Culture & Community | Faith & Spirituality
Paul Wessel: "It’s all intended to divide us in ways that are not helpful and aren’t who we are." Lucy Gellman Photos.
When Paul Wessel spotted a plastic bag outside of his East Rock home on Sunday, he thought it was a piece of trash. He moved closer, and could see crumpled paper and a handful of rocks. Only when he began to read it did he realize that it contained pages of anti-Semitic rhetoric.
Three days later—and just hours from the Jewish holiday of Passover—he turned that discovery into a call to stand together against discrimination, white supremacy, and far right rhetoric that seeks to divide, rather than unite, people often pushed to the margins.
Wessel brought that message to the New Haven Green Wednesday morning, as faith leaders, community organizers, New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker and Hamden Mayor Lauren Garrett responded to the distribution of anti-Semitic fliers in New Haven.
The flyers, which appeared in sections of East Rock and along Whitney Avenue in New Haven and Hamden, directed anger and vitriol at Yale School of Management student Robert Lucas, who is leading a campaign to rename Whitney Avenue. The street, like the eponymous Hamden museum, is currently named after Eli Whitney, who helped extend slavery with the invention of the cotton gin in 1794. Lucas has proposed naming it after Dr. Edward Bouchet, the first Black man to graduate with a doctorate from Yale.
In addition to several faith leaders present, representatives of the New Haven People’s Center, New Haven Peace Commission, New Haven Pride Center, Jewish Federation of Greater New Haven and Integrated Refugee and Immigrant Services presented a united front against discrimination.
New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker.
“You know, people feel battered by jobs where wages don’t keep up with the cost of living, healthcare that keeps costing more and more and covers less and less, school shootings, and it’s a hard time for a lot of people,” Wessel said after describing what it felt like to find the flier.
"There are other people who are willing to serve up somebody who is the cause of their ills. Sometimes they point to Black people. Sometimes they point to Brown people. Sometimes to transgender people. Sometimes to immigrants … It’s all intended to divide us in ways that are not helpful and aren’t who we are.”
That call—to unite, particularly during a holy time shared by three Abrahamic faiths—echoed over the Green as both elected officials and faith leaders took the mic one after the other. Speaking at the top of the press conference, both Elicker and Garrett pointed to the need to come together. Garrett specifically called out the people who have brushed off the news as spurious, pointing to the harm and hurt that such behavior can create.
In addition to Passover, which commemorates the Jews’ flight from slavery in Egypt, the incident comes during both Holy Week and the Muslim observance of Ramadan. As Jews begin to tell the Passover story Wednesday night at sundown, Muslim families across New Haven and Connecticut will enter the Iftar meal, or the nightly breaking of the Ramadan fast.
Rabbi Brian Immerman.
Rabbi Brian Immerman, who currently leads Congregation Mishkan Israel in Hamden, remembered receiving a phone call last week, from a woman who had found the same flier on her property. By the time she spoke to him, she had already called the cops. She called the Anti-Defamation League. Then she picked up the phone and called Immerman.
When he picked up, she admitted that she didn’t know why she had dialed his number.
Immerman had a sense that he knew, he said Wednesday. His grandmother, who has since passed on, escaped Nazi Germany as a girl. At the end of her life, she urged her children and grandchildren to keep teaching “the evils” that could happen when people needed to find someone or something to blame for their own misfortune.
“She needed me to tell her that she is not alone,” he said. “She’s not alone because even though she doesn’t regularly attend services or keep kosher, she’s a member of the Jewish community and she will never be alone. She’s not alone because she’s a member of the Greater New Haven community, a community of people who stand up to hatred and bigotry of all forms.”
He reflected on the timing, which falls on the eve of a ritual Jews have practiced for over 2,000 years, including during the crusades, in Jewish ghettos, under forced labor, and in exile. On Wednesday night, he will hold up a sheet of matzah, and recite the words Ha Lachma Anya—“this is the bread of affliction.”
“‘This year, we are slaves,’ we’re gonna say tonight. Next year we pray that we can be free,” he said. Then, paraphrasing civil rights icon Fannie Lou Hamer: “We recognize that until everyone is free, none of us is truly free. And so we’re gonna break that middle matzah, and we’re gonna pledge to break the chains of oppression everywhere.”
Rev. Lucille Brown.
The story of Passover is also a call to intersectional justice. It was women, and specifically women of color, who made Moses’ delivery of the Jews from slavery possible. In the Passover story, two midwives, Shifra and Puah, ignore Pharaoh’s edict to kill baby boys born to the Israelites. Then Moses’ mother, Yocheved, and his older sister, Miriam, refuse to surrender the baby and instead float him down the Nile River in a reeded basket. It is Pharaoh’s own daughter, Bithiah, who risks her life for this child, who raises him as her own.
Representing Christian Tabernacle Baptist Church in Hamden, Rev. Lucille Brown also turned to scripture, dispelling hate as she recited Bible verses from memory. A lifelong New Havener, Brown stressed the pain she feels each time she sees an act of discrimination, whether it is racist or religious (or both) in tenor. As a child, she said, she believed that racism would vanish by her 20s. Now she is in her late 60s, and still sees it everywhere.
“We are still where we were when I was a 13-year-old child,” she said. “There’s something very seriously wrong with that. We need to start examining what’s inside of us that keeps us acting the way that we do.”
Rev. Thomas Jackson, who ministers to the congregation at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church on Whalley Avenue, called for a reckoning among Christians who have long blamed Jews for the death of Jesus Christ. He tied the timing to Holy Week, which begins with Palm Sunday, flows through Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday, and ends with the story of the resurrection on Easter a week later.
“It’s an important time for Christians to admit our grievous sin, and one of the greatest sins in history is the belief, the inappropriate belief, the biblically incorrect belief, that Jews are responsible for the death of Christ. This underlies much of the anti-Semitism that has existed, and is the root of much of the evil that has been done to Jews around the world for millennia.”
“It is time for this hatred in the name of Jesus to stop,” he said. “It is time for Christians to reclaim Jesus from those who hate. It is time to fulfill our responsibility as Christians to speak out and to stand up for those who are oppressed and afflicted.”
May Ye and Mikveh Warshaw.
In an interview after the press conference, rabbinical student May Ye said she hopes to see continued efforts to build community against hate in Greater New Haven. On the eve of Passover, she’s found herself thinking about both the fliers, and what the broader fight for liberation looks like in New Haven, and across the globe. Ye practices that in her own work with the New Haven-based, non-Zionist havurah Mending Minyan.
“I would just call on the city to ask how they’re intervening and how they’re interrupting white supremacy in our city,” Ye added. “It’s a reminder that the work’s not done, and it never has been. I was laying in bed this morning, and I was like, ‘What is this holiday about?’ What is this crossing into freedom?’ What does it mean for our Black Jews and Black comrades to go through the story every year as if we’ve made it?”
“This isn’t new or old,” chimed in Mikveh Warshaw, who is a member of Mending Minyan and came to show solidarity with fellow spiritual leaders Wednesday morning. “We know these people are here. I agree with May—like, what are you doing to really confront white nationalism and white supremacy?”
Warshaw brought it back to Wessel, with whom she said she agreed. “You address these things by addressing healthcare, by addressing our education, by … just like making people be able to survive and live.”
The fliers are currently under investigation at the New Haven Police Department, which has also involved the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Wednesday morning, Assistant Police Chief Bertram Ettienne said that the department has not yet identified any person or people who may be responsible.
Following the press conference, a few of the faith leaders wondered if it might be linked to NSC-131, an outgrowth of the Nationalist Social Club based in Massachusetts.
For the full press conference, click on the video above.