Latest news with #RabbiMarcSoloway
CNN
6 days ago
- CNN
Their synagogue taught them to build peace. Then an antisemitic attack hit
Fifteen minutes outside of downtown Boulder, Colorado, sandwiched between a golf course and a marsh, is Congregation Bonai Shalom. In Hebrew, bonai shalom means 'builders of peace,' and the congregation welcomes both Jews and non-Jews to participate in all aspects of the community. But that peace was shattered when an antisemitic attack at an event in support of hostages in Gaza left at least six members of the congregation injured, including one woman who is a Holocaust survivor. The attack, the latest in a wave of antisemitic violence that has stretched from coast to coast, has further horrified the Jewish community. 'The fact that in 2025 someone can just literally try to burn Jews to death on the streets of Boulder, Colorado, is shocking,' Congregation Bonai Shalom Rabbi Marc Soloway said. 'We're grieving.' Authorities said Wednesday there were at least 15 victims of the firebombing attack, including some who suffered severe burns. A dog was also injured, the FBI Denver office said. The suspected attacker, Mohamed Soliman, has been charged with hate crime and attempted murder. The emotional trauma is 'immense,' Soloway said. 'I still feel ripples,' he said, telling CNN's Erica Hill the whole Jewish community is 'traumatized.' One congregant is 'touch-and-go' with horrific burns all over her body, Soloway said. The attack, he added, brought back 'horrendous memories' of Jewish history. Barbara Steinmetz, who escaped the Holocaust as a child, was one of the congregants injured in Sunday's attack. Steinmetz said her family fled Europe in the 1940s, according to the CU Independent, the student news website for the University of Colorado Boulder. Her father, she said, applied for asylum to countless countries before the Dominican Republic accepted them. The family immigrated to the United States years later, and she moved to Boulder in 2006. Steinmetz was honored by the Boulder Jewish Community Center in 2020 for creating positive change throughout Boulder County. Jonathan Lev, executive director at the Boulder Jewish Community Center, said the victims were pillars who helped build the community. 'They bring to life what Jewish life can be,' he said. After what happened on Sunday, he said, 'how could you not be scared?' The shock traveled to Pittsburgh, where Michael Bernstein, chair of the board for the Tree of Life, said it felt all too familiar — and brought back recent memories. In 2018, a gunman killed 11 worshippers and wounded six others at the Tree of Life Synagogue. It was the deadliest-ever attack on Jewish people in the United States. 'The hearts of our community, I know, are aching right now,' Bernstein told CNN's Bianna Golodryga. 'We know what happens when an attack like this shatters a community.' The Boulder Jewish Community Center, just down the road from Congregation Bonai Shalom, is hosting a community vigil Wednesday night. 'Healing begins with coming together in community,' a joint statement from leaders in the Boulder Jewish community said. 'We're resilient,' Soloway added. 'We're here for each other, and we'll get through it.' He said peaceful walks for the Israeli hostages in Gaza, like the one his congregants were participating in on Sunday, should continue. Congregation Bonai Shalom's calendar is packed with summer events. There are Shabbat services and bar mitzvahs. On Thursday, there's a conversation about immigration scheduled. A poetry and reflection meeting is planned for the end of the month. A Boulder Jewish Festival will still take place on Sunday despite the attack. We are 'taking steps to reimagine the event in a way that helps our community heal and feels grounded in the reality' of the attack, the Boulder Jewish community's statement said. Continuing to celebrate the Jewish community and traditions is part of the healing process, said Maggie Feinstein, the director of a healing partnership founded in Pittsburgh after the Tree of Life shooting. She encouraged those affected by the attacks to lean into Jewish joy and ritual. 'Don't shy away from that, even though that was what somebody tries to tear apart,' Feinstein said. 'If we stop the ritual of joy, then it's hard to be resilient.' Lev, the Boulder Jewish Community Center executive director, said the community is choosing to respond to the grief and threat with 'love, connection and community.' Soloway said he and his congregation have received 'outpourings of love from other faith partners.' 'They're here for us, we're here for each other,' he said. His congregation already had an event planned for Friday before Sunday's attack. The session is timely. The Rev. Pedro Senhorinha Silva, Soloway's friend, is scheduled to lead a reflection called 'Joy Comes in the Morning.' The session, the congregation said, will explore how to hold grief in one hand and joy in the other. CNN's Alisha Ebrahimji and Shimon Prokupecz contributed to this report.
