Group aims to unify metro Atlanta against anti-Semitism

By John Ruch

A Dunwoody homemaker’s outrage over recent anti-Semitic threats and vandalism across the country has spawned a rapidly growing advocacy organization that hopes to send a nationwide message against fear and hate.

“I want to stand up and be as loud as the people making the bomb threats,” said Lauren Menis, founder of the new Atlanta Initiative Against Anti-Semitism.

Menis’s text-message chats with other Davis Academy moms last month snowballed into the creation of AIAAS, which has already won support from the regional chapters of the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee.

The group hopes eventually to hold some kind of public town hall forums. On March 30, it plans a private organizing meeting that representatives of local governments and religious and cultural groups will attend, including some Dunwoody City Council members and the Sandy Springs police chief.

“I am very impressed by the grassroots efforts that Lauren has created,” said Dov Wilker, regional director of the American Jewish Committee’s Buckhead-based Atlanta chapter. “The greater awareness we bring to the issue of anti-Semitism, the better off we will all be. If we are able to create complementary efforts to combat anti-Semitism, we will be able to have a greater impact than by ourselves.”

Menis is Jewish, but “not particularly religious,” and said she has not been involved in advocacy organizing before. Her background is in the media as a producer at CNN and a local newspaper columnist.

The north Perimeter area has a large Jewish population and such cultural