Our Story

In early 2023, Adrian Erlikhman, Ryan Erlikhman, and Yonatan Zarur were students in Los Angeles. Antisemitic incidents had been rising nationally for several years, and all three of them were seeing it close up — in their schools, in their neighborhoods, on social media feeds. Swastikas on lockers. Slurs in hallways. Flyers. The kind of thing that gets reported once to an administrator and then disappears.

What struck them was not just that it was happening, but that there was no clear way to see it. The ADL published an annual audit. The FBI published hate crime statistics. The LAPD published reports. But none of it was in one place, none of it was mapped, and none of it was current enough to be actionable for a community trying to respond in real time.

The question that kept coming back was simple: where is the data? Not summarized in a press release six months later — where is the actual, mappable, searchable data? They started building the answer.

The first version of SafeJew was scrappy. The team taught themselves what they needed to build it — pulling publicly available incident data from the ADL, FBI Uniform Crime Reports, and LAPD hate crime logs, writing a community reporting form, and stitching it all together into an interactive map. The analytics were basic by today's standards, but the concept was sound: one platform, multiple data sources, one map.

Users could see where antisemitic incidents had been reported in Greater Los Angeles, filter by category and date, and submit their own reports for community review. For a lot of people, it was the first time they had seen the pattern clearly laid out geographically.

SafeJew earned a $1,000 Teen Innovation Grant from JFEDLA — the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles — one of the largest and most established Jewish communal organizations in the country. The platform was subsequently distributed across JFEDLA's Greater LA network in partnership with the Community Security Initiative (CSI), JFEDLA's dedicated community safety arm.

Getting that distribution meant SafeJew was reaching the people who needed it most: synagogue security coordinators, community center directors, neighborhood safety liaisons. The feedback confirmed what the team had suspected — there was real demand for this, and nothing else was filling the gap.

V1 had real limitations. The mobile experience was poor — most people reporting incidents were on their phones, and the interface was not built for them. The analytics were shallow. The map showed incidents but did not help users understand trajectory or concentration. There was no campus layer, which turned out to be a major gap as antisemitism on college campuses intensified in late 2023 and 2024. And practically: the domain lapsed during college application season, which was a hard lesson about the infrastructure required to run something people depend on.

Those failures were instructive. They made clear what Version 2 needed to be.

Version 2 is a full rebuild. The codebase is new, the design is new, the data architecture is new. The goal is the same — put reliable, accessible safety data in the hands of Jewish communities — but the execution is held to a higher standard. Institutional-grade credibility. Mobile-first reporting. A real campus layer. Analytics that tell a story, not just display rows.

SafeJew V2 is built to scale beyond Los Angeles. If antisemitism is a national problem — and it is — then the tools for tracking and responding to it should not be local. The roadmap includes verified data partnerships, a mobile reporting application, and a university program that can deploy per-campus with appropriate privacy controls for student safety.