Rabbi Bentziyon Pil’s storefront synagogue is easy to miss, just a corner shop with boxes of halvah stacked in the window.
But local prosecutors say Dmitri Mishin knew it was a gathering place for Jewish emigrés who fled the Soviet Union decades ago to escape religious persecution. He lives nearby, and is Russian himself.
After dark on Feb. 1, in a scene captured on surveillance video, a man authorities have identified as Mishin pushed open the unlocked door and entered the synagogue’s single worship room, where a dozen people were sitting at a long table covered in plastic. Pil greeted him, thinking the man had come to join them.
Within seconds he pulled a gun. He struggled to cock it, then began firing, first toward the Torah and then toward the men — eight blasts marked by the flare of the muzzle.
Matthew Finkelstein leaves the Schneerson Jewish Center, a longtime gathering spot for Russian emigrés in San Francisco.
(Paul Kuroda / For The Times)
The gun turned out to be a replica, firing something like blanks. But the men in the room didn’t know that.
The attack was so sudden, so unexpected, that none of the congregants reacted. No one ducked, no one screamed. The surveillance video has gone viral. But not because the violence is shocking. Instead, people are watching because it is almost funny how calm the congregants seem.
Of course, there is nothing humorous in this assault. But such incidents have become so common that this one barely made headlines outside San Francisco. Just another alleged hate crime in a surging tide of them, unremarkable without deaths to count.
In our polarized country where extremism is being mainstreamed, we are becoming desensitized to anything but the most egregious acts of hate.
Rabbi Bentziyon Pil raises the Torah during prayers at the Schneerson Jewish Center.
(Paul Kuroda / For The Times)
In recent weeks, a man was accused of shooting and injuring two Jewish…
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