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Mordechai Levy (inset: Jacques Pluss of Ridgewood)
Following a story in CLIFFVIEW PILOT last week about the National Socialist Movement’s intention to hold an April conference at an undisclosed hotel in the state the third week in April, JDO founder and national director Mordechai (Mark) Levy called for action.
The question is: Will anyone listen?
“We need every angry Jew to call all New Jersey hotels & motels and ask for [the] catering department, or person in charge of renting out meeting rooms,” said Levy, 50, who one night in 1989 began firing out his window at former compatriot Irv Rubin because he thought the Jewish Defense League chairman had come to kill him. Levy wounded three others instead and served time in prison for assault.
Rubin, who was actually trying to serve Levy with a subpoena in a slander suit against him, dubbed Levy’s group a “totally nutty, insane organization.” The Anti-Defamation League has branded the organization as hate group.
Members of the far-right-wing JDO admitted surrounding and beating protestors at the dedication of the Holocaust museum in D.C. Similar thuggery has been reported nationwide over the past two decades, prompting condemnation by the ADL and others.
When calling the hotels, Levy urged: “Tell that person that neo-Nazis are trying to rent under a fake name for a neo-Nazi KKK convention for the week of April 15-16. Ask them to check their list see if anyone suspicious tried renting.
“We need every angry Jew to call every hotel and motel in New Jersey and let them know how serious JDO is,” including planning to boycott any hotel the neo-Nazis are allowed to operate in, he said.
In turn, Levy said, the neo-Nazis will be “demoralized.”
Despite tactics that have included beating those who attend neo-Nazi rallies and calling for “death to Nazis,” the extremist organization has been successful in keeping certain groups out of particular areas.
Theresa El-Amin, a coordinator for the Southern Anti-Racism Network (SARN), confirmed to the North Carolina Independent News that a hate group known as American Renaissance had to seek another venue after reservations for this week at the Sheraton Charlotte Airport Hotel were cancelled. The group had previously announced its annual meeting would be held in Charlotte Feb. 4-6 but wouldn’t disclose the location.
A city councilman in Charlotte sent an email to every hotel in the city, asking that police be alerted if the group booked space with them. The Airport Sheraton Hotel checked its convention bookings and determined the group had used a different name to schedule room for early February.
American Renaissance’s annual conference was cancelled last year when protestors brought pressure on hotels in the Washington, D.C. area. As it turned out, the group had tried to book into a hotel near another airport — Dulles, in northern Virginia.
New Jersey got its first warning of similar tactics in a CLIFFVIEW PILOT story last week, which itself came just days after the arrest of a former neo-Nazi leader by a State Police SWAT team that burst into his Ridgewood apartment and charged him with emailing threats to the director of the New York regional office of the Anti-Defamation League.
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ONLY ON CLIFFVIEW PILOT: A two-day neo-Nazi conference — capped by a rally on the steps of the Statehouse — is being planned for New Jersey, possibly without the host even realizing it, the head of an anti-racism watchdog group told CLIFFVIEW PILOT. For the full story: CLICK HERE
PROFILE: “I simply do NOT believe that Israel has a right to exist,” wrote Jacques Pluss, a former neo-Nazi leader from Ridgewood charged with threatening the director of the New York regional office of the Anti-Defamation League. “Jews have NO inherent nationality,” Pluss added, “just a portable ‘culture of conspiracy’.” CLICK HERE TO READ….
The JDO describes itself as dedicated to “the eradication of Jew haters. It has fought neo-Nazis, KKK, and Al-Qaeda in America and around the world. JDO trains Jews with guns (legally) so they can know how to protect synagogues and Jews from Jew-hating terror attacks.”
It says it operates a camp “where Jewish youth are taught kickboxing, gun training and anti-terror training in the Catskill Mountains.”
This is necessary, Levy says, because he believes that “preaching racial inferiority can lead to lynchings, cross burnings and murder and mayhem.”
No less than the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the ADL, have called Levy’s organization a hate group. The ADL links it to the “Kahane Chai” movement, referring to the late Meir Kahane, an American Israeli rabbi who was killed by a radical Islamic Egyptian in New York 20 years ago after advocating the expulsion of all Palestinians from Israel.
Kahane founded the Jewish Defense League in 1986 to counter anti-Semitic attacks in New York through armed self-defense; he even adopted the slogan “Every Jew a .22.” Kahane later moved to Israel, where he founded he militantly anti-Arab Kach (“Thus”) Party.
Until nearly 30 years ago, Mark Levy was one of the JDL’s most active members. He was arrested several times and once dressed in a Nazi uniform to apply for a parade permit so he could warn Jews in Philadelphia about the “dangers of neo-Nazism.”
He split with the JDL, claiming that it “spent more time attacking other Jews than anti-Semites,” and formed his own group.
Soon after, he was taking potshots at JDL members from the window of his Bleecker Street loft with a Ruger, then held police at bay for nearly 2 ½ hours before surrendering. He also was convicted of beating a 12-year-old boy during one of his group’s Catskills camps.
In 1991, Levy’s group marched past the Teaneck homes of a black City College professor who ignited an uproar with anti-Semitic remarks and a black pastor who stirred racial tensions from his Brooklyn church.
And although he said his group wasn’t involved, Levy called the pipe bomb explosion that killed former Nazi soldier Tscherim Soobzokov after it exploded on his Paterson Eastside porch in 1985 “the Eichmann treatment,” after the SS officer who was kidnapped by Israeli agents in Argentina in 1960, tried and convicted of crimes against humanity, and hanged.
Levy had been protesting outside Soobzokov’s house for years.
The JDO and the JDL continue to fight one another — literally — to the point that they’ve now become as marginalized and socially insignificant as the groups they say they’re opposing.
“Cowardice and apathy are the enemy of Jewish survival,” Levy once said. “Hitler was a laughable joke, too, until one day a depression hit — and a small Nazi Party became a large one.”
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