CBS News
6 days ago
- Politics
- CBS News
Colorado rabbi, other community leaders deliver strong messages in response to Boulder attack: "Emotional scars will never fully heal"
Gov. Jared Polis along with other political and faith leaders held a vigil in Boulder Wednesday morning at the site of Sunday's attack on the Pearl Street Mall in which a suspect hurled Molotov cocktails at a march for Israeli hostages. Rabbi Marc Soloway CBS "This was a brutal, hateful, antisemitic terrorist attack against peaceful Jews in Boulder, Colorado in 2025," said Rabbi Marc Soloway, who leads a Boulder Synagogue that many of the victims attend. "We are really hurting. We are really angry and really sad." Soloway began the vigil with a strong message to a large audience gathered on Pearl Street. "The physical and emotional scars of this will never fully heal," Soloway added. Gov. Jared Polis, Colorado's first Jewish governor, followed with equal passion and a proclamation of unity. "We have Republicans and Democrats standing together against hate and antisemitism here in Boulder and in Colorado," said Polis. "This heinous terror attack struck just hours before the start of the Jewish holiday of Shavuot, and of course, less than two weeks on the heels of the targeted antisemitic killings at the capital Jewish Museum in Washington, DC, and as the scourge of anti-Jewish and antisemitic rhetoric and sadly, violence continues to rear its ugly head, we want to say enough hate. Antisemitism, terrorism and violence have no place in Colorado and no place in the United States of America." Boulder Mayor Aaron Brockett speaks during a community gathering at the site of an attack against a group people holding a vigil for kidnapped Israeli citizens in Gaza oin Boulder, Colorado on June 4, 2025. CHET STRANGE/AFP via Getty Images But perhaps the most chilling comments came from Ed Victor who was a part of the "Run For Your Lives" group that was targeted on Sunday, and recalled grabbing anything he could find to put out the flames on nearby burning bodies. "I'll tell you, when someone is on fire, it takes too long to put them out," said Victor. "What do we have to put them out? You look around you like there's some flags. We have a banner. You do what you can. It was myself, two, three other people, doing what we could." As people begin to look forward to heal, there was an overwhelming message of the need for change. "Governor Polis reminded us that hate has no place in Colorado and no place here in Boulder," said Boulder JCC Executive Director Jonathan Lev. "Declarations are only as strong as the actions that follow them when we leave this event. My hope is that each of you leaves with a renewed sense of purpose and accepts the responsibility of ending hate and helping us heal." The Boulder JCC hosted a vigil for community members Wednesday night and will host the Boulder Jewish Festival on Sunday, returning to the site of the attack.
