Facing the Haters

My world of work is a continuum of older adult services, located in northern New Jersey.  We care for people who need us, we reach out into the community to improve the health of older adults, we work hard to provide the best possible quality and services.  And we’ve been doing this, as an organization, for well over a century.  While we have “Jewish” in our name and are a Jewish organization, we are open and welcoming to people of all faiths.

Some months ago, I received a very threatening letter attacking Jews, Israel, the Jewish Home and more.  We had all the requisite security folks involved from the police to the ADL and more.  There were threats in it that were disturbing and there were demands that included taking signs of support for Israel off of our campus.  We stood firm and refused to let ourselves be intimidated.  Were we concerned? Yes. But we agreed that we could not let evil win.

In recent weeks, we have been, as we always do, posting a number of our event photos on social media.  We share pictures of elders and staff at programs, from music to exercise and lectures to art.  We want people to know that life is lively at the Jewish Home, and we want to show how we live our mission of enriching lives.

While we are telling benign, heart-warming stories on social media, the haters have come out in force.  They clog our feeds with false profiles and vile anti-Semitic messages.  These messages are not attacking our organization, they are attacking the Jewish people, attacking Israel and expressing neo-Nazi ideologies.  They come in waves, an orchestrated attack, and, although they are upsetting to see, we know how to deal with them.  We know how to report them and block them and delete them and to do the same with the message after that and the one after that.

Our sense is that these haters search the Internet for any social media that contains the word “Jewish” and then just blindly begin to direct their threats and slurs.  It starts.  It stops.  It starts again.

What a sad commentary this is on the world in which we live, that the powerful communication tools that we have to connect the world are being used to spread hate and extol evil.  We cannot allow the haters to prevail. We cannot allow them to change our course.  If we do, they win. And the haters will not win, cannot win.  We will continue to share our messages, we will continue to be positive, we will continue to stand strong and proud of who we are, what we do and what we represent.  As Helen Keller so well said “Never bend your head.  Always hold it high.  Look the world straight in the eye.”