GUARDING THE FAITH
Worshippers in NY turn to guns after Pa.
The power of prayer can now be measured by caliber.
While a Queens synagogue has hired a heat-packing, off-duty cop to protect its congregation on the Sabbath, Catholic churches have been taking live-shooter training and mulling armed ushers at Mass.
“It’s really all about survival,” said Elie Meskin, president of The Utopia Jewish Center in Fresh Meadows. “We are living in a crazy era. It’s frightening and we have to protect ourselves.”
Meskin, with the blessing of Rabbi Yonoson Hirtz, enlisted the officer a week after an anti-Semitic gunman burst into a baby-naming ceremony at Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh on Oct. 27 and slaughtered 11 people.
Meskin, 67, hopes the plainclothes cop brings calm to more than 100 congregants on edge.
“You are talking about mostly 60-year-old people. We have elderly people. You can’t entrust security to older people by teaching them self-defense or Krav Maga [the Israeli combat system],” Meskin said. “You don’t want to be worrying about your safety when you are praying.”
Meskin said the officer began standing guard at the shul during Saturday services last week and will continue until further notice. The synagogue is paying $45 an hour for peace of mind.
Rabbi Gary Moskowitz, a former cop who founded a group called the International Security Coalition of Clergy, said he has been inundated with more than 150 calls from “scared” rabbis, congregants and non-Jews who want guns or self-defense training, which includes learning how to hurl weights and tomahawk axes.
“Everyone wants a gun!” Moskowitz told The Post. “Most are worried and fearful. The axes and weights are just alternative measures in lieu of the guns being denied.”
Among those who signed up for Moskowitz’s training was Elliott Gordon, who worships at the historic Kingsway Jewish Center, an Orthodox synagogue in Brooklyn.
“It would be foolish not to be prepared,” said Gordon, a former aide to Rudy Giuliani.
“My parents taught me that if you do fight back, sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. But if you don’t fight back, you lose every time.” The synagogues are not alone. The New York Archdiocese has been quietly training its parishes in active-shooter response for months.
Our Lady of Good Counsel Pastor Ambrose Madu told The Post his Staten Island parish will hold a meeting later this month to discuss whether the flock will reach out to off-duty cops to staff Mass as ushers.
Said one Good Counsel parishioner: “In an ideal scenario, you want them to be ushers. They are walking the church. They are directing and seating the people . . . . Our church has several entrances. They need to be watched.”
Father Gerald E. Murray, pastor of The Church of the Holy Family in Manhattan, said, “It’s a state of reality that there are parishioners who legally carry weapons and know how to use them, and so if they’re in the parish it’s a good idea to know who they are.”
Joseph Zwilling, a spokesman for the Archdiocese, said pastors have been empowered to urge police parishioners to shuffle their churchgoing schedules so that every Mass is covered.
“The pastors would do this privately, one on one . . . the pastor knows his people,” Zwilling said, adding that they “would not be serving in any particular role at the Mass other than attending.”
The recommendation was included in a January memo from Timothy Cardinal Dolan to pastors that rolled out a plan for 296 parishes to undergo live-shooter training.
In May, parishioners at Our Lady of Pity on Staten Island took part in a four-hour workshop where lawenforcement officers taught them to use desks to block the doors in religious-ed classrooms and run zig-zag patterns in the parking lot, the Staten Island Advance reported.
“The horrible events [of Pittsburgh] have caused officials here at the Archdiocese to look at this issue again and is there more that we can or should be doing to assist our parishes with security,” Zwilling said. “Many of these things were already in place and underway. This has heightened our awareness.”