Poile Zedek
Congregation Poile Zedek is an Orthodox Ashkenazic synagogue located in New Brunswick, NJ. About ten years ago their beautiful synagogue was placed on the historical registry of New Jersey. They have wonderful people and a kindly rabbi. Every year, the put on a wonderful dinner for the poor in the area at Thanksgiving. In fact, their synagogue was originally founded as a mutual aid society and grew into their present congregation over the last hundred years or so.
This week, someone vandalized their cemetery, with 499 stones overturned, of which more than 50 will need to be replaced.
The police initially said that they were not considering this to be an act of anti-Semitism – which to me can only mean that they fail to take this event seriously in any way.
I know that New Brunswick is the home of Rutgers University and sometimes college kids get bored and do dumb things, but no one could have been ignorant of the fact that they were at the very least desecrating the graves of people who were beloved by the living. This is already long past unconscionable.
Still more, it is hard to believe that anyone who has grown to the age of maturity necessary to topple a gravestone can be ignorant that Jews have had a long history of being labeled “undesirable” in almost any place they have called home. If this was college students, they certainly would have been knowledgeable about the legacy of the Shoah, gulags, and ghettoes which litter the history of Western civilization.
But if somehow the persons who did this act where ignorant, then I would argue anti-Semitism is still a root cause of this event. The fact that a child has been allowed to come to some level of maturity and not know the great and evil deeds of our forbearers means that they are destined to repeat it, as the old adage goes. And in this much, the failure to teach the legacies of hate which we inherit, it a commitment to repeat them in the future. In this way, the ignorance of the youth betrays the legacy of hate or - what may be worse – indifference of us all.
Please pray of Congregation Poile Zedek, for their honored dead, and for the people who did this awful thing to these good people.
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