This blog for Times of Israel was written by past Israel Board Chair Sherwin Pomerantz – In February 2019, I was in Colleyville, Texas, at Beth Israel Congregation for the bat mitzvah celebration of the daughter of Charlie Cytron-Walker, the rabbi who was held hostage with his family this past Shabbat. His mother-in-law is my first cousin and if there is a family Simcha in America, I do my best to schedule by business trips around those. This time it worked. Colleyville is perhaps the very last place in the world where you would expect that someone would enter a synagogue and hold the rabbi and his family hostage for 12 hours. A town of 26,000 people situated between Dallas and Fort Worth…..the epitome of middle America.
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