‘We are used to running’: 12 things to know for April 29

1. ‘We will stand tall’: The various Jewish communities affected by the Poway Chabad shooting are picking up the pieces after the deadly Passover rampage in their synagogue, with stories about what happened inside the house of worship proliferating throughout the media.

• Rabbi Yisroel Goldstein, his arm bandaged and minus one finger after it was blown off by the shooter, made an appearance for the media outside the synagogue on Sunday, just some 24 hours after the shooting.
• “We are a Jewish nation that will stand tall. We will not let anyone take us down. Terrorism like this will not take us down,” Goldstein recalled telling his congregants as they sheltered in place on SAturday, his mangled and bloodied hand wrapped in a prayer shawl.
• Speaking to NBC earlier, he urged that “this horrific event must raise alarm and safety for all places of worship. Our government must step up… and secure our houses of worship.”
• “It was just 70 years ago during the Holocaust we were gunned down like this. And I just want to let my fellow Americans know, we’re not going to let that happen here. Not here in San Diego, not here in Poway, not here in the United States of America.”
• The rabbi told the media that when he saw the shooter he initially froze, then raised his hands to cover his face. One of his index fingers was blown off; a finger on the other hand was reattached by surgeons at Palomar Medical Center in San Diego late yesterday, Debra Kamin reports for ToI.
• In a remarkable chain of events that followed, the rabbi and a handful of congregants were able to save a group of children playing in the adjacent banquet hall, and prevent a full-fledged massacre.

2. A heroic charge: Helping matters was the fact that the shooter’s gun froze, which allowed army veteran Oscar Stewart to charge at him, yelling and screaming and apparently scaring him away.

• Stewart tells the New York Times that when he heard shots ring out, his training from his years in the military kicked in.
• “He looked scared. I yelled as loud as I could in my mean sergeant voice. I yelled, ‘Get down!’ and then I ran toward him,” he’s quoted saying, calling the killer a “coward.”
• Stewart says to the LA Times that he feels bad for the gunman, who will now spend his life in prison, and wishes he could have scared him off sooner.
• “I’m not a hero or anything. I just reacted,” he tells the paper. “I thank God that he gave me the courage to do what I did.”

3. Giving chase: Also praying at the synagogue was Jonathan Morales, an off-duty border policeman who recently discovered his Jewish roots and would travel three hours from El Centro to pray with the congregation.

• Goldstein says he asked Morales to come packing because the synagogue did not always have the resources for an armed guard.
• “Many times I said, ‘Jonathan, you work for the border patrol. Please arm yourself when you are here; we never know when we will need it,” Kamin reports.
• Reuters quotes San Diego Sheriff Bill Gore saying that Stewart chased the gunman to his car, at which point Morales “caught up to the vehicle and yelled for Mr. Stewart to get out of the way.”
• “Stewart risked his life to stop the shooter and saved lives in the process,” Gore says.
• Poway Mayor Steve Vaus tells JTA that Morales was not armed but managed to get to a weapon, shooting and hitting the killer’s car as he fled.
• “His courage likely prevented further bloodshed,” Vaus says.
• He also credits security precautions the congregation was briefed about following the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre with helping congregants escape.
• “We memorialized the victims of the Tree of Life massacre, and then we gave them tips about what to do if hate comes knocking at the door,” Vaus says. “Tips like, if you can run away, run away; if you can hide, hide; if you can’t hide, challenge the shooter.”

4. Fallen angel: The one fatality, Lori Gilbert-Kaye, is said by some to have shielded the rabbi from the gunman.

• That heroic act notwithstanding she is remembered as a kind, giving soul in life.
• “It’s not like she gave a million dollars for a building, but if someone was sick or someone died, she was the first one there with food or asking what she could do,” friend Lisa Busalacchi tells JTA.
• “She didn’t die a senseless death,” Roneet Lev, another friend, tells CNN. “She died advertising the problem we have with anti-Semitism and to bring good to this world. … If God put an angel on this planet, it would have been Lori.”

5. Scarred and scared: Yedioth Ahronoth interviews Noya Dahan, the 8-year-old girl originally from Israel injured in the shooting, describing her as “amazing, smiling, and just wanting the dozens of media outlets to leave her home and give her some quiet.”

