The Warning I Sent before October 7

On August 14, 2023, at 22:46, I sent an email to the security office of the Jewish community in Stuttgart. October 7 was seven and a half weeks away. Nobody knew that yet.

The email is in Russian as it is the working language of 95% of the Jewish community in Germany, including the security apparatus.

The email described what I saw the morning before — Sunday, August 13, around 8:40, when I went out with my dog. Two cars standing near a Jewish site, two men in each, watching it. One of them held a phone up. Filming — or that is how it looked. Earlier that morning I had noticed the same men, four of them, walking together. A few minutes later they were sitting in two separate cars, both with a clear view of the same entrance. In the email I described the cars, the positions, the sightlines, how they moved. I attached a map. I still have a dated copy. The version I can publish is redacted — no addresses, no exact location, nothing operational — but the date, the time and the substance are all there.

I did not write it as a nervous neighbor. My background is military and security work, including years of training others to observe, to report, and to pass information up the chain. And I knew the ground. I lived at that location for months. A city-center street has a rhythm, and you learn it fast. Sunday morning before nine, that street is empty. The last of the Saturday night crowd is gone by four or five, nothing opens for hours. As a rule there is nobody there at that hour. Sometimes a police car. That is all. Surveillance detection is not intuition and not paranoia, it is baseline and anomaly. Two occupied cars, static, at an hour when nobody parks there, with a view of one entrance and a phone held up toward it — that is an anomaly worth reporting anywhere in the world. Do I know that most suspicious behavior turns out innocent? Of course. Any professional can be wrong, and I can be wrong too. That is exactly why the right answer to such a report is not belief and not dismissal. It is process. Log it, check it, escalate it, and answer the person who filed it.

That same morning I did what a citizen is supposed to do. I went to the two police officers on duty nearby and reported what I saw: the positions, how long it was going on, the filming. Among the details I mentioned the language the men were speaking. The answer I got — I wrote it down in my email the same evening — was a question. Something like: and is that a problem? From that moment the conversation turned upside down. Instead of my report........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)