California woman sentenced for hundreds of phone threats to Tree of Life synagogue
Melanie Harris, 59, began menacing the synagogue within months of the attack
A woman who made hundreds of threatening phone calls to the Tree of Life synagogue and its executive director was sentenced Thursday to 32 months in prison and three years of supervised release, closing a saga that began just months after 11 congregants were killed there in an antisemitic attack.
Melanie Harris, 59, made her first phone call to the synagogue and its executive director, Joel Goldstein, in February 2019. In various voicemails left over the next few years, she referenced victims of the October 2018 massacre, used antisemitic slurs and said, “I’ll cut your f—ing head off.”
Harris was arrested in March 2023 in Riverside, California, and pleaded guilty to knowingly and intentionally transmitting a threatening communication in interstate commerce.
The Tree of Life synagogue did not respond to a request for comment.
After serving Tree of Life for more than 20 years, Goldstein left the position and moved with his family to Florida, but the calls continued. Harris called him more than 240 times in total, according to the plea agreement, including one day in October 2022 in which she left Goldstein 15 voicemails.
Goldstein raised his concerns with the ADL’s South Florida office, which forwarded them to the FBI, leading to Harris’ arrest. She pleaded guilty in October 2023.
“The nature of her threats of violence towards the victims and their faith were clearly meant to evoke a climate of fear and intimidation,” Jeffrey B. Veltri, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Miami field office, said in a statement. “Such conduct cannot be tolerated.”
Goldstein and attorneys for Harris did not respond to a request for comment.
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