Jeff Sessions Meets With JCC Leaders To Discuss Bomb Threats
Image by Getty Images
(JTA) — Representatives of the umbrella organization of Jewish community centers discussed recent bomb threats against their institutions with U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
Officials from the Anti-Defamation League, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, Jewish Federations of North America, Secure Community Network and the Jewish Community Center Association met with Sessions on Thursday, a week after an Israeli teenager was arrested on charges of calling in over 100 bomb threats to JCCs and other American Jewish institutions.
Ian Prior, a Justice Department spokesman, said the meeting was “positive and productive” and that Sessions had praised the Jewish leaders “for their responsiveness, efficiency, calm and competence” in dealing with the threats.
“The Department of Justice will not tolerate hate crimes against Jewish communities or the targeting of any community in this country on the basis of their religious beliefs,” Prior said, according to media reports.
Earlier this month, representatives from the association had written to Sessions to express their frustration with the investigation and to request a meeting.
Two weeks later, on March 23, Israeli police arrested a 19-year-old at his home in Ashkelon. Juan Thompson, a former journalist from St. Louis accused of making at least eight bomb threats against Jewish institutions, was arrested on March 3.
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
