Jewish Terrorist Groups in the United States

The Jewish Defense League

The Jewish Defense League (JDL) was founded in 1968 by Meir Kahane, an orthodox Brooklyn rabbi. The group's original function was to protect elderly Brooklyn residents from street attacks. Kahane, however, was outspoken, even strident, and the JDL soon was known for its confrontational style.

Focusing mainly on the treatment of Jews in the Soviet Union, who were often jailed and refused exist visas, the JDL decided that violence was necessary to draw attention to the plight of Soviet Jewry. The goal was to strain U.S.-Soviet relations; the reasoning was that Moscow would need to respond to the pressure by allowing more Soviet Jews to immigrate to Israel.

The JDL began a series of demonstrations against, physical attacks on, and harassment of Soviet offices and personnel in 1969. While the majority of JDL members participated in peaceful political demonstrations, Kahane later publicly admitted that some members of the JDL “bombed the Russian mission in New York, the Russian cultural mission here [Washington] in 1970, and the Soviet trade offices.”

JDL members were also implicated in two high-profile murders. Jerome Zeller was indicted for the 1972 bombing of the office of agent Sol Hurok, which killed his receptionist and injured 12 others; in 1992 Kahane admitted that he too had had a part in that attack. Two other JDL members, Robert Manning and his wife Rochelle, were indicted for the 1985 [Page 193]bombing death of Alex Odeh, regional director of the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) in Santa Ana, California.

According to a 1985 U.S. Department of Justice report, the FBI also suspected Manning and several other JDL members of being involved in a yearlong series of violent incidents in that year. These included the August house-bomb slaying of Tscherim Soobzokov, a suspected Nazi war criminal, in Paterson, New Jersey; the August 16 attempt to bomb the Boston offices of ADC office in which two policemen were severely injured; the September bombing at the Brentwood, Long Island, home of alleged Nazi Elmars Sprogis, in which a 23-year-old passerby lost a leg; and the setting afire of the ADC office in Washington, D.C., on October 29.

Manning and his wife were arrested in Israel on March 24, 1991, and charged in a separate suit involving the 1980 letter-bomb murder of Patricia Wilkerson, a secretary in California. Manning was extradited to the United States on condition that he not be tried in the Odeh murder and the other cases, because the events occurred after he became an Israeli citizen. However, on October 13, 1994, Robert Manning was found guilty of complicity in the Wilkerson murder.

The 1985 Department of Justice study of terrorist acts in the United States since 1981 found that of 18 incidents initiated by so-called Jewish terrorist elements, 15 were by the JDL. In a 1986 study of domestic terrorism, the U.S. Department of Energy concluded: “For more than a decade, the Jewish Defense League (JDL) has been one of the most active terrorist groups in the United States.”

Kahane moved to Israel in 1971, where he won a following among that country's extreme right. He established a political party, Kach, which eventually won several seats in the Knesset, or Israeli Parliament. Kahane was assassinated in New York in 1990. (The suspect, El Sayyid Nosair, an Egyptian-born Muslim who was a naturalized U.S. citizen, was acquitted by a Manhattan jury but later sentenced to a life term after he was convicted in a new trial.)

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