Two weeks after neo-Nazis marched chanting ‘Sieg Heil,’ Charlottesville Jews try to heal

Congregation Beth Israel is the sole synagogue in Charlottesville and, although the sounds and sights of bigotry and hatred that stirred fear in worshippers as they prayed that day remain fresh, the community is now focused on moving forward.

CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA.—As a Jewish musician sang a prayer for healing, Beth Epstein started to cry.

She didn’t realize how broken she felt until now.

Two weeks ago, neo-Nazis marched past her synagogue on Shabbat chanting “Sieg Heil” while on their way to a white supremacist rally at Emancipation Park, one block away.

Epstein, 51, remembers looking out the window from the room she was now sitting in at Congregation Beth Israel and glimpsing a swastika. Later that day, 32-year-old Heather Heyer would be killed when a driver with ties to the neo-Nazi movement allegedly plowed into a crowd. Two state troopers would also die that day.

Congregation Beth Israel is the sole synagogue in Charlottesville and, although the sounds and sights of bigotry and hatred that stirred fear in worshippers as they prayed that day remain fresh, the community is now focused on moving forward.

More than 250 people—much larger than a usual Shabbat crowd at the Reform synagogue—showed up Friday night to draw inspiration and comfort from prayer and music by artists who journeyed there from around the country.

“My general feeling is that the Jewish community will come back stronger from this threat just like America will,” said Charlottesville Mayor Mike Signer, a member of the synagogue who attended the healing service.

The white supremacists and neo-Nazis who marched on the town Aug. 12 had chanted threats aimed directly at Jews: “Blood and Soil!” and “Jews will not replace us!” They held signs reading “the Goyim know,” a slur referring to non-Jewish people, and “the Jewish media is going down.”

The synagogue had felt it was important to continue weekly services that day, but leaders had taken certain precautions, said synagogue president Alan Zimmerman. Services started an hour early, and they moved Torahs, including a Holocaust scroll they knew was irreplaceable, to a congregant’s house for safekeeping.

As the white supremacist ralliers raged, Zimmerman stood outside the synagogue with an armed security guard hired by the congregation because he was concerned for his congregants praying inside, he said. Men in fatigues armed with semiautomatic rifles passed by, Zimmerman said, and he recalled hearing one shout: “There’s the synagogue.”

“I had no choice but to be out there,” Zimmerman said. “I’m not suggesting I could have done anything, affected anything, but there was no other place that I could be at that moment.”

Zimmerman felt close to crying, he said, as he later told the roughly 40 people gathered in the synagogue that it would be best for them to leave through the back door after services and travel in groups.

Signer said he had requested a police car and an officer at the synagogue that day, but the department was unable to fulfill the request, Signer said. There has been intense scrutiny over what many have criticized as a lack of police response to the eruptions of violence throughout that day.

“I am very frustrated and have called for accountability for those failures here,” Signer said. City Manager Maurice Jones countered in an Aug. 17 statement that police were stationed within just a few blocks of the synagogue that day.

As worshippers attended services, Beth Israel rabbi Rachel Schmelkin stood on the steps of the First United Methodist Church gazing out at the chanting protesters, as she sought to drown out the hate with music. Wearing her prayer shawl and carrying a guitar, she played more than 20 songs with themes of love and kindness. Despite the outward displays of hate, Schmelkin said, she was reassured by the other clergy supporting her, including rabbi Tom Gutherz, who was attending services that day, and the broader Jewish community. “We aren’t alone,” she recalled thinking.

Now, she said, “I’m now thinking of how do we heal? How do we start to heal as a Jewish community?”

Schmelkin, Zimmerman and Signer were in the crowd Friday evening enjoying prayer, songs and poems of hope. The artists had travelled to the service in Charlottesville, from Los Angeles, New York City, Cleveland and Chicago to help the community the best way they know how: music.

“Our reaction to violence and our reaction to hatred is that we sing louder and we make better music and we just we throw more love at it,” said Los Angeles musician Julie Silver, paraphrasing a quote by another Jewish musician, Leonard Bernstein.

“Good and evil exist in the world,” she said. “We just have to make sure that our good shines and that’s the best we can do.”

Though Jewish people are always aware that anti-Semitism exists, the brazen chants from that weekend seemed to have brought that threat to the forefront of the Jewish collective conscience across the country, said rabbi Rick Jacobs, president of the Union for Reform Judaism.

In the days after the Charlottesville rally, the Anti-Defamation League tracked instances of anti-Semitism, including a man urinating on a Philadelphia synagogue, a swastika drawn on a California high school campus and a bomb threat written on dorm walls at Washington State University.

“What Charlottesville did was really shake our community to realize it’s not simply a historical memory or a small thing,” Jacobs said. “People woke up as this is something we need to be paying attention to.”

Wendy Tanson travelled from Chapel Hill, N.C., with her husband, James Falek, on Friday to participate in the musical services and reflect on what happened. Recent threats to Jewish communities nationwide, such as the act of vandalism at the Boston Holocaust Museum, have shown Tanson, 54, that what happened in Charlottesville can happen anywhere.

“This synagogue specifically was threatened in a profound way two weeks ago, in a way that shouldn’t happen in 2017,” Tanson said. “We felt it was important to be here and stand up and be counted.”

Over the past two weeks, the events of Aug. 12 have reverberated for others who attended the healing service on Friday.

Dana Mich, 30, said she has been thinking a lot about her grandfather, who survived the Holocaust. Jan Dorman, 60, said that during walks on the downtown mall she pictures the violence she saw on the news versus what she knows about the city she’s lived in for decades. Sara Rimm-Kaufman, 47, recalled waking up in the middle of the night before the Friday services, worrying that the synagogue would be a target for anti-Semitic acts this Shabbat.

After formal prayer services, Silver led the congregation in singing uplifting songs of hope. People got out of their chairs, linked hands, smiled and danced around the room, and Silver thought: “We are a resilient people.”

“We have a strong, vibrant Jewish community here,” said longtime congregant Fred Epstein, 50.

His wife, Beth Epstein, agreed. Though she was brought to tears earlier in the services, she joined in the dancing by the end. “I hope it continues,” she said. “It’s really special.”