ray robots checked the entire building from top to bottom. At 10:15 a.m., the police said that the building was safe and that the threat was non-credible.
The second day of Rosh Hashanah services, which were supposed to start at 10:30 a.m., began instead at 11:00 a.m. Rabbi Mickey Baum said, “We will not be deterred by these kinds of threats. The service went on as normal, and people came. We are proud of our congregants and our community who have been calling and expressing support and outrage at what happened.” He expressed, “This was not just a threat to the Jewish community—accepted hate, in any form, is a threat to our entire society.”
The sender of the threat, Eddie Manuel Nuñez Santos, was arrested in Lima, Peru, on Sept. 26 for making bomb threats like these to over 150 school districts, synagogues, airports, hospitals, and a shopping mall. Temple Avodah in Oceanside had also received the same threat as Beth Am.
Carl Ben and Liz Gordon, congregants of Beth Am, shared their feelings about the threat. “At first, I didn’t know. I heard Rick [a Beth Am custodian] talk about it.…I was devastated that we got threatened, especially on one of our most holy days of the year. I felt lucky that it was fake, but it’s sad to see this happening,” said Ben. Gordon added, “I wasn’t nervous. I was angry.…I knew it was false, but I’m angry because it was antisemitic.”
Both Gordon and Ben commented on the timing of the bomb threat around a religious holiday. “I would connect it to antisemitism because not only did we just get threatened; we got threatened on Rosh Hashanah, and they tried to scare us from practicing our religion,” said Gordon. Ben continued, “They picked a holy day in our calendar, and they were looking to hurt as many Jewish people as possible.”
