It was about halfway through the Sabbath service on Saturday when a gunman turned what was supposed to be a time of solace into a day of horror. The rabbi, Yisroel Goldstein, turned quickly to see the body of the woman, Lori Gilbert Kaye, 60, slumped on the floor. He began to rush toward her when he caught sight of several small children watching as the gunman unleashed the attack on Chabad of Poway.
“My instinct was to go to her, but I turned toward a doorway and these little kids were there, so scared,” he said. By then, Goldstein had been shot in both hands. “I just grabbed them with my bloody fingers. They were screaming and I was shouting.”
Goldstein and leaders like him in synagogues and other houses of worship are confronting their new reality. Just like school principals across the country, religious leaders now must take measures to prepare for the horrors of mass shootings.
African-American churches have long had to consider the probability of security threats, but recent events are showing many white congregations that their past sense of safety is false, said Rev. Ronell Howard, pastor of Christ United Methodist Church of Piscataway, New Jersey.
“When I tell my Caucasian colleagues, black churches have always had security as long as I can remember, they are always flabbergasted,” Howard, 50, said.
At the Islamic Center of Fredericksburg, Virginia, parents have started to take turns sitting in their cars in the parking lot to keep watch after dropping their kids off for Sunday school.
“Every religious group feels vulnerable right now as the violence feels unpredictable and chaotic,” said Russell Moore, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. “We can disagree about all sorts of important things, even ultimate things, but surely every person ought to agree that no one should be gunned down in worship.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.