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Rabbis Reform Judaism Social Justice

An Introduction to the Jews of the South: A Good First Impression

The president of the congregation met me at the airport. It was late summer, 2000, my first visit to Hebrew Union Congregation, my new biweekly student pulpit in Greenville, Mississippi. No sooner had we pulled away from the tiny terminal, past the defunct air force base, onto the access road, than we were pulling off again, into a cotton field in full bloom. I had never seen anything like it. Next thing I knew, I stood waist-deep among gently bobbing plants, an undulating field of white stretching to the horizon, the green leaves beneath like a sea obscured by bright foam.

“Have you ever picked cotton?” he asked.

“No.”

He urged me to pull one soft boll for myself. I asked if this was his field. He laughed, knowing from a lifetime of Mississippi autumns that soon, during the harvest, the roads would be paved in white, stray cotton blowing along the lane markers, fields still generously tipped with snowy fibers, as if awaiting gleaners.

“It’s okay to pick one,” he assured me. I hoped he at least knew the field’s owner, and followed his instruction.

How do you make a good first impression? Or a powerful one? I’ll never forget my introduction to the Deep South, to the Jews of the south. I got the message loud and clear that cotton was—historically, and still in large part to that day—the lifeblood of the region (and if our “field” trip weren’t enough, my congregational president, a history major in college, had plenty of tales of times past to finish the job). The blood wasn’t pumping as strongly as it once had, and the town was in decline. The synagogue had just said goodbye to their last full-time rabbi. I was their first student rabbi. Nevertheless, in the hearts of many in the Mississippi Delta, cotton was . . . if no longer king, at least a true royal.

Of course, the legacy of cotton is inextricable from the legacy of slavery, which is one of the factors that set the region up, 100 years after abolition, for its troubled relationship with the African-American civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s.

We continued on to the synagogue, a gorgeous domed 1906 structure with enormous stained-glass windows and a full-sized pipe organ. The congregation had once claimed the largest synagogue membership in the state, and the sanctuary seated hundreds of worshipers. The synagogue building had all the amenities you might expect: assembly hall, kitchen, classrooms, board room, and a sizable library. The library had recently seen the installation of an impressive historical exhibit, curated by two congregants.

The president led me to a glass-sided display case, filled with some of the more physically vulnerable artifacts: old snapshots and siddurim, yellowing posters, manuscripts. He opened the case, and pulled out two items.

The first was a pamphlet, published by the Association of Citizens’ Councils of Mississippi, titled “A Jewish View on Segregation.” The anonymous author self-identified only as a “Jewish Southerner,” but was presumed by Jewish locals, based on personal details disclosed in the essay, to be a resident of the Delta.

The second was a letter, dated November 1963, from the president of Greenville’s Hebrew Union Congregation to the Board of Trustees of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, protesting the arrangements for the banquet speaker at the upcoming Biennial Convention. The letter did not report the details, already well-known by the parties involved, and my guide filled them in for me: The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. had been invited to speak at the gathering later that month in Detroit. The record shows that he spoke, Greenville’s protest notwithstanding. The letter, however, received a thoughtful, two-page reply from Rabbi Maurice Eisendrath, also on display  in the library; and the congregational board secretary, a Detroit native, in defiance of her board colleagues, attended.

“Why are  you showing me this?” I ventured, hesitantly. The current president did not strike me as the sort who would be proud of this chapter in his congregation’s history. But I wasn’t sure what to expect.

“Can you believe this?” he chortled. “Some folks in the North think this is still who we are. But we’ve changed. It’s pretty amazing how much the South has changed.”

It’s pretty amazing, I thought, that this near-total stranger trusted me to see through the stereotype that the documents present, to perceive whatever reality I might encounter in my own experience here, just now beginning. It reminded me of how we’ve preserved the shame of the golden calf in the Torah, for all to see, like an inoculation, a warning or reminder of what we’ve been, against what we might, but mustn’t, become.

