In grim hazard of pandemic life, a synagogue’s celebratory Zoom is crashed with hate speech
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It was a celebratory occasion. From his home in Tennessee, Rabbi Rami Shapiro, the former and founding rabbi of Temple Beth Or Miami, had joined a Zoom meeting Wednesday with some 50 of its congregants to commemorate the Kendall synagogue’s 40th anniversary.
But just after Shapiro spoke on a Talmud teaching about compassion — “that which is hateful to you, don’t do to anybody else‘‘ — a group of virtual intruders attacked the meeting, threatening participants with anti-Semitic messages and even with visits to their homes. It was the second such incident since they switched to virtual gatherings due to COVID-19 precautions.
Since the start of the pandemic, the closing of schools, workplaces, churches and synagogues has resulted in people conducting much of their lives virtually over Zoom, the cloud-based video-conferencing platform.
Such conferences aren’t impregnable. Crashing a Zoom conference is known as “Zoom-bombing.”
At first, the Zoom-bombers were coming one at a time, “but then it became out of hand and they would come in as quickly as they left,” said Beth Or’s current rabbi, Robyn Fisher, who hosted the event.
“I did not let these people in,” she said. “Even when I would remove them, they had some way of re-entering.”
In an ominous way, they even recited home addresses for Fisher and Shapiro.
The Miami Herald reviewed footage that Fisher recorded of the call and, at one point, a congregant begs: “Please end the Zoom. Please end it.”
Dori Brail, 40, grew up attending Beth Or, which describes itself as “an out-of-the-box thinking, spiritual, Jewish community, reimagining our prayers, sacred gatherings and our moral imperative to heal the world.” She said she noticed that the congregants were not only frightened by the messages, but confused.
“These are mostly people in their 70s and 80s,” Brail said. “They just kind of were like, ‘what’s going on? Why are they reading this? Why are they saying this?’ ”
A 74-year-old congregant who has been a member of the synagogue for 36 years, spoke with the Herald on condition that she be identified only by her first name, Vicki, because of the threats the Zoom-bombers made while listing home addresses.
“This was in my house,” she said, a reference to being on her home computer. “I was in my house, the sanctity of my house, and that’s what made it even more horrific.”
And it wasn’t the first time Beth Or congregants have dealt with Zoom-bombers. Last summer, as many communities were hosting events about racial injustice, Beth Or held one of its own on Zoom. But it was overrun by Zoom-bombers flashing child pornography and blurting racial slurs.
Rabbi Fisher promptly reported the intrusion to the FBI, and inquired about help on securing meeting links, she said.
Fisher doesn’t know what became of her last report to the FBI, but in response to questions from the Herald a spokesperson for the bureau said, “the FBI does not confirm or deny the existence of an investigation.”
For now, Fisher said she is planning to have another conversation with Zoom about security measures. “[Zoom’s] the best mechanism that we have right now to be able to offer virtual programming,” she said.
Though Fisher has taken precautions to prevent Zoom-bombings, such as requiring guests to preregister with a code, there is one place where Zoom information for Beth Or’s meetings is publicly available: the synagogue’s online calendar. “We may have to take that off,” she said.
In a statement, a Zoom spokesperson said, “We have been deeply upset to hear about these types of incidents, and Zoom strongly condemns such behavior. . . .We take meeting disruptions extremely seriously, and where appropriate, we work closely with law enforcement authorities.”
Zoom’s Trust & Safety team has been alerted of the incident.
This story was originally published February 11, 2021 at 8:24 PM.
