Story highlights Eric Levenson is an associate writer for CNN

This is his personal account of an event that happened in 1997

A series of bomb threats have rattled Jewish Community Centers (JCCs) across the country over the past few weeks, sparking evacuations, presidential denouncements, and what some have called "telephone terrorism."

In each case, JCC leaders have taken the bomb threat seriously and evacuated the building.

That makes sense to me. When I was a little kid, I found a bomb at my synagogue.

It was Feb. 22, 1997, and I was a precocious 5-year-old boy in Jacksonville, Florida. That Saturday, as was pretty typical, my family attended services at the Jacksonville Jewish Center, which doubled as my synagogue and Jewish day school.

Antsy and bored, my older brother and I left the main service room to play hide-and-seek in the hallway with a couple of friends. Lining the wall of the hallway were about a dozen large memorial plaques. I hid in a small nook between two of them.

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