On Nov. 19 at night, antisemitic protesters blocked worshippers from entering Park East Synagogue, a Modern Orthodox congregation on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, and called for violence against Jews. Two days later, a Reform temple some four blocks away hosted a Friday night dinner, which drew so many people that it set a new Guinness World Record.

“We had to be seated for a full hour for the dinner to be counted,” Rabbi Joshua Davidson, senior rabbi of Temple Emanu-El, told JNS. “After that came the announcement that we had broken the record, along with the number by which we surpassed it.”

That number was 2,761 —439 more people than the prior record of 2,322 at a Shabbat gathering in Berlin on July 31, 2015 during the European Maccabi Games.

Davidson told JNS that Emanu-El, which

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