After Charleston, Solidarity Shabbat With Blacks Planned
Image by Getty Images
An array of Jewish groups representing every major religious stream has declared this coming Shabbat one of solidarity with the African American community in the wake of the Charleston, S.C. mass killing.
A release Tuesday including among its signatories representative groups of the Conservative, Reform, Orthodox and Reconstructionist streams “to speak out in synagogues this coming Shabbat on the issue of racism in society and to express rejection of hateful extremism” and to demonstrate support for African Methodist Episcopal churches in their neighborhoods.
On the evening of June 17, a gunman shot dead nine worshippers at Emanuel AME in Charleston. The suspect in the shooting, who is in police custody, is allegedly a white supremacist.
“We stand together, as a united American Jewish community in calling for a Shabbat of important introspection and examination of racism in the United States,” Rabbi Stuart Weinblatt, the rabbi of Congregation B’nai Tzedek in Potomac, Md., said in the statement. “We hope to convey our support to the African-American community nationwide and show all that we will not stand for violent acts driven by hatred.”
Weinblatt convened the coalition of groups and is also the president of the Rabbinic Cabinet of the Jewish Federations of North America, which is also part of the initiative.
Joining the call, on addition to umbrella bodies representing the various religious streams, are the American Jewish Committee; Hillel, an umbrella body for campus student groups; and the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, the umbrella body for Jewish public policy groups and Jewish community relations councils.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
