local
Jewish Federation Leads Civil Rights
Mission Trip to Southern US
SASHA ROGELBERG | STAFF WRITER
T hirty-one Philadelphia Jewish
leaders returned to the City
of Brotherly Love on Sept. 20
from the third annual Civil Rights
Mission. The trip, organized by the Jewish
Federation of Greater Philadelphia’s
Jewish Community Relations Council in
partnership with the Anti-Defamation
League Philadelphia and American
Jewish Committee Philadelphia/Southern
New Jersey, included visits to Atlanta and
Montgomery, Selma and Birmingham,
Alabama to tour civil rights-era land-
marks, museums and memorials.

The third of its kind, the mission
aimed to “change words into action”
and “continue the dialogue between
the Black and Jewish communities,”
according to a Jewish Federation blog
post about the trip.

“The current climate in our country
and the division in our country made
this mission even more relevant,” said
Dave Gold, Jewish Federation Civil
Rights Mission chair. “It opened my
eyes to how we can never forget our
history because if we do, it’s bound to
repeat itself.”
Over three days, the group visited
Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta
— where Rev. Martin Luther King
Jr. served as co-pastor — and heard
Rev. Sen. Raphael Warnock preach
on a Sunday morning; they visited
Montgomery’s National Memorial
for Peace & Justice, the nation’s first
memorial for lynching victims; and
met with Joanne Bland, a participant
in the 1965 “Bloody Sunday” march
across the Edmund Pettus Bridge for
voting rights for Black Americans;
among other activities.

AJC Philadelphia/SNJ Regional
Director Marcia Bronstein was most
struck by the conversation the group
had with Bland. Bland shared the hopes
she had to revitalize the impoverished
city of Selma as well as her involvement
in Bloody Sunday.

Only 13 in 1965, Bland was a child
when civil rights discourse heightened
in the 1960s. Not allowed to sit at
restaurant lunch counters, she remem-
bered crossing the Pettus Bridge in the
name of being able to eat ice cream at
the lunch counter like her white coun-
terparts. “She said she and her sister walked
across the bridge on Bloody Sunday
where they were met with hoses
and dogs and police beating them,”
Bronstein said. “She asked us to help
preserve history, help tell the story
to, I guess, amplify social justice and
activism.” Robin Schatz, Jewish Federation’s
director of government affairs, believed
the trip put into perspective the role of
Jews in the civil rights movement 50
years ago. She recollected the photo
of King with Rabbi Abraham Joshua
Heschel in 1965, marching together
from Selma to Montgomery.

Despite previous solidarity between
Jewish and Black people in the past, Schatz
said, “Our role has been overstated.”
“This was an attempt to study these
issues, to hear from the perspective of
people who have suffered because of
racist policies, whether overt or more
hidden, and to see how we can come
together to create a better society for
everyone,” Schatz said.

White Jews in particular must reckon
with their role in both being the vic-
tims and perpetuators of discrimina-
tion and white supremacy, argued ADL
Philadelphia Director of Education
Randi Boyette.

She most grappled with those two
identities at the National Memorial
for Peace & Justice. The group learned
that in 1911, a white mob lynched
Zachariah Walker, a Black man from
Coatesville — about 39 miles from
Philadelphia — as well as about the
lynching of Leo Frank, a white Jew, in
Atlanta in 1913.

“The experience of Black people in the
United States is not the same experience
as the Holocaust experience,” Boyette
said. “But it packs an emotional punch
to think of the immense suffering in
both of those experiences that really
resonated with me, I think as a human,
but also as a Jewish person.”
Though the Civil Rights Mission
took on different iterations, one in 2020
Participants visited Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where Rev. Martin Luther
King Jr. was a co-pastor, and heard Rev. Sen. Raphael Warnock speak .

 before the pandemic and one for Jewish
Federation Women’s Philanthropy in
May, the JCRC hopes to continue the
annual trip, making it more accessible
to the greater Philadelphia community.

As Jewish leaders return with a
renewed perspective, they are already
working on ways to increase Black-
Jewish relationships and address rac-
ism in the Jewish community.

AJC will host the first part of its
Courtesy of Amy Swiatek
anti-racism book club at Rodeph
Shalom on Nov. 2 with a moder-
ated discussion of “The Case for
Reparations” by Ta-Nehisi Coates; the
Jewish Federation is working with the
National Urban League and ADL on
increasing voter engagement, carrying
out a Get Out the Vote campaign for
the November election. JE
srogelberg@midatlanticmedia.com JEWISHEXPONENT.COM
5