February 9, 2023 – 19 Shevat 5783
My name is Rabbi Jared H. Saks and I serve as the spiritual leader of Congregation Bet Ha’am in South Portland’s Thornton Heights neighborhood. Bet Ha’am is comprised of 350 member households, drawing mostly from the greater Portland area, but including members from Kittery to Caribou and the Maine coastline to New Hampshire’s White Mountains. I am deeply grateful for the opportunity to address you this evening and to speak about the antisemitism that faces my community and Jews across our state.
While my synagogue has not been the direct target of acts of antisemitism, we know that it is on the rise not only across our country, but across our state, as well. Here in Maine, we have seen hate speech incidents in school settings in several communities, swastikas and other hateful anti-Jewish graffiti in parks and public trails in the greater Portland area, vandalism to synagogue property, and a white supremacy group based in New Hampshire that has posted personal details about Maine’s Jewish organizations and their leadership to a hate group website. Some members of my congregation are reluctant to wear Jewish symbols in public and some of my students are hesitant about sharing their Jewish identity with classmates in school.
In December, I traveled to Washington, DC to lobby Congress with the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism. In past years, our students have focused their lobbying efforts on improving the lives of others, especially those at the greatest disadvantage, addressing issues of climate justice, LGBTQ+ equality, hunger and homelessness, and other pressing causes of our day. For the first time since I began leading students on this trip almost 20 years ago, I had students choose to lobby Congress on antisemitism.
In particular, two of my students, Aziza and Roxy, spoke about the threat of antisemitism that they feel in their own lives. It is striking to me that in nearly 20 years of bringing students to DC for this social justice lobbying seminar, it was the first time that my students felt the need to advocate specifically for themselves. Aziza and Roxy lobbied Congress on the Pray Safe Act, a bill that passed the Senate in the spring by unanimous consent, but which the House of Representatives failed to take up for a vote in the last Congress. The bill would provide a federal clearinghouse in which faith-based organizations and houses of worship could access resources on safety and security, including federal grants and opportunities for security training.
This evening, I want to share some of Aziza’s and Roxy’s words with you: “On the High Holy Days each year at [our] synagogue, we can only afford to post two [off- duty] police officers [or security guards] and we [can] only afford to post them for half of the services. We have no security [presence] the rest of the year. When I attend nighttime Sunday school, the lights are on inside and it’s pitch-black out. We can’t see out the windows, which make up most of the walls [of our sanctuary], but someone else could see in. We cannot afford bulletproof glass coating.”
This isn’t the first time that one of my students has expressed concerns about being a ‘sitting duck’ when they attend worship or religious school at Bet Ha’am. While we keep our doors locked at all times, my students live under the constant threat of antisemitism, sometimes wondering if they are even safe as Jews within the walls of their own faith community. And the adults in my congregation feel no differently.
The Anti-Defamation League reported last year that in 2021 there were 2,717 antisemitic incidents across the country.1 This represented a 34-percent increase from the previous year. In 2019, the United Nations reported that, “Antisemitism [is] the ‘canary in the coalmine of global hatred.’”2 As Jews, we believe that we have a religious obligation to be a light to the nations and a redeemer of the oppressed. The central narrative of our tradition, the story of our people’s liberation from Egyptian bondage, which we’ve just read in our annual cycle of Torah readings and which we’ll retell at our Passover seders in two months’ time, teaches us that we know the heart of the stranger, because we were strangers in the land of Egypt. We stand up for others not only for their sake, but because we know that when Jews are unsafe, others will be unsafe, as well.
My community is deeply grateful not only for any attention that is paid to the threat of antisemitism in this community, but also for the opportunity to raise awareness about all forms of hatred, each of which is an affront to the divine spark that exists within each and every person. I want to thank you for taking up this resolution and I call on the Commission, our city, and our neighbors to turn those words into action, to be a force that not only speaks out against antisemitism, but works to eradicate it, and to be leaders in ending hatred of all kinds within our community.
Thank you again for the opportunity to speak to you this evening and thank you for the work you are doing to make our world a better and more peaceful place.
1 https://www.adl.org/resources/press-release/adl-audit-finds-antisemitic-incidents-united-states- reached-all-time-high
2 https://news.un.org/en/audio/2019/10/1049601
Important Update – March 7, 2023:
The South Portland City Council unanimously passed the following resolution condemning anti-semitism! Thank you to those of you who supported the resolution and made your voices heard. Civic activism works! To read the resolution in its entirety, please click here.