Last September, a week before Yom Kippur, a former skinhead sat before the Jewish community whose synagogue he had vandalized decades earlier.

It was the site in Vancouver where Tony McAleer committed his first anti-Semitic act before he rose to prominence in the white supremacy movement.

“I had to face this congregation that I had harmed,” he said. This would be his personal Day of Atonement.

He came before them nervous, ashamed and fearful. And he shared his journey.

Tony was 15 when he developed a loose association with neo-Nazis. It wasn’t the hateful ideology that drew him in.

“I became a skinhead because I felt weak and powerless,” he said. He felt invisible. The attention and approval that came with his hate group made him feel safe. “I had so much invested in this identity. It wasn’t about whether I was correct.”

Over the years, those relationships slowly became his entire identity, and he often appeared on television as a spokesman for the white supremacist cause.

His mother was horrified. While her love was unconditional, she told him, their relationship was not.

“She held me accountable,” he said. She told McAleer, by this time a single father, that if he was going to have one foot in the world of neo-Nazis, she wasn’t going to be around to help him raise his children. It was help he desperately needed. He left the movement in his early 30s, but he never dealt with the wounds that made those views attractive to him in the first place.

In a political moment when racists feel emboldened to publicly share their hateful views, family members may struggle with how to respond. Last summer, some were surprised to discover their children or siblings had marched holding Tiki torches and chanting Nazi slogans in the violent Charlottesville, Virginia rally. A Ladue High School graduate was seen marching alongside neo-Nazis and KKK supporters, and his sister apologized for and condemned his actions on Facebook.

The main organizer of the Charlottesville rally is planning another demonstration in August across the street from the White House on the anniversary of last summer’s deadly protest.

The underlying emotion that draws people to hate groups and extremism is toxic shame, said McAleer, now 50. Consider the opposite of shame: pride. These groups offer an expression of false pride. It took McAleer years of therapy to discover the source of his shame. His Jewish therapist, who listened while he expressed doubts about the Holocaust, helped him get to the root of his disordered thinking. Eventually, he pushed McAleer to share his story so he could help others. In 2012, McAleer went public about his past, speaking on television and radio about how he was drawn into a white supremacist movement and how he extracted himself from it. He has also co-founded a nonprofit, Life After Hate, where others can share their stories of similar experiences. He advises schools, towns and organizations about how to break cycles of hatred and disrupt recruiting. He speaks all over Europe and America.

“There’s no academic way of making someone compassionate,” he said. “It happens through experience.”

Earlier this month, McAleer spent three days at the Auschwitz concentration camp memorial in Poland as part of a documentary he is making.

“It’s also part of the process of healing and confronting who I used to be,” he said.

It took years before McAleer could confront the community he had hurt in his hometown.

The Jewish congregation asked him tough questions about vengeance. They talked about how one atones for a sin when you don’t know exactly who the victims are, which is often the case in spreading hate speech. He apologized to the congregation at Temple Sholom, but he did not ask for their forgiveness.

“I don’t know if I had the right to ask for forgiveness.”

After the hour-long talk, several of the congregants came up to thank him, shake his hand and hug him.

They had forgiven him anyway.

White supremacists are busy recruiting a new generation and have devised creative ways to lure children.

Children who Google Martin Luther King Jr., for example, might click on a “.org” site that comes up as a top result. It appears to link to King’s speeches and a civil rights library. Actually, it’s run by the Neo-Nazi site Stormfront, created by Don Black, a former Ku Klux Klan leader. The links from that particular MLK site lead to neo-Nazi propaganda.

Earlier this year, Newsweek reported on an interview with an editor of the neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer on a white supremacist radio show. The editor, Andrew Anglin, admitted that the purpose of the conspiracy site is to radicalize children as young as 11.

“My site is mainly designed to target children” for radicalization, Anglin reportedly said on Radical Agenda, a radio show hosted by Christopher Cantwell, one of the marchers at the Charlottesville, Virginia rally in August. “(Age) 11 through teenage years ... Young adults, pubescents.”

Linda Woolf, professor of psychology and international human rights at Webster University, has tracked these trends. She has been studying the recruitment and radicalization tactics of hate groups.

“I’m sure in schools they are warning kids about online predators,” she said. “My guess is that many don’t talk about online hate groups or cults. They use the same recruitment techniques.”

Unsuspecting tweens or teens stumble upon such sites or groups on social media, which number in the tens of thousands, and are invited to chat privately. The conversation doesn’t start with hate. Instead, the white supremacists groom the child by giving them attention and a sense of belonging. They wish them a happy birthday. They target those who already feel disillusioned, isolated or disenfranchised.

“People don’t always join hate groups because they hate,” Woolf said. Rather, they join to meet other social and emotional needs, such as finding a place to fit in. On college campuses, the recruitment events often feature free food to appeal to hungry students. The groups’ tactics have become more difficult to research after the initial contact, as many of these activities move to the dark web, requiring special passwords.

