The Jewish Defense League (JDL) is a Jewish far-right religious-political organization in the United States and Canada that was founded by Rabbi Meir Kahane in 1968 with the objective of protecting Jews from anti-Semitism. Late-1960s New York City saw elderly Jews be harassed and mugged, storeowners held up, Jewish teachers assaulted, and synagogues and cemeteries defaced as violence in the city was on the rise. Kahane responded by creating the JDL, ostensibly with the purpose of combating anti-Semitism in the public and private sectors of live in America and to "do the job that the Anti-Defamation League should do but doesn't." The group adopted the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising's motto of "Never Again!" as a sign that the JDL would not allow for Jews to be caught by surprise or lulled into a foolish trust in others, and, in 1969, the JDL sent members to protect Jewish businesses in Passaic and Boston. However, the 1970s saw the JDL engage in a series of violent attacks against Soviet interests in the USA in retaliation for the jailing of Jewish refuseniks in the USSR. The group was transformed form a vigilante club into a 15,000-strong right-wing terrorist organization that targeted Arab-American political activists, neo-Nazis, and Soviet communists; the group was responsible for the murder of Alex Odeh in 1985, the Cave of the Patriarchs massacre in 1994, and a plot to assassinate Conrgessman Darrell Issa in 2001. Kahane himself was assassinated in 1990 and was succeeded by Irv Rubin and then by Shelley Rubin.