When Home Is No Longer Home 

There Are More Good People Than Bad

June 30, 2025

With the recent pico protest, elad and I have been reflecting on times when we have seen our jewish community really respond with incredible support and embrace in times of threat. 

Like the time in Brooklyn when elad was in Shul davening and a jewish woman outside started yelling she needed help, that she was being mugged by a non Jew in the neighborhood. Men ran out instantly from shul, came from every street corner, pounced upon this guy as a mob and chased him away. 

The times I called Hatzalah in the middle of the night, worried about one of my kids, and two men would show up within minutes, armed with everything I could need, staying with me, making all the necessary arrangements, driving me to the er, escorting me in. Everything. 

The time in Brooklyn I saw a non jewish guy grab my jewish neighbors phone from his hand and start running down the street with it, my jewish neighbor about 20 years old, but not quite all there in the head, running after him. I called Shmira because honestly I was just worried about my jewish neighbor, that he would be safe chasing after him. And Shmira came with flashing light racing down in a car, tracking him down. 

How good we are at taking care of our own when we feel that the threat is outside. 

How differently that changes when the threat comes from within. 

When my husband started telling me this week about how there were certain Jewish instigators who were not just responding to violence at the pico protests but initiating it, who were chasing after pro Palestinian protestors and cornering them and beating them up, I said “you need to talk about that. We need as a community to talk about that.” 

And he did, on his social media. This Friday, he alerted me that someone from our local jewish community was sending him threatening messages, asking where we live, calling him a self-hating Jew, insinuating that he was going to harm him. 

My husband was alarmed enough to call Shmira, the local Jewish safety organization.

I realized that i knew who this guy was, that we had spoken a couple of times. But I worked hard at calming down my body and felt okay. 

Shabbat was wonderful and beautiful, more so than usual. It was full of lots of people and lots of conversations. 

I was scootering home with my seven year old from her play date, and we stopped at the corner of Pico and Doheny to wait for the crosswalk light. 

There was a crowd of jewish men on the opposite side and one of them called out loudly at me:

“Hey!! where’s elad???” 

I stared at him and he stared back, his eyes fixed on me. I realized it might be that guy who had threatened elad, so after a moment, I turned to Amalia and said, “hey, let’s go down this way instead.” 

We turned to go down pico towards the 770, and the guy (his name we will call Chaim, he’s the one with the large Moshiach flag at all the protests, in the mix of all the violence) started loudly yelling at me, over and over again, top of his lungs. 

I was in shock and can’t remember what he was saying, but I just know that it was happening on repeat, for a long time, and he was standing on the corner watching us, shouting towards us. 

I’m with my 7 year old as he’s doing all of this. I asked her later when she remembers, and she could just remember that he was saying “Elad” and “Fuck” a lot. I know he was mentioning Eretz Yisroel and something about the war. I asked her if she remembered him saying anything about hurting abba but she couldn’t remember. 

I stop in front of the Shmira station in front of 770. A nonJewish man is standing nearby, concerned. “Do you want me to call 911?” He asks. 

“Yes,” I say, as the shouting continues. “Go inside” I tell my daughter, pushing her inside the doors of 770, where she waits, confused, inside, alone, while someone outside is yelling and swearing about her dad in the middle of a busy street. 

The 911 call is taking a while. Because Chaim isn’t physically doing anything, it seems like they don’t think there’s much they can do.  The nonJewish man is explaining the harassment as it’s ongoing, continuing, trying to convince them to send someone. The Shmira guy is silently standing next to me. 

I’m strung out. 

“Why aren’t you doing anything?!” I ask him exasperated, panicking. “Go stop him.” 

“I can’t leave my post,” he says simply , calmly. 

After what feels like forever, another Shmira man arrives, walking slowly towards me. 

Chaim starts walking in the other direction. 

“You need to stop him,” I tell Shmira #2. “My husband called you on Friday. This guy has been threatening us. You need to find him and make sure he doesn’t hurt us.” 

“Chaim?” The guy says, knowing who it is without me mentioning his name. Rony is apparently known as a trouble maker, a rabble rouser, within this community. 

I nod and he starts walking slowly in Chaim’s direction. I find out later he never finds him, that Chaim must have ducked into somewhere. 

I want to go home, I want to find my husband. I call him on the Shmira guy #1s phone, even though it’s still Shabbat, but  no answer. 

I decide to scooter home the few minutes with Amalia; in the opposite direction. 

In a world in which so many Jews obsess about fears and antisemitism and all that, I spend my life reminding my nervous system that I am safe and keeping it bathed in that belief. I avoid fearful talk and remind myself daily that as a grandchild of Auschwitz, I can rewire my brain and inherited trauma to one of liberation and expansiveness. I do not want to live a life walking around hyper vigilant and wondering if It will happen again. 

I am not exaggerating when I say that this was the most frightening, shocking thing that ever happened to me. 

When I reflect on that time, one thing stands out most starkly for me: 

We were standing on one of the busiest Jewish streets of LA, full with Jews finishing up their Shabbat plans and walking home. There were so many Jews surrounding me as this was going on. They all saw another Jewish man yelling at a Jewishwoman in a long skirt and a head wrap scootering innocently doing the street with her little kid. They all saw and heard him yell again and again and again. They all must have noticed that he seemed pretty deranged . They saw me frightened and talking with Shmira and calling on the phone for help. 

And the only person- the only person- that reached out to me and comforted me and took it seriously was a nonJew. The only one I didn’t have to verbally shake to pay attention was a nonJew. 

No Jewish person checked in if I needed anything, if I was okay, anything. There was no Jewish mob of men, flying in from all directions, to calm down the situation. We scootered home  alone, with a man on the loose who was threatening to hurt my family, and the only one that wished me well, that was willing to stay there for as long as I needed on the phone with the 911, was a nonJew. 

I cannot shake that.

We have reached out to Shmira and those in the community who know this chaim since and there is a lot of dismissiveness. “Oh Chaim, he’s all talk”, “Oh Chaim, he wouldn’t hurt a fly”. “Oh he didn’t actually cross the street, that means he wasn’t actually serious.” 

You know, boys will be boys kinds of stuff, Chaim will be Chaim. 

What is going on with Jewish extremists cannot be ignored; not here and not in Israel. As Shai Held put it when I heard him speak this year, when Jewish settlers do violence to Arabs or Palestinians, they and the institutions that support them need to be shut down. 

We need to shut down the Jewish extremists here; whether they are verbally or physically assaulting people, whether it’s those outside of or within the Jewish community. 

What happened at UCLA and Pico is not just about intimidation from without. It is about violence from within.  It’s about the Jewish community not speaking out about what is acceptable and unacceptable forms of protest. It’s about the Jewish community protecting the ability of those within it to disagree without fearing for their lives. It’s about the Jewish community saying: “ this is not okay. “ 

Someone verbally harassing someone like that is not okay and is never okay. 

I am not waiting for something worse to happen for the LAPD or Shmira to take it seriously. 

We need to demand that our leadership talks about this.

Because if we don’t, truly none of us are safe.

Nov 10, 2024

I created this painting right after the Nov 5, 2024 election. I wandered into my studio, feeling the weight of fear and isolation. Our brains can so quickly scan for threats and see all those stacked against us. It represents a shift to an acknowledgement that home is no longer home, safe is no longer safe. But as I created this, I thought about all the good people that surround me and that surround us, and reminded myself that in this world, though evil breaks through, there are more good people than bad. We must remember them all around us.