Alabama Zoom Selichot service interrupted by Holocaust imagery
In this photo illustration a Zoom App logo is displayed on a smartphone on March 30, 2020 in Arlington, Virginia. – The Zoom video meeting and chat app has become the wildly popular host to millions of people working and studying from home during the coronavirus outbreak. Image by OLIVIER DOULIERY/AFP via Getty Images
(JTA) — Holocaust imagery interrupted a videoconference on Zoom for some Alabama Jews to say the selichot prayers and prepare for the High Holidays.
Some 50 congregants from Montgomery, Auburn, Dothan and Mobile were on the call with rabbis on Saturday night when at least two or three unknown people joined the meeting, the Montgomery Advertiser reported.
They began to share their screens with images of “Hitler, swastikas and I thought some pornographic images,” the call’s leader, Rabbi Scott Kramer of Agudath Israel Etz Ahayem in Montgomery, told the newspaper.
“It was chaotic. Then voices came in screaming at everyone using bad language, anti-Semitic language, telling us ‘you should go back to the showers,’ which is of course a reference to the Holocaust,” the rabbi said.
Kramer said the group has been meeting long distance for several months and had not had any other incidents of so-called Zoom-bombing.
“It was shocking to me. For 72 years, nothing like this has ever occurred to me,” Micki Beth Stiller, a board member at Temple Beth Or, told the newspaper. “It was just stunning. It feels like you’ve been violated.”
The harassment continued for about 10 minutes until the rabbi was able to end the call. Kramer later restarted the videoconference, but the harassers returned. Eventually they were kicked off, leaving everyone crying, including the rabbi. He called the incident a “gut punch.”
Kramer called the Montgomery Police but was redirected to the FBI.
The post Zoom selichot services for Alabama Jews interrupted by Holocaust imagery appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
