“The unspeakable murder of nine accomplished, beloved and respected African-American Charlestonians of faith in their own church on Wednesday (June 18) has hit our city like an earthquake.”
—Author Robert N. Rosen
Rabbi Alan Cohen, rabbi emeritus of Congregation Beth Shalom, is currently in Charleston, South Carolina, where he is seeing first-hand how the murders of nine black Charlestonians is affecting the Charleston community, and its Jewish population. Rabbi Cohen is spending the next couple of months in Charleston filling in as the rabbi for Synagogue Emanu-El, while its regular rabbi is on sabbatical.
Estimates of Charleston’s Jewish population range from 7,000 to 12,000 according to Judi Corsaro of the Charleston Jewish Voice. {mprestriction ids="1,3"}Rabbi Cohen reports that the community is an old one, dating back to at least 1695. In Colonial times it was the largest Jewish community in the country. Synagogue Emanu-El, which boasts about 350 family units, was founded in 1947 and was the first Conservative synagogue in South Carolina.
Rabbi Cohen served Emanu-El for 10 years from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, which is what facilitated his return as an interim rabbi.
“We have had longstanding relationships with lots and lots of folks here,” he said from his office in Charleston on Monday.
He said the shooting has impacted everybody in Charleston.
“It happened not necessarily to people we know personally but it happened to people that we know of because they are part of the community,” he said, comparing the feeling to what members of the Jewish community in Kansas City felt a year ago after the shootings at the Jewish Community Campus and Village Shalom.
“Everybody in the Jewish community there felt impacted by it, probably a little more so because the attack in Kansas City was ostensibly an attack on the Jewish community. I’m sure that everybody felt vulnerable by it and I think people here are feeling a little more vulnerable.”
When the shooting occurred here last year, people did feel vulnerable and support for the Jewish community poured in from all over the city, country and the world. In part because of that support, Marvin Szneler, executive director of the local Jewish Community Relations Bureau|American Jewish committee reached out personally to about 90 houses of worship, African-American and others, to express the Jewish community’s solidarity and condolences.
“It was a horribly upsetting act of hate, which has an unquantifiable impact on our entire country. It was another painful reminder of racism against so many, including blacks and Jews, that continues to brew in our country,” said Szneler. “Our (AJC) statement was sent to over a 1,000 email contacts, including over 700 area clergy. We all need to work to fight bigotry and injustice.”
Violence in a safe haven
Rabbi Cohen believes that people have begun taking for granted the acts of violence that have occurred in numerous venues from post offices to schools to malls.
“Religious institutions should have been off limits, sacred, special space … and when this happens in a church we know it can happen in a synagogue, it can happen in a mosque, it could happen anywhere, and of course we know it does. So from that standpoint there is a psychological sense of vulnerability that the Jewish community feels and because the Charleston Jewish community, generally speaking, goes back not just generations but centuries in some instances, there is a sense of really a tie to the community.”
That feeling of vulnerability has caused the Jewish community of Charleston, at least at Emanu-El, to take security more seriously.
“They were not very conscientious about security and this is making them very much more security conscious,” Rabbi Cohen said. “They immediately met with representatives of the Charleston police department and I noticed this morning as I left minyan there was a Charleston police patrol car stopped and parked in the area right in front of the synagogue.”
“For the first time we had a plain clothes armed detective at services on Shabbat,” he added.
In addition to Emanu-El, there is also a Reform congregation in Charleston as well as a few Orthodox ones, along with a Jewish Federation, Jewish Community Center and Chabad.
While there has been no strictly Jewish memorial or commemoration of the shootings, Rabbi Cohen said he devoted portions of his Erev Shabbat and Shabbat services to the topic and believes other congregations discussed it at Shabbat as well.
He attended a communitywide vigil, along with a number of others from the Jewish community, the day after the shootings at Morris Brown AME Church. Later he learned that he was seen in a photo published in the Boston Herald as well as in video shown on at least one television network, CBS.
There have been several memorials and the rabbi knows many Jewish people who have attended those. Many are also visiting the Mother Emanuel AME Church, where memorials have been placed outside. At one point a group of Jews representing Charleston’s Reform congregation stood in a circle and said the Mourner’s Kaddish.
Rabbi Cohen said one of the things that distinguishes Charleston from other communities is that it is “uniquely cohesive, especially regarding people’s sense of responsibility toward different elements of the community.”
“That’s not to say it’s a perfect community, there are no such things. And it’s not to say that there aren’t issues,” he said.
One of those divisive issues is about the Confederate battle flag, which flies in front of the state capitol. While some say it is a symbol of racism, others say it is a symbol of Southern pride.
“That’s an example that in spite of the fact that it’s a very cohesive and caring community, there are issues of racial divide that still exists,” Rabbi Cohen said, noting the fact that the flag is still flying at regular height while the U.S. and state flags are flying at half staff has exacerbated the issue.
He said one thing the Charleston community is proud of is the way it has handled this and the recent problems in North Charleston when a policeman shot an unarmed black man who was running away from him.
“Unlike some of the other places where incidents occurred and there were some violent responses, including places like Ferguson with a lot of rioting and so forth, here there is a sense of pride that we are working in the right way. We are not naïve enough to say it’s perfect, but we are working in the right direction and we take pride in the fact that we have that sense and I think the Jewish community very much feels the same way about that.”{/mprestriction}