Chicago Jews Hire Security After Anti-Semitic Incidents
Jewish families in the West Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago have hired off-duty Chicago police officers to patrol the neighborhood in the wake of several anti-Semitic incidents.
The armed officers were hired to patrol a 16-block area populated largely by Orthodox Jewish families on the Jewish Sabbath and holidays, when residents walk to synagogue and do not carry cell phones, DNAinfo-Chicago reported.
More than 25 families pay $25 a month for the extra security.
The Chicago Police are not happy with the arrangement, according to the news website.
“It was brought to our attention there was a group of citizens in the area that don’t feel the police are serving the community the best we can,” Sgt. Shawn Sisk, who leads the district’s community policing office, told DNAinfo. “We can’t stop that from happening; however, we’re not going to support it. We don’t want that to send a false sense of security to the neighborhood.”
Incidents over the last six months include anti-Semitic graffiti, robbery at gunpoint, and anonymous envelopes filled with white powder and Arabic writing sent to several Jewish organizations in the area.
It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.
This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions.
We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.
As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday!
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
