After the only synagogue in Jackson, Miss., Congregation Beth Israel, was severely damaged in an arson attack on Saturday, Jewish community security professionals are calling for continued vigilance, but also to refrain from jumping to specific, concrete conclusions about the fire and its motivations as the investigation is still underway.

While a suspect has been arrested in the case, he has yet to be named, and it is not yet clear how sophisticated the attack was. Surveillance footage of the attack showed that one person poured what appeared to be an accelerant around the lobby before starting the fire, Mississippi Today reported yesterday. However, it is not yet known if the arson attack was solely the work of an individual or if a network was involved in the planning. These details can be critical for assessing the level and nature of threats posed to other Jewish institutions and communities.

“There’s still a lot of information we don’t know. As far as I can see, the suspect hasn’t been made public yet, so we don’t know how much of it was targeted, how much preparation went into it,“ Richard Priem, CEO of the Community Security Service, told eJewishPhilanthropy. “Our experience is that information tends to change with time, and assumptions that people tend to draw may not always play out. We saw that a lot after the Bondi Beach attack in Sydney, [Australia,] there were a lot of rumors floating about what happened, and it took one or two weeks until we were actually able to do a full debrief where we invited our partners from Australia to join. And there were a lot of things that we learned then that in the first few days after the attack were not available.” While CSS operates in the Southeast region, Priem noted that the organization was not specifically active in Beth Israel.

This is the second time that the synagogue, which has launched a donation drive, has been targeted in such an attack; in 1967, it was set on fire by members of the Ku Klux Klan in response to the rabbi’s support for the Civil Rights movement.

Many Jewish leaders noted this history in response to the weekend’s arson attack. “Beth Israel Congregation in Mississippi was once firebombed during the [Civil Rights] movement for standing on the right side of justice. To see it targeted again this Shabbat is a chilling reminder that hatred never just disappears — it resurfaces when left unchallenged,” World Jewish Congress President Ronald Lauder said in a statement. “Incidents like this are fueled by an increasingly radicalized society, emboldened by the unchecked spread of hate across social media. Antisemitism and extremism are once again surging and must be confronted with vigor and decisive action.

The synagogue’s history adds a “symbolic” level to the attack, said Priem. With heightened antisemitism over the last few years, CSS has also seen an “uptick” in arson attacks and attempted arson, as well as synagogues being targeted more generally, he added. “At a minimum, the symbolic impact is significant, given the history of the synagogue, and is illustrative of the kind of environment that an organization like ours, which works on the topic of synagogue security, is dealing with,” he said. 

Taking place a month after the terror attack on a Hanukkah celebration at Sydney’s Bondi Beach that killed 15, the attack has rattled an already reeling international Jewish community. According to Priem, the attack is a reminder of the importance of taking a consistent approach to community security measures. 

“We always look at incidents that happen and use them to inform training plans and operations, but we’ve been pushing and encouraging our teams to be proactive for a long while and that does not change. We were pushing it two days ago, and we’ll encourage it tomorrow,” Priem said. “In terms of what we advise teams to do, we advised our teams to protect their synagogues last Shabbat, we advise them to protect their synagogues this Shabbat, and we’ll advise them to do it next Shabbat. We try to get our teams to always be vigilant, and that doesn’t change.”