A year after the Pittsburgh attack, an interfaith gathering calls for 'knowing each other'
Naz Georgas, executive director of Cordoba House, speaks at an interfaith service in New York City commemorating the Tree of Life synagogue attack last year. Photo by Micah Danney.
NEW YORK — A year after the deadliest attack on the Jewish community in the U.S., a representative of the New York/New Jersey Anti-Defamation-League (ADL) told attendees of a memorial service in Manhattan that the most common question he gets is from people asking how they can get involved in the fight against rising anti-Semitism.
“We’re hoping that this is now a proactive moment for people to get engaged,” said Evan Bernstein, the organization’s regional director.
Faith leaders from several communities spoke at the Oct. 23 service at East End Temple, a small synagogue in Lower Manhattan. Everyone stood in silence as the names of the 11 people killed at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Penn. were read aloud. Seven others were wounded in the shooting.
Bernstein announced a new year-long initiative, the Signature Synagogue Program, that will extend ADL resources to religious communities in the area to educate clergy and congregants about anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry and how to fight them.
Each speaker offered a prescription, which were all variations on one theme: building relationships across communities. Sheikh Musa Drammeh, editor of the Muslim Community Report, talked about weekly “community peace dinners” he holds in the Bronx for former gang members who converted to Islam in prison.
It was often a radicalized version of the faith that contained strains of anti-Semitism, Drammeh said. When the men return home, their interactions with the Jewish community tend to be limited to tension with Jewish landlords.
Drammeh helped organize a conference called “Muslims for Israel” that was attended by three dozen imams, which he said will be held again in December. He coordinated another program that sent students of his Bronx Islamic school to Manhattan’s Holocaust museum.
“In the Muslim community, most Muslims now understand the fact that Muslims and Jews are inseparable,” Drammeh said. “One human family.”
Kaji Dousa, senior pastor at Park Avenue Christian Church in Manhattan, explained the dangers of epigenetic trauma, a growing field of research that studies how trauma can be inherited physiologically and suffered by children who did not experience its infliction. Research has suggested, with some reservation, that people whose parents have suffered extreme hardships can have shorter life spans.
She also cautioned about “allostatic load,” or the physiological effects of an accumulation of stressful experiences. Anyone who faces oppression or systemic or consistent violence or abuse has experienced more than their share of the release of hormones that trigger fight or flight responses, she said. The chemical balancing act required of the brain has a cumulative effect known as “the load.”
Dousa said that support from her community, particularly friends from other faiths, has been vital to her coping with the personal targeting she has suffered as a result of her activism. She said that hearing about massacres where people were targeted based on their identity can create a sense that individual and collective survival is at stake.
“But what we know is that something’s not right, and that something is happening,” Dousa said. “And something is happening and it seems that it’s gonna get worse before it gets better. So as I stand before you as a black woman, a Christian, and many of us will describe our collective stories as the canaries in the coal mine of the United States who see just how bad it can be, I will submit to you that the Jewish people are flying in that same space.”