Michael Oren misrepresents 1971 synagogue bombing that changed his life

Then he came home and something terrible happened that confirmed his understanding of America: his synagogue got bombed.

In relating the story in Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide, the former Israeli ambassador to the U.S. makes New Jersey seem like the Ukraine during the pogroms:

The only Jewish kid on the block, I rarely made it off the school bus without being ambushed by Jew-baiting bullies. Those fistfights left my knuckles lined with scars. One morning, my family awoke to find our front door smeared with racist slogans; one night our car’s windshield was smashed. Then, when I was a high school freshman, the phone rang with horrendous news: a bomb had blown up our synagogue. I ran to the scene and saw firemen leaping into the flames to rescue the Torah scrolls. The next day, our rabbi stood with Christian clergymen and led us in singing, We Shall Overcome.” But no display of brotherhood could salve the pain.

Oren’s account leaped out as bizarre when I read it; that wasn’t the country I grew up in. So I looked into the bombing of the West Orange Jewish Center on April 18, 1971, and discovered that Oren leaves out the most important fact about the bombing, which you can see in the Daily News headline above: it was linked to an appearance at the synagogue of the Jewish extremist Rabbi Meir Kahane that was cancelled and rescheduled amid controversy.

In fact, Kahane himself was linked to several bombings the same year, and was convicted of making illegal explosives just three months later.

Oren leaves all of that out. It doesn’t fit his narrative: that the United States was unsafe for Jews: “anti-Semitism was a constant.”

Four past presidents of the synagogue (later renamed B’nai Shalom) all told me that the 12:30 AM bombing, for which no one was ever charged, was connected to Kahane’s appearance at the synagogue the following night– an appearance that by one account had been cancelled days before amid controversy over the lightning-rod figure, and that was ultimately held two weeks later. “That was what it was all about,” says Paul Kurland. “It really had nothing to do with our synagogue. It was because Kahane was supposed to speak there the following night. There was no reason to bomb our synagogue. We were just a suburban synagogue.”

The four past synagogue presidents all ascribe the bombing to anti-Semitism, as Oren does. But even if the bomber was someone who hated Jews, Oren’s account lies by omission. He presents  the bombing as anti-Jewish terrorism without stating the involvement of a notorious Jewish terrorist.

In recent years, Oren has even attributed the bombing to the Ku Klux Klan. But the late rabbi of the synagogue specifically ruled out the KKK as the culprit at the time. And the former presidents of the synagogue dismissed the idea in my interviews.

Minor details in Oren’s account are inaccurate. There were no flames, for instance; two synagogue presidents who were in the synagogue that night say there was no fire, and newspaper accounts say as much too. The sanctuary was damaged, but the ark was never in danger, Irving Kerzner, a former synagogue president, told me. The late president Murray Gottlieb was said to have moved the Torahs with firefighters.

Such discrepancies in a 44-year-old memory are entirely understandable. But Oren’s omission of Kahane is inexcusable for a political historian. He is simply misrepresenting the American scene of the attack– just as two other writers have now charged him with concocting an assertion about President Obama’s insult to Israel and trying to “twist reality” of US foreign policy.

Meir Kahane admitted being responsible for several bombings in that period. His targets were largely Soviet ones, such as a Soviet mission and a Soviet trade organization; he was applying pressure to compel the former Soviet Union to allow Jews to emigrate to Israel. Three days after the synagogue bombing, Meir Kahane was charged with rioting in New York in a scuffle involving police officers outside the United Nations. Eight months after the West Orange Jewish Center bombing, Kahane played a part in the smoke-bombing of Jewish impresario Sol Hurok’s offices in New York, because Hurok promoted Russian acts. A woman died in that attack.

I am not alleging that Kahane carried out the West Orange bombing. I have no idea; though the police description of the bombing as a professional job aimed strictly at property damage and the issue of the speech’s cancellation raise an eyebrow. The synagogue presidents all say the bombing was anti-Semitic. “I don’t think anyone ever thought it was anybody Jewish. It was a given that it was anti-Semitic,” Paul Kurland says. “There were always threats to anyone who hosted Kahane as a speaker. It was a thing at the time. No one was terribly surprised.”

News accounts all highlighted Kahane’s appearance as a cause. The Jewish Telegraphic agency account of the bombing states: