DHS To Help Jewish Community Centers Enhance Security Protocols

The Department of Homeland Security is stepping up its support for Jewish institutions across the nation who've received more than 120 bomb threats in the past two months. Jewish Community Centers have been pressing for help as they've been targeted by waves of threatening calls as well as vandalism. Since January, the calls coming in to JCCs have been both vivid and unnerving. Betzy Lynch, executive director of the JCC in Birmingham, Ala., got three of the threatening calls, all very similar. "It is a very disguised sort of digitized voice that indicates that there's a bomb in the building, and then there's some pretty horrific rhetoric about hurting Jewish people," she says. The calls have thrust JCCs around the nation into repeated evacuations. Elderly women doing water aerobics and babies in daycares have been rushed out to the streets, and whole communities have been rattled. "Everybody's no more than one or two degrees of separation from someone whose kid ended up on a sidewalk