For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, saith the Lord, thoughts of peace, and not of evil, to give you a future and a hope. — Jeremiah 29:11
I have a number of duties at the Jewish World. As editor of the newspaper, I write and select articles and edit copy. On the business side, I try to keep up with subscriptions and bookkeeping.
On the afternoon of Tuesday, Aug. 26, I drove to the BMO Bank branch on Clinton Avenue and East Lake Street to make a deposit.
There was a fire engine and an ambulance on the corner, and some hubbub inside the bank. Employees and customers were looking out the windows at the AutoZone store on the other side of Clinton. A man was being helped out of the store and loaded into an ambulance.
The bank teller muttered something about “what’s gonna happen next?” and handed me the deposit receipt. The friendly older security guard walked with me to the door and unlocked it. “I have to escort you to your car,” he said. We went outside, and I gestured to my car parked nearby.
I had no idea what all the fuss was about. Police cars and ambulances were converging on the corner of Clinton and Lake, and I somehow managed to thread my car through the emergency vehicles and drive to the AJW office.
I learned later from the lead story on a local TV news program that someone had opened fire on a group down the block on Clinton. In a Sept. 3 article recapping recent violent crime in South Minneapolis, the Minnesota Star Tribune reported that one person was killed and six others injured at about 1:30 p.m. on Aug. 26, in the 2900 block of Clinton Avenue, near Cristo Rey Jesuit High School.
“Two people have been arrested and charged with being accomplices to the gunman, who remained at large as of late Tuesday afternoon,” according to the Star Tribune.
Prior to my bank stop, I had shopped at the Seward Co-op on East 38th Street. If I had gone directly to the bank, I might have been in the path of flying bullets.
The mass shooting that I narrowly missed was followed several hours later by the fatal shooting of a man in his 20s in the 2700 block of Third Avenue South, not far from the bank. “The man’s identity has yet to be released. No arrests have been announced,” according to the daily newspaper.
And later that night, around 2 a.m. on Aug. 27, a man was shot to death and a second man was wounded at Eighth Street and Hennepin Avenue, in downtown Minneapolis. “The Medical Examiner’s Office identified the man who died as Jermaine Jabaar Typray Baker, 35, of Rochester,” the Star Tribune reported. “There have been no arrests in connection with this killing.”
And as everyone in the Twin Cities and around the world now knows, at about 8:30 a.m. on Wednesday, Aug. 27, a sick and hateful young person fired a rifle through the windows of Annunciation Catholic Church, killing two young students attending an all-school mass and wounding 21 others, mainly children, in the sanctuary. After perpetrating horrific carnage, the shooter committed suicide with the weapon.
The lines from Jeremiah at the top of this editorial appeared on the digital sign outside of Annunciation Catholic Church on Aug. 27: God’s promise of “a future and a hope.” Many of us wonder about the shape of the future in this country and what we can hope for.
A JTA story in this issue delves into the motives of the church shooter:
According to the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, writing on the guns used in the attack featured “antisemitic and anti-Israel references; praise for mass killers across the ideological spectrum, including white supremacist, anti-Muslim and anti-government extremists; as well as other school shooters.”
A YouTube account believed to have belonged to Westman shared videos prior to the shooting in which gun parts and smoke grenades can be seen with neo-Nazi messaging including “6 million wasn’t enough,” “Burn Israel,” “Israel must fall” and “Destroy HIAS,” a reference to the Jewish humanitarian organization. The videos were removed after the shooting.
HIAS was also targeted in online writing by Robert Bowers, the man convicted of murdering 11 Jews in the Tree of Life synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh in 2018.
The ADL’s Center on Extremism report also mentioned that “the attacker’s suicide note expressed deep remorse for the impact on their family, suggesting their motive was a desire for notoriety and to violently end their life and others’ lives, rather than ideological hatred.”
As has become commonplace in the United States, a suicidal person — in this case, someone obsessed with mass shooters — has ready access to lethal weapons and lashes out against innocent children and adults. We are not safe from gun violence in this country, not in our churches, mosques, synagogues, supermarkets, Walmarts — or in going to the bank. The U.S. is awash in guns, and our feckless elected officials, especially those of the Republican persuasion, do nothing to effectively address the problem.
After the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Newtown, Conn., on Dec. 14, 2012, in which 20 small children and six adults were murdered, there was no reform of gun laws on the federal level. On Sept. 27, 2012, less than three months before the Sandy Hook massacre, a former employee at Accent Signage Systems in Minneapolis went on a rampage at the firm and murdered four people, including Reuven Rahamim, 61, the company’s founder, before fatally shooting himself. There was gun reform legislation proposed at the Minnesota Legislature — former Rep. Michael Paymar authored some of the bills — and nothing of substance was accomplished. I attended a packed House hearing on Paymar’s proposals that drew hundreds of gun afficionados to the Capitol in St. Paul.
(Gov. Tim Walz and DFL legislators have talked about a special session at the Capitol in the aftermath of the Annunciation Catholic Church shooting, but some say that the sharply divided Legislature is not in a position to pass gun reform proposals. There also have been discussions about increasing security at the Capitol complex following the assassination of former House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark Hortman, and the shooting of state Sen. John Hoffman and his wife Yvette Hoffman.)
This is a sad time in Minnesota. And all this violence is taking place amid an incipient fascist regime in Washington, D.C. Masked federal immigration police are arresting migrants, legal residents and U.S. citizens under the rubric of “law and order,” and at the behest of the convicted felon occupying and redecorating the White House. Federal troops have been sent into Los Angeles and Washington — and an invasion of Memphis seems to be in the works. The slogan “America First” apparently means to invade the U.S. first; the Greenlanders can breathe a sigh of relief.
The disastrous Trump foreign policy is the subject for another editorial; however, on Sept. 2, the president posted the following on the Truth Social platform, regarding a meeting of dictators in China: “May President Xi and the wonderful people of China have a great and lasting day of celebration. Please give my warmest regards to Vladimir Putin, and Kim Jong Un, as you conspire against The United States of America.”
Perhaps one needs to laugh to keep from crying.
As Teddy Weinberger reminds us in his column in this issue, there is the traditional Jewish greeting for Rosh Hashana: “Let the year with its woes end and let the year with its blessings begin.”
The editors and staff of the American Jewish World wish all of our readers a good and sweet new year.
Mordecai Specktor / editor@ajwnews.com
(American Jewish World, Sept. 2025)
