Families at Congregation Har Shalom, a Conservative synagogue in Potomac, Md., have told Rabbi Adam Raskin, who has led the community for 15 years, that they “don’t feel that the public schools are a safe place for Jews.”
Raskin, 52, whose three children attended Jewish day schools, signed a letter on Monday urging Montgomery County Public Schools to confront Jew-hatred.
“They don’t feel like the administration handles incidents of antisemitism with any meaningfulness or seriousness,” he told JNS.
The letter states that the district recorded 600 hate-bias incidents of all kinds in the 2025-26 school year, up from 253 the year before.
The heavily Jewish county contains about 45% of Jews in the state.
The letter cites Anti-Defamation League figures, which place Maryland fifth nationally for antisemitic incidents in K-12 schools. Montgomery County accounted for 84% of the state’s incidents, the letter says.
Dozens of rabbis and cantors signed the letter to Thomas Taylor, superintendent of the county public school system, and the district’s board of education.
Jewish families are withdrawing children from public schools, and some families have teenagers, who stop going to school or transfer after being harassed and facing physical threats, the signatories write. Jewish teachers also reported bigoted comments from students and colleagues, according to the letter.
Their demands for the 2026-27 school year include training teachers and administrators to identify Jew-hatred, bring programs on Jewish identity and the Holocaust into classrooms and set enforceable rules for social media harassment.
They also want the district to report measurable progress.
Of more than 1,000 educators who attended a free Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington training during the past academic year, only 2% came from the county public school system, according to the letter.
Raskin told JNS that his synagogue serves 750 families and that teachers and families in his community have spoken to him about the issue.
Teachers have described hostility from fellow educators and said that some students feel that they have no one at school who understands what they are experiencing, he said. The district’s response to offers of training and education has been “underwhelming, to say the least,” the rabbi told JNS.
Raskin said that if schools are “dodging the issue” of antisemitism training because of sensitivities around the subject of Israel, then “it’s a standard that’s only applied to the Jewish community in terms of diversity training and education, which is unfair.”
“The fact is, you have to be able to address that thoughtfully and meaningfully, not use that as an excuse to delay,” he told JNS. “I think what we’re experiencing is that the district has preferred to ignore it or push it under the rug.”
“Zionism is a lightning rod issue,” he said. “But it’s also a fundamental part of Jewish identity, and most Jews in Montgomery County and beyond believe that Israel is a core part of their Jewish identity.”
“Antisemitism is masquerading as anti-Zionism,” Raskin added. “There are other antisemitic tropes that are surfacing that are not really only about Israel. Symbols and myths and slogans and imagery that has deep antisemitic history associated with it.”
The rabbi told JNS that students are taught that Israel is a part of their Jewish identity, but when they go to school, they face hostility about that identity expressed by “their educators and advocates and people who are supposed to create safe spaces for them.”
That “changes the entire landscape of school,” he said.
Raskin said the rabbis want to work with county schools. This summer, he arranged for five county public school students to tell a group of county teachers about their experiences as Jews at school.
The teachers listened and asked how they could help, according to the rabbi. “We just hope the district will take us up on it,” he told JNS.
JNS has reported on a federal civil rights complaint alleging slurs, Nazi swastikas and retaliation against educators in the county public school system.
In May, police sought three suspects after antisemitic graffiti appeared at Greenwood Elementary School in Olney, Md. At the time, a JCRC official told JNS that the group was receiving significantly more reports of antisemitism from Montgomery County Public Schools than from other school districts in the region.
