BOULDER, Colo.—One week after foreign national Mohamed Soliman firebombed a Jewish group’s weekly march in support of the Israeli hostages, Colorado’s Jewish community gathered at the site of the attack in a show of strength and resilience.
Soliman’s attack did not deter the Boulder Jewish Community Center from moving forward with its 30th annual Jewish Festival on Sunday. Instead, it prompted event planners to place Run for Their Lives Boulder’s weekly walk, which Soliman targeted, at the center of the festival. Thousands participated in the march in solidarity, albeit with enhanced security, which encouraged community center executive director Jonathan Lev to hold the festival.
“In the wake of last Sunday’s terror attack, I didn’t know how—or if—holding the Boulder Jewish Festival would be possible from a security perspective, or whether our community would even want this event, which is traditionally a celebration of Jewish culture, to go on as planned,” Lev said in a statement.
“But with the full weight of state and local law enforcement behind us, the support of Governor Polis, Run for Their Lives, and community leaders, and the overwhelming feedback from our community that we not only want to gather—but need to gather—we’ve reimagined the Festival into something that promises to be the most powerful and memorable yet.”
The Washington Free Beacon spoke to a dozen Jews from the area during Sunday’s festival. The attendees, many of whom donned kippahs and waved Israeli flags, said they felt prideful following last week’s attack.
Attendee Danny Simon, for example, returned home to Denver from Israel just days before Soliman’s attack. Even after visiting the site of the Nova Music Festival and some of the kibbutzim that Hamas attacked on Oct. 7, the 35-year-old said the United States seems scarier for Jews than Israel—though he said he doesn’t feel “fearful.”
“Crazy, you’re like literally leaving a war zone more or less and you come back to something like this,” he told the Free Beacon. “There’s a lot of people here that agreed with what that guy did, you know? They want to see Jews die. They want to see Zionists die. They think what he did was a good thing.” Simon said he felt “more prideful, more emboldened” in response.
“Now is not the time to kind of kowtow and hide at home to be scared that something like this might happen again,” he said. “I think we just have to do the opposite of that and show more numbers … and say that we’re not scared, and we’re here and we’re proud.”
Exactly a week before the festival, in the same location, Soliman yelled “Free Palestine” as he threw Molotov cocktails at Run for Their Lives members, injuring 15, according to prosecutors. The Egyptian national, who entered the United States under the Biden administration and overstayed his visa, told investigators he wanted to “kill all Zionist people,” and that he’d been plotting the attack for a year. He is now facing a federal hate crime charge and 118 state charges, including attempted murder.
Simon said he felt Soliman deserved the death penalty.
“Public execution,” he said. “Straight up.”
Anti-Semitic incidents have surged in the wake of Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack. Less than two weeks before the Boulder firebombing, Elias Rodriguez shot and killed two Israeli embassy aides at point blank range, yelling “free, free Palestine” as he was arrested. The two violent attacks prompted the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security to issue an alert “to highlight potential public safety concerns related to ongoing threats to Jewish and Israeli communities.”
Some Colorado Jews expressed concern with the environment but emphasized that it would not deter them. Alan Shavit-Lonstein, a rabbi with Boulder-based Adventure Judaism, said he was “realistically scared” but “it’s obviously not keeping me at home.”
“The reality of anti-Semitism and threats against Jews is not new, but the speed at which violent rhetoric becomes violent, deadly action has increased,” he said. “That’s, I think, something we are all intimately aware of.”
Denver’s Isabelle Darcy echoed Shavit-Lonstein’s sentiments, adding that she hopes Soliman’s attack “helps open people’s eyes to the overlap between anti-Zionism and anti-Israel sentiment and anti-Semitism.”
“I think a lot of people would really like to separate those two,” she said.
In addition to the Run for Their Lives march, this year’s Jewish Festival featured a speech from the brother-in-law of an Israeli hostage as well as “Hostage Square,” a visual installation honoring the 55 remaining hostages.
“This walk has always been about peace and awareness,” Run for Their Lives Boulder founder Rachel Amaru said in a statement ahead of the festival. “Now, it’s also about resilience. We will show the world that we are still here, still walking, and still standing for life, human dignity, and the return of the hostages. Sunday will be a moment for our community to begin healing.”
The police department for Boulder—a city typically known for beautiful views of Colorado’s Flatirons and upscale neighborhoods—deployed SWAT teams and drones for the event.
Boulder, like many cities across the United States following Hamas’s Oct. 7 terror attack, has faced a number of jarring anti-Semitic incidents. Agitators at the University of Colorado Boulder, which is in some ways central to the city, have consistently disrupted campus with anti-Israel demonstrations.
City council member Taishya Adams, meanwhile, has repeatedly used her platform to denounce Israel. Every member of the council—except Adams—signed a statement acknowledging “in strongest possible terms” that the firebombing “was a targeted, antisemitic attack.”
“We stand in solidarity and sadness with those directly impacted by the attack as well as Boulder’s entire Jewish community,” the statement read. “We are united in condemning this hateful act of terror against Jewish people.”
Adams released her own statement explaining that the council’s release lacked “an acknowledgement that, based on his recorded comments, this was both an act of antisemitism and anti-Zionism.”
Still, Soliman’s attack has brought out an outpouring of support for the Jewish community. On Wednesday, around 1,200 people, including Colorado governor Jared Polis (D.), attended a vigil honoring the victims.
“Tonight we come together to find comfort in community. We know that resilience, strength, and pride is who we are—as Coloradans, as Boulder County residents and as Jews,” Polis, the Centennial State’s first Jewish governor, told the crowd. He also called Soliman’s attack an “act of terrorism.”
Jessica Schwalb contributed to this report.
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