I’m reminded of this now, as we prepare to observe the fiftieth anniversary of Freedom Summer, when hundreds of young people, disproportionately Jewish, traveled south to register African-American voters. I’m back in Mississippi, where I have lived full-time for seven of the last fourteen years. The cotton still flourishes in the Delta, and the South is still changing.

"Shabbat Cotton." Photo by Bill Aron. Courtesy Goldring/Woldenberg Institute of Southern Jewish Life. Do not reprint without permission.
“Shabbat Cotton.” Photo by Bill Aron. Courtesy Goldring/Woldenberg Institute of Southern Jewish Life. Do not reprint without permission.

Rabbi Kassoff serves Hebrew Union Congregation in Greenville, Mississippi, as rabbi, and Beth Israel Congregation in Jackson, Mississippi as Director of Youth Education.

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CCAR on the Road Ethics Rabbis Reform Judaism

Recalling MLK Jr and Maurice Eisendrath

An e-mail arrived from the indefatigable Art Waskow reminding us that April 4th is the anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr..  The reminder included a photo from a demonstration at the Arlington National Cemetery along with valuable excerpts from King’s prophetic remarks about Vietnam delivered at Riverside Church.

From L to R: Rabbi AJ Heschel, Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., Reverend Ralph Abernathy, Rabbi Maurice Eisendrath, Rabbi Everett Gendler
From L to R: Rabbi AJ Heschel, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Reverend Ralph Abernathy, Rabbi Maurice Eisendrath, Rabbi Everett Gendler

The photo showed Rabbi Heschel to one side of King, and this prompted me to look at another photo of that demonstration.  In this fuller one, King is flanked on the other side by Rev. Ralph Abernathy and Rabbi Maurice Eisendrath carrying a Torah, and beside them a youngish flag-carrying rabbi from Princeton, NJ (the latter, I).

I feel moved to share this with you on what will be the 45th anniversary of King’s tragic removal from our midst because we often forget to mention Maurice in the reminiscences about King.  The Arlington National Cemetery ceremony was important, moving, and not heavily attended by public figures.  Notably absent were any representatives of the Urban League or the NAACP.  They disapproved of King’s challenging publicly the morality of our policy on Vietnam since LBJ, supporter of civil rights, was also the primary advocate of that very policy.  But at this particular event there was Heschel’s blessed supportive presence, and there also was Maurice Eisendrath carrying a Torah in further support.  Those of us who knew and cherished Maurice are fewer with the passing of the years, so this seems an appropriate time to mention him with the respect and affection that so many of us felt for him.

That Maurice came with a Torah to this particular act of moral witnessing captures perfectly some of his most admired qualities.  This march, held on the sacred ground of our national cemetery, was solemn, not high spirited.  It absorbed the painful testimony of surroundings that expressed human dedication, courage, suffering and sacrifice..The stated proposition of the march, that our engagement as a nation in Vietnam betrayed the basic American values for which these deceased had offered their lives, was not at that time a crowd pleaser.  Pragmatic institutional calculations probably said, not great for UAHC fund raising, especially among big givers, and Maurice dearly loved and devoted his life to that institution. But justice is justice, the truth must be proclaimed, and so Maurice proclaimed it in his characteristically vigorous, energetic way.  The real bottom line for UAHC (now URJ), after all, was prophetic Judaism, and Maurice was accountant par excellence in those calculations.

At this especially difficult period in King’s life, severely criticized by the leaders of the major civil rights organizations, suffering daily threats to his own life and to his beloved family, can we imagine what the presence of Rabbi Heschel, Rabbi Eisendrath, and the sefer Torah must have contributed to King’s morale and sense of Divine support?  The attached photo may convey some of the mood.

As in life all of us were and are able to offer support to the righteous among us, so do the memories of those righteous ones, of King, of Heschel, and of Eisendrath, bless and sustain us.

Rabbi Everett Gendler is retired and lives in Great Barrington, MA.