SEATTLE — Cormac Li was suspicious of the white envelope delivered to his Seward Park synagogue Friday afternoon, given that the name of the house of worship was misspelled and the two return addresses — one in Jerusalem, the other in Seattle — were clearly bogus.
Despite the red flags, Li, the 23-year-old office manager of the Sephardic Bikur Holim Congregation, decided to open the package because he was in a rush to get ready for Shabbat and didn’t want to leave any mail unopened heading into the weekend.
“In any other setting, I wouldn’t have opened the package. I would’ve called security,” said Li, who interned last year for the Israeli parliament and studied counterterrorism before graduating from Whitman College in May. “This is a synagogue. This is the one place people should feel safe. It’s a place of community, a place of worship.”
When he opened the envelope, a white crystalline substance blew into his face. Li called 911 and locked himself and the package in his office until police arrived around 4 p.m.
Over the next 2 1/2 hours, Seattle police and fire personnel responded to a second synagogue, the Congregation Ezra Bessaroth, as well as Hillel at the University of Washington, over reports of similar packages, though the package sent to the Jewish campus organization did not contain any white powder.
Monday evening, Seattle fire crews responded to another report of a possible hazardous substance at a fourth Jewish institution: Congregation Shaarei Tefilah-Lubavitch in Northeast Seattle. The Seattle Fire Department asked people to avoid the area while they investigated.
While the substances would all prove harmless, the suspicious packages were especially frightening against the backdrop of the Israel-Hamas war, which began with an attack by Hamas on Oct. 7 and has seen the continued bombardment and invasion of Gaza, causing many Seattle-area Jews to feel on edge amid a sharp rise in antisemitism.
The FBI is now leading an investigation and is working to determine how many letters were sent, who was responsible for sending them and why they were sent.
“The letters were safely collected. Laboratory testing at this time has not indicated a risk to public safety. Additional testing will be needed to fully characterize the material in the letters,” the FBI’s Seattle field office said in a statement, which was made before the hazmat response at Congregation Shaarei Tefilah-Lubavitch. “The FBI would also like to remind everyone to exercise care in handling mail, especially from unrecognized senders.”
The FBI is the lead federal agency for responding to threats and potential threats from weapons of mass destruction, which includes weapons containing biological agents, poisonous chemicals or toxins, according to the agency’s website.
Phone messages left Monday for the Congregation Ezra Bessaroth and Hillel at the University of Washington were not immediately returned.
In addition to the white substance that looked like salt or sugar, the package sent to the Sephardic Bikur Holim Congregation also included what appeared to be a 20-page manifesto comprising typed and handwritten pages, Christian religious texts and photocopied passages, some of them in German, Li said Monday.
“We tried to really read through, like, what is it about,” he said. “But to be honest, neither me nor the officers could understand what the person was trying to express. It was all over the place … there isn’t a central theme.”
Though the FBI is leading the investigation, Li said Seattle police officers returned to the synagogue on Saturday to ensure all was well, and a patrol officer circled through the parking lot on Monday, waving to Li through his office window. He said the synagogue’s non-Jewish neighbors have also expressed their concern and support.
“It’s really the humanity of the neighborhood, of the community, being demonstrated,” Li said.
Though the meaning behind the letter remains unclear, the inclusion of the white powdery substance was clearly meant to intimidate, said Jack Gottesman, board vice president for the Sephardic Bikur Holim Congregation.
“When a white powdery substance falls out of an envelope and onto somebody’s skin, no matter who that person is, that’s terrifying,” he said, adding it calls to mind investigations from the early 2000s when letters laced with anthrax and ricin were sent through the U.S. mail.
“There’s a lot of anti-Jewish sentiment in the world right now,” Gottesman said, referencing some reactions to the Israel-Hamas war. “It’s something that is, unfortunately, not new to our community. It wasn’t new to our parents; it wasn’t new to our grandparents; it wasn’t new to their grandparents. It’s something we’ve been dealing with for generations.”
He said the letter and white substance shut down the synagogue as police and a hazmat team swept the campus Friday. The investigation didn’t stop evening prayers, however, as the nearby Bikur Cholim Machzikay Hadath synagogue opened a room for affected congregants to worship.
The Saturday morning service at the Sephardic Bikur Holim Congregation then went on as planned.
“Are we afraid? No. We’re not afraid because we can’t be afraid,” Gottesman said. “We need to be strong and stand up for ourselves and for what we believe in.
“As always, nothing will stop us from praying. If you look at the Jewish liturgy, if you look at what Jews pray for, we pray again and again and again and again for peace.”
