By Anna Rahmanan
On Nov. 19 at night, anti-Semitic protesters blocked worshippers from entering Park East Synagogue, an Orthodox congregation on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, and called for violence against Jews. Two days later, a Reform temple some four blocks away hosted a Friday night dinner that drew so many people that it set a new Guinness World Record.
“We had to be seated for a full hour for the dinner to be counted,” Rabbi Joshua Davidson, senior rabbi of Temple Emanu-El, says. “After that, came the announcement that we had broken the record, along with the number by which we surpassed it.”
That number was 2,761 — 439 more people than the prior record of 2,322 at a Shabbat gathering in Berlin on July 31, 2015 during the European Maccabi Games.
Davidson says that Emanu-El, which is celebrating its 180th anniversary, has talked about hosting a “big Shabbat” event for “a number of years.”
Planned as a joyful event, the Shabbat meal took on new significance in the political climate and following recent events in New York City.
“What we didn’t anticipate was the environment and the historic moment in which the event would take place, particularly given the tensions in New York City around the increase in anti-Semitic violence and the divisions sparked during the mayoral race,” he says.
The press secretary of Zohran Mamdani, the mayor-elect of the Big Apple said after the protest outside Park East Synagogue that the event, which addressed Jews moving to Israel, was a “violation of international law.”
“We certainly didn’t anticipate that two days before the event, there would be a very disturbing anti-Semitic protest at one of New York’s own synagogues,” says Davidson.
The record-breaking event, which drew temple members, other Jewish New Yorkers, international visitors and non-Jews who came with their Jewish friends, “turned out to be more poignant and more powerful than any of us could have imagined,” the rabbi said.
“It wasn’t just a celebratory dinner,” he says. “It became an important demonstration of Jewish pride.”
The freed hostage Omri Miran and his wife Lishay lit the Shabbat candles, and prominent Jewish chefs recited other blessings prior to the meal.
Two stars from “Fiddler on the Roof” on Broadway sang Shabbat songs during the meal, as did an a capella group, Davidson said.
“The power of the event was the statement it made at this particular moment in Jewish history,” he said. “It all made the evening an especially poignant statement of Jewish solidarity.”
Frank Greenberg, 68, a Temple Emanu-El member, attended the “spectacular” with his family members and 30 friends that they invited.
“It was incredibly well organized. The security was perfect,” he says. “Everybody was concerned about security. The flow of the evening was better than we expected. It was just a very special event.
“No other event I’ve been to comes close to this,” he said.
Everyone was very excited when there was an announcement that a Guinness record had been set, he said.
A City Hall spokesman under Mayor Eric Adams praised the event and the message it projected at a tense time for New York Jews.
“New York City is home to a vibrant, eclectic and diverse Jewish community — the largest one outside of Israel,” said the spokesman for the mayor, who visited Israel last week.
Mayor Eric Adams “has always welcomed and celebrated this community, particularly amidst a rising anti-Semitism in our city, our nation and the globe,” City Hall said.
“Under the mayor’s leadership, anti-Semitic hate crimes are down 12% year-to-date, but this work is not finished, and events like these help encourage a sense of unity and community for our entire city.”
Rabbi Aharon Slonim, who runs the Chabad at Binghamton University, says that “if every Jewish community continues to break records in this vein, the world will be that much more of a brighter place.”
The Binghamton Chabad began hosting “Shabbat 1,000” dinners in 1994, and one such event drew more than 2,000 people, according to Slonim.