• “The synagogue is supposed to be a safe place, and a fun place, but now I’m really scared and don’t know if I will go back,” she tells the paper.
• Her uncle, Almog Peretz, who helped protect children and was wounded in the leg, is described as a “media star” for his heroics.
• “I understood I had to get [the girls] out of the synagogue and run with them toward the houses [outside]. The emergency exit saved us; my luck was that I was right next to the door and [the gunman] shot at me. He pointed the gun at me, I saw him do it. He saw me and didn’t shout anything. He stood in the same spot the entire time, next to the entrance to the synagogue because he wanted to be close to the door – to get away. If I was losing my mind, imagine what the kids were going through; they didn’t know where to run,” he tells Israel Hayom.

6. Digging deep: After a slow start, a GoFundMe page set up to help the synagogue and those affected has managed to raise almost $90,000 as of Monday.

• The GoFundMe was set up by a Jewish 15-year-old named Cameron from the Midwest who tells JTA he’s never even been to Poway.
• He tells the agency that the only thing worse than a tragedy is “when you can’t do anything about it.”
• A separate fundraiser run by Chabad has also raised thousands of dollars.

7. From rockets to bullets: The Dahan family, originally from Sderot, moved to Southern California 8 years ago after their home was damaged by a Gazan rocket.

• Some five years ago, their home in Mesa, California, was vandalized with a swastika, Reuters reports.
• “We came from fire to fire,” Israel Dahan, Noya’s father, tells Israel Radio.
• Peretz tells Channel 12 news that “this is sad, but I am originally from Sderot so we know a bit about running from the Kassam rockets.”

8. Unimaginable: Dahan and Peretz weren’t the only Israelis caught up in the hail of bullets.

• Shimon Abitbul, who was in the San Diego area to visit his daughter, tells ToI’s Eric Cortellessa that he thought he was in the last place where deadly violence would strike him.
• “I come from Israel, I know what a security situation is,” Abitbul says. “When I come here, I feel like heaven.”
• “You come here and you think: This is the greatest democracy in the world, and you see what’s happened in the synagogue. You can’t imagine it,” he adds.
• Area resident Ortal Lusky says the same to Israel Hayom, telling the paper the whole community is “in shock.”
• “We’re a small community and it’s always very quiet here. … This is something you are not prepared for at all.”

9. Anti-Semitism is real: The shooting sparked an outpouring of support for the Jewish community, including recognition that the scourge of anti-Semitism is alive and kicking in the US and elsewhere.

• A Twitter thread by ADL associate director Judah Khaykin goes into just how prevalent anti-Semitic attitudes in the US and around the world are.

You might be surprised to learn how many Americans hold beliefs about Jews similar to those of the #SanDiegoSynagogue shooter. A THREAD:

— V. Judah Khaykin (@VKhaykin) April 28, 2019

• In the Forward, Ariel Sobel writes Jews should not have to die to prove anti-Semitism is real.
• “Every time I speak up about anti-Semitism, I’m gaslit by people who deny it exists. They even go so far as to accuse me of fabricating false allegations of hate in bad faith,” Sobel writes. “In other words, not only is there a furious spike in hatred against Jews in this world; there is also a ferocious movement to deny that it is happening.”

10. An atmosphere of hate: In Haaretz, Chemi Shalev attempts to go into the politics of the shooting and how it plays into the Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu nexus.

• He notes some tried to connect the attack to anti-Semitism on the left, even though the gunman is a white supremacist, underlining a refusal to deal with a very real problem.
• “The bobbing and weaving, the posturing and the spinning, the indignant attacks and the disingenuous defenses all broke along expected political lines. Which is as clear an indication as any that in the wake of the second shooting attack against a Jewish synagogue in US history, absolutely nothing will change. And that a third attack, with potentially far more devastating results, is virtually unavoidable,” he writes.
• Yedioth’s Orly Azulay also expresses fears that another attack is only a matter of time thanks to Trump’s rhetoric.
• “Words have power, and they can kill. When the US President makes racist comments against those that are different and the other, it gives anti-Semites and neo-Nazis room to act,” she writes.

11. Yair vs. Soros: Not a few people attempted to connect the shooting to an anti-Semitic cartoon in the New York Times of Trump being led by his Netanyahu seeing-eye dog, including Netanyahu’s son Yair.

Some reports say that the shooter of the Chabad synagogue in CA was saying that Trump is the slave of the Jews. I’m sure this cartoon in the NYT have nothing to do with it pic.twitter.com/BZ9xG6ItrZ

— Yair Netanyahu