As most casual observers can tell, hate speech has been trending upward in America. For the past three years, there’s also been a documented rise of neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups in America. The number of hate groups has risen 20 percent since 2014, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). The SPLC identified 954 hate groups in the US in 2017, compared with 784 in 2014.

It’s not just the number of groups and hate crimes that are surging; white supremacists are more emboldened and trying to ascend into visible positions of power and social influence.

At least eight white nationalists are running for state or federal office, according to SPLC tracking. This appears to be more than in any other election in modern history.

We’ve seen a mainstreaming of language that dehumanizes racial, ethnic and religious minorities, along with alt-right creep into the public square.

Corey Stewart, Republican nominee in the Virginia Senate race, has ties to numerous white supremacist activists. He had described Paul Nehlen, the self-professed “pro-white” candidate for Congress, as his “personal hero,” but later disavowed him and said he wasn’t aware of his racist views.

Republican congressman Steve King also recently retweeted a Nazi sympathizer, Mark Collett, later saying he wasn’t aware of his Nazi affiliation. Collett is a well-known British white supremacist who has spoken admiringly of Adolf Hitler and was once featured in a documentary called “Young, Nazi and Proud,” according to the New York Times.

It’s no surprise that white supremacist hate groups are enjoying a resurgence in America, and that they are focusing their efforts on targeting younger white men to join their ideological ranks.

Woolf says the greatest danger these hate groups pose is the way they tacitly encourage individuals to commit violence -- including those who just casually consume their content.

She encourages schools to include these hate group tactics as part of media literacy education. She also urges parents to keep an eye on their children’s peer groups and try to monitor their online activity, especially if their child seems isolated and spends a lot of time online.

“I think the general public may underestimate the danger these groups pose,” Woolf said. “They work to infiltrate and target those most predisposed to violence.”

There are six ways to say “uncle” in Pakistani homes. There’s the standard English word, used to address any South Asian man older than you regardless of actual relation. Your parents’ friends are called “uncles” and “aunties” -- not Mr. or Mrs.

But in the case of truly related kinfolk, there are five different Urdu variations of “uncle” that denote the exact relationship, depending on whether you are referring to a maternal or paternal uncle, through marriage or blood, who is either older or younger than your parent.

It sounds complicated, but I love these specific titles for extended family. It makes each relationship seem special in its own way.

Growing up, I only had one of these uncles nearby. The rest were either in Pakistan, England or another American city.

Lucky for me, my father’s older brother, my Abbas taya, has been a constant presence in my life since I was born. He and my father emigrated within a few years of one another and have always lived in the same city. Our families grew up together. The six children in my family combined with the four in theirs meant we had a team of playmates, confidantes and partners in crime throughout our childhoods.

Abbas taya was the larger-than-life figure that loomed above us.

If every family has a gifted storyteller, Abbas taya is ours. He’s the life of the party, the center of attention in any room, the one making us all laugh with his wicked sense of humor. He’s the one who paved the path of financial success in this country, arriving with little and eventually building a factory that employed dozens. He has flair and a love for the finer things in life -- expensive cars, brand-name clothes, beautiful things and people.

He worked out regularly, and to my young eyes was the strongest and biggest man I knew. He could easily have been an intimidating figure, but that was rarely his way with us. Instead, he charmed us with stories that poked fun at himself more often than others. He defused his frequent teasing with genuine flattery and self-deprecating remarks. He never got sentimental, but his concern and interest in our lives spoke to the unspoken love he has for us.

These were valuable lessons he taught by example: Don’t take life so seriously. Learn to take a joke. Develop a thick skin. Be generous. Dream big. Live big.

He and my father love each other dearly, and also had some epic fights when we were growing up. They share the same quick and volatile temper and sensitivities. Yet they never let any of their personal disagreements spill into any of our family relationships. While my father has always been my intellectual foil, my cheerleader and The Law in our home, my taya has been the one who brings the party, and makes every person he meets believe they are the most talented, interesting and beautiful person he’s ever met.

In the past few years, I watched him struggle with health problems that challenged the way I’ve seen him my entire life. Back problems and neck surgeries seemed to shrink his imposing frame. Some days he can carry on conversations like his old self, but many times, he will ask the same questions multiple times in the same visit. On days when his memory is more clouded, he sits and observes our family gatherings rather than taking center stage, holding court and telling stories.

It’s strange to see him quieter.

He’s 81, which I suppose might sound old to someone who never knew him. But to me, he’s the last person who could have ever gotten old. It took me a while to accept that time can turn the toughest patriarch, the happy-go-lucky success story, into the one who needs care.

I make a point to visit him and my aunt every time I go back home to Houston. As an adult, I can see more clearly the village that helped raise me.

On a recent visit, the brief moments of clarity in our conversation where punctuated with longer pauses of confusion and repetition. As I got up to leave, I walked over to give my taya a hug.

I stopped for a second, kissed his cheek and said, “Thank you for being a second father to me my entire life.”

“What are you talking about?” he said, in the good-natured way he dismisses such comments. He sounded exactly like his old self. Then he kissed my head and said softly, “You’re just like my daughter.”

“I love you.”