Beineinu - March 2026

On January 10th of this year, a 19-year-old man drove to

Jackson, Mississippi in the middle of the night, removed his license

plates, broke a window, poured gasoline across the floors of a synagogue, and lit it on fire. He called the building the "synagogue of Satan." When he confessed to his father, he said he had "finally got them." He was talking about Jews. He was talking about us.

Beth Israel Congregation is a Reform synagogue. It is the only synagogue in Mississippi's capital city, and the oldest Jewish congregation in the state, founded in 1860. It sits on Old Canton Road, nestled between churches, because that is what Jewish life outside the big cities looks like: small, rooted, tenacious, surrounded by neighbors who are not Jewish and who, more often than not, have been decent neighbors. The silver mezuzahs on the building's front door were gifts from the local Catholic and Episcopal dioceses. When Beth Israel's sanctuary was dedicated in 1967, Black ministers from across Jackson stood at the ceremony. It is, by any measure, a congregation that belongs to its city and that its city has claimed as its own. That same building was bombed by the Ku Klux Klan in September 1967, two months after its dedication, because the rabbi had supported the Civil Rights Movement. The congregation rebuilt.

They are rebuilding again.

I want to sit with that for a moment, because I think we have a tendency to receive news like this, feel the appropriate horror, and then move on. We should not move on too quickly. What happened in Jackson happened to a congregation that looks like ours. A Reform synagogue. A small Jewish community in a state that is not famous for its liberalism. People who chose to stay, to build, to raise children and bury parents and celebrate b'nai mitzvot in a place where being Jewish means being a minority in every room you walk into. That is a particular kind of Jewish courage, and it deserves more than a moment of solidarity before we scroll to the next story.

When firefighters arrived, they found Torah scrolls burning. Several were destroyed. One Torah survived because it was behind glass: a scroll that had already survived the Holocaust, that had made it across an ocean and through six decades of American Jewish life, and that was protected from the flames of a 21st-century antisemite by a pane of glass. Zach Shemper, the congregation's

president, said that when he saw it intact, it was the first time he had tears of joy. "We're all about remembering the past," he said, "and our historical relics mean a lot to us."

That Torah is doing something right now that Torah has always done: testifying. It testifies that we have been here before. It testifies that the people who want to erase us have never succeeded, and that the people who keep showing up, lighting candles, opening the ark, teaching children the aleph-bet, have always outlasted them.

Here in Topeka, we know something about being a small Jewish community. We know what it means to be the only synagogue for miles, to really share the weight of Jewish life for our region, to build something precious in a place that doesn't necessarily notice it. We know the particular mixture of pride and vulnerability that comes with that. Beth Israel's story is not foreign to us. It is, in important ways, our story.

So what do we do with it? A few things.

We give. Beth Israel is rebuilding, and that takes money. It could take a year. I am asking our congregation to contribute to their rebuilding funds as our monthly tzedakah. When a synagogue burns, all of us are diminished. When we help one rebuild, all of us are restored.

We remember. The next time someone suggests that antisemitism is a marginal problem, or that Jewish anxiety is overblown, or that we are somehow safer now than we were, remember Jackson. Remember that a young man soaked a library in gasoline because the building had "Jewish ties." Remember that this is the second time that building has been attacked with fire. Remember that the congregation showed up the next morning to sort through the ash and begin again.

And we stay. That is the most Jewish response I know to hatred. Not flight, not silence, not the slow erosion of Jewish life through attrition and embarrassment and the quiet decision that maybe it isn't worth it. We stay. We open the doors. We teach the children. We light the candles on Friday night and say, out loud, that we are still here. Beth Israel's statement after the arrest of the suspect said they would "proudly, even defiantly, continue Jewish life in Jackson in the face of hatred." It is the right answer. It has always been the right answer.

Am Yisrael Chai.