Daily Mail
6 days ago
- General
- Daily Mail
Holocaust survivor who was burned in the Colorado terror attack breaks her silence
An 88-year-old Holocaust survivor who was burned in the shocking terror attack in Boulder, Colorado broke her silence with a message of unity. Barbara Steinmetz spoke out to condemn the attack on Sunday, where at least 12 people were injured when suspect Mohamed Soliman allegedly threw Molotov cocktails at a pro-Israel protest, but said the community would recover. 'We are better than this,' she told NBC News. The 88-year-old said she and other members of the Run for their Lives event were 'peacefully' demonstrating when the attack unfolded. 'It's about what the hell is going on in our country,' Steinmetz continued. 'What the hell is going on?' Steinmetz's family fled Italy and Hungary to escape the Nazis decades ago, but said the attack on Sunday had 'nothing to do with the Holocaust, it has to do with a human being that wants to burn other people.' The outlet said Steinmetz appeared to still be rattled by the shock attack, but said she just wanted 'people to be nice and decent to each other, kind, respectful, encompassing.' 'We're Americans,' she said. 'We are better than this. That's what I want them to know. That they be kind and decent human beings.' Police said Soliman screamed 'Free Palestine' as he threw the Molotov cocktails at the protestors, and he is now facing 16 counts of attempted murder as well as federal hate crime charges. Rabbi Marc Soloway, the leader of Congregation Bonai Shalom in Boulder, where Steinmetz is a member, said the elderly woman suffered minor burns but is 'going to be okay.' Soloway added that although Steinmetz will recover, he wondered how someone who survived the Holocaust would process the anti-Israel attack. 'Can you imagine the trauma that that reactivates?' the rabbi said. 'It's just horrendous.' Steinmetz, an active and visible member of Boulder's Jewish community since she and her late husband moved from Michigan 20 years ago, was born in 1936 in her parents' native Hungary. Shortly after her birth, they returned to Italy, where they'd run an island hotel since the 1920s – but as Steinmetz progressed through her toddler years, it was becoming more and more dangerous for Jews in Europe. Steinmetz fled with her parents and sister in 1940 to Hungary, but her father saw the dangers there, too, and quickly planned to get out of the country. 'My dad encouraged the rest of my family to leave,' Steinmetz told CU Boulder students at a 2019 talk. 'They were scared — they simply couldn't envision what was to come…or that their friends [and] customers would turn on them.' As their family and Jews suffered increasingly under Hitler's regime, her 'cousin stole a Nazi uniform and brought food into the ghetto and caused plenty of mischief to the Nazis,' Steinmetz wrote in 2014 in a Holocaust film review. Her father eventually fled with his wife and children to France, then Portugal, then the Dominican Republic, stopping at Ellis Island on the way just for processing. The island nation's dictator, Rafael Trujillo, had agreed to accept Jewish refugees, and a Jewish resettlement organization established a community at Sosua. 'Sosua was an abandoned banana plantation … and these bedraggled refugees, doctors and lawyers and professors, came to this piece of land where there was one building we all slept,' Steinmetz said in an interview posted to Instagram in April. 'And there was water, and the women did the cooking, and the men tried to do the agriculture.' After four years of attending a Dominican Catholic school, telling no one she was Jewish or European, Steinmetz and her family were granted visas to the US. She and her sister immediately began attending Jewish summer camps, where they 'knew no one and didn't speak any English,' Boulder Jewish News reported five years ago, as Boulder JCC prepared to honor Steinmetz at its annual gala. The camps 'offered the opportunity to excel in sports and exposed them to what it means to be a Jew,' it continued. The family eventually settled in Detroit, where her mother ran the lunchroom at the Jewish Community Center (JCC), which became Steinmetz's 'home in America,' the outlet reported. 'Barb met and married Howard while still a teenager and college student. They moved to Saginaw, Michigan when she was a young mom,' it continued. 'They built a life there around Jewish community.' The Steinmetz had three daughters – Ivy, Julie and Monica – and lived in Saginaw for decades before moving to Boulder two decades ago. They left Michigan after filing suit against Dow Chemical over alleged dioxin poisoning on their property. Both Ivy and Howard Steinmetz died of cancer, ten months apart, in 2011. Steinmetz has been a frequent featured speaker in Colorado, sharing her experience as a Holocaust survivor for students and local groups as recently as March. She has been a vocal Jewish presence in Boulder for decades. Steinmetz's son-in-law, Bruce Shaffer, is a co-lead of Run for Their Lives, which orchestrated the event attacked on Sunday. The Shaffers split their time between Boulder and Jerusalem. Steinmetz had previously expressed fears about anti-Semitism and hate finding her in Boulder, writing to city authorities in 2016 to oppose the establishment of Nablus, in Palestine, as a sister city – which ultimately went ahead. 'I AM NEAR 80 YEARS I ONCE AGAIN HAVE TO DEAL WITH ANTI - JEWISH SENTIMENT IN MY OWN TOWN?' she wrote to Boulder's council in a letter publicly available online. 'HAVE I NOT COME TO AMERICA WHERE I CAN FIND DON'T TAKE THAT AWAY FROM ME AND MY COMMUNITY OF VERY ACTIVE CIVIC CITIZENS.'
