DEL.ICIO.USTemple bombing 50 years ago had unforeseen effects
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Sunday, October 12, 2008
A beautiful temple. A horrifying roar. “The brick walls flapped upward like sheets on a line,” wrote Melissa Fay Greene in “The Temple Bombing.” “[T]he stained-glass windows snapped outward, like tablecloths shaken after dinner.”
With that early-morning explosion on Oct. 12, 1958, the artificial peace that separated Atlanta from the violence erupting elsewhere in the South was also shattered.
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Mayor William B. Hartsfield (left) and Rabbi Jacob Rothschild crouch in the rubble of The Temple after the 1958 bombing.
It was Atlanta’s first civil rights-era bombing, and it was aimed not at black leaders, but at Jews — specifically, at The Temple, the handsome Romanesque synagogue on a ridge above Peachtree Street, and its outspoken rabbi, Jacob “Jack” Rothschild.
Today, 50 years later, members of an even bigger Temple, enlarged by two building campaigns, will look back at that event, and contemplate the unintended consequences of that destruction.
“That act of hatred was meant to divide the community and destroy any support for integration, and it did just the opposite,” said former Temple Rabbi Alvin Sugarman, an Emory University junior at the time.
The bombing galvanized the white community. Mayor William B. Hartsfield denounced the bombers in a television address filmed amid the wreckage. Atlanta Constitution Editor Ralph McGill’s column in the next day’s paper, “A Church, a School,” helped win him a Pulitzer Prize.
Unseen impacts
What was less remarked on at the time was the impact of the bombing on the Jewish community, an impact visible in an exhibit of Rabbi Rothschild’s papers, on display at Emory’s Manuscript Archive and Rare Book Library.
Historian Ellen Rafshoon, who curated the exhibit, points out that Rothschild’s earliest sermon opposing segregation was in 1948, well ahead of the curve, certainly ahead of his own congregation.
“You can see why The Temple members in 1948 are uncomfortable; they’re not thinking about these issues, they’re complacent,” said Rafshoon, a member of The Temple and professor of history at Georgia Gwinnett College in Lawrenceville.
Indeed, some members of the congregation were uncomfortable with the arrival of Rothschild in 1946 from Pittsburgh, not because he was too much of an activist, but because he was “too Jewish,” remembers Rothschild’s widow, Janice Rothschild Blumberg, who remarried after Rothschild died in 1973.
An Atlanta native whose great-grandfather had been a rabbi at The Temple from 1877 to 1881, the future Mrs. Rothschild met the new rabbi at the Standard Club.
The Standard Club was yet another token of assimilation for Temple Jews, who held services in English, forswore head coverings, bar mitzvahs and prayer shawls, and for whom fitting in was important.
“People like me grew up not lighting candles on Friday night. We had Christmas trees and weren’t ashamed of it,” recalled Blumberg, speaking from her home in Washington, D.C.
Jack Rothschild, a former Army chaplain who enjoyed