The incendiary political situation in the US and the storming of the US Capitol in Washington last week by supporters of President Donald Trump has affected the Jewish community nationally in several ways. But it also spilled over specifically into the Orthodox Jewish community in New York when the Five Towns Jewish Times weekly newspaper published a hugely controversial picture of the riot on the front page of its January 8 edition. In the picture, Gila Jedwab, a 5TJT columnist, is seen standing outside the Capitol building with the rioters in the background smiling broadly and with her hands outstretched. The caption below it read “5TJT columnist Dr. Gila Jedwab joined the Save America protest in Washington DC on Wednesday. She returned to New York before the violence broke out.”The publication of the letter caused an outcry, however, and the leadership of two local synagogues, Young Israel of Woodmere and Congregation Beth Shalom, both denounced Five Towns Jewish Times for printing it. The leadership of Congregation Beth Shalom, including Rabbi Kenneth Hain and Rabbi Avi Miller called the publication of the photo “an outrageous Chilul Hashem [desecration of God’s name]… which glorifies Wednesday’s violent attack on the US Capitol,” and also objected to the description of the riot and the storming of the Capitol as “a protest.”Young Israel of Woodmere president Stuart Wagner wrote to the newspaper in the name of the synagogue’s rabbis and lay leadership, saying that 5TJT had glorified the attack on the Capitol through publication of the picture and similarly described it as a Chilul Hashem. Both synagogues said they were banning the paper from their premises.
THE CONTROVERSY led Five Towns Jewish Times editor Larry Gordon to issue an apology, saying the photo had “communicated a terrible damaging message” and that the paper “condemn[s] all violence regardless of its motivation and feel[s] that the assault on the US Capitol in Washington, DC will be recorded in history as a dark day for our country.”But responses to the apology on Facebook were clearly divided. Some welcomed the statement, some castigated the paper for having abandoned Jedwab and denounced the synagogues for having “cancelled her,” and others attacked the paper as hypocritical for having engaged in attacks on the integrity of the election, which was the backdrop for the storming of the Capitol. Speaking to The Jerusalem Post on Tuesday, Jedwab, who lives in the Five Towns, works as a dentist and is Orthodox, said she had received a great deal of support from friends and relatives since the synagogues’ letters were published. Speaking about her participation in the events that led up to the attack, Jedwab said she had participated in the rally held by Trump’s allies and family at The Ellipse adjacent to the White House, but left midway through Trump’s speech which started at noon and headed back to her hotel. After resting for a while, she then noticed her phone light up as the attack on the Capitol began to unfold. Rioters massed on the steps of the Capitol at around 1:30 p.m. and the Capitol building itself was breached at about 2:15 p.m., after which both houses of Congress were evacuated as the rioters invaded further into the halls of Congress.The Capitol was only cleared of the attackers by around 6 p.m.
HAVING SEEN events begin to unfold on her phone, Jedwab said she headed back to Pennsylvania Avenue and towards the Capitol. It was then, at about three o’clock in the afternoon she said, that the picture which was published in the paper was taken.“The gesture was a ‘thank you to Hashem [God] moment’ for this beautiful day,” she said. “If I wanted to capture the emotion of the moment: That was it.”She insisted that she was unaware of the breach of the Capitol or the violence taking place inside the building, despite her phone going “crazy” when she was still back in the hotel.Jedwab said the atmosphere outside the building was “a chill environment” and described the “patriots” outside the building and on the scaffolding outside it for the inauguration “as peaceful and non-violent as could be.”However, a photograph she posted on her Facebook page, currently not publicly available but seen by the Post, showed her in front of the Capitol with a beaming smile and in a muscle flexing pose, and was captioned with the words “We took back our house today.”Jedwab said she took the caption down after she heard about the violence. Asked why she went to the rally, Jedwab said “Because Donald Trump asked me to. He tweeted it out. When the president asks you to do something, you do it.” Jedwab says she believes the November 3 presidential election was not fair, and that evidence presented by Trump’s attorneys, including Rudolph Giuliani, proved this. She also cited the conspiracy theory that electronic voting hardware was corrupted to favor President-elect Joe Biden.
TRUMP’S FORMER attorney-general William Barr stated that, after an investigation, he had not seen any fraud that would have changed the result of the election, while the Department for Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said that “The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history.”Dozens of district, federal, appeals and state Supreme Court judges also ruled against the Trump Campaign’s claims of fraud, including judges appointed by Trump himself. Jedwab said she believes that these judges and officials have been corrupted, bribed or blackmailed in some way. “This is a war of good and evil and we see who is evil now, as clear as day – which is anyone who has blocked the truth from coming out,” she said. “I think this is the culmination of all battles when the spiritual and practical are mingling and mixing; realities are coming together,” Jedwab continued, adding that she believes Trump will be the next president regardless of the current political reality – and that the current era is that of the birth pangs of the Messiah. “Hashem has exhausted every single possibility, and let things happen in the Supreme Court; the judicial system, “she said. “Everyone is watching for the truth. Hashem is giving everyone the chance to get on board for when the big reveal happens. Hashem is going to show salvation and he can bring souls along the way and wake them up.”For his part, Gordon explained that an hour before the paper was sent to print, at about seven o’clock in the evening, he had not received any other pictures he could use.“At that moment, when that decision was made, I had no information about the extent of the violence, or that anyone had lost their lives,” he told the Post. “Had that been the case I would not have run that picture,” he said, adding that he had been unaware the Capitol had been breached by press time.
GORDON SAID that the paper had endorsed Trump for president “largely on his record on Israel,” which he said was very important to the Orthodox community in the Five Towns area and the broader readership of the Five Towns Jewish Times in the nearby Jewish neighborhoods of New York. He insisted however that the paper is “centrist” and has supported Democratic candidates for statewide and national office, adding that he rejected any efforts of “trying to maneuver me into a position supporting insurrection, a new word we’ve learned recently.”Despite these comments, Gordon published an opinion piece on December 30 accusing Hilary Clinton and other unnamed Democratic officials of conspiring “to commit a national fraud” in the November 3 election, together with “the cooperation and complicity of the media and those who control social media, the Department of Justice, the FBI and the Supreme Court.”Rabbi Hershel Billet, the now retired head rabbi of Young Israel of Woodmere, said that the culture in the Orthodox Jewish community in New York is “very pro-Trump.”He said, though, that he believes the overwhelming majority of those people were upset by the events of last Wednesday and would look on those who participated or supported it with disdain. “This was a revolt against the government, but the US works by elections; we don’t have coup d’etats, we don’t have armed coups,” he said. Billet noted however that the community is “complex,” and that political divides have erupted within it, noting that he himself had once been derided as “an anti-Zionist” for political comments he once made.Even the letters Young Israel of Woodmere and Congregation Beth Shalom had written to the Five Towns Jewish Times had aroused the ire of some people who compared the synagogues to “the radical Left” for their denunciation of 5TJT and the riots, Billet said.“There are people who get very hot and very angry,” the rabbi said. “That’s how the hotheads react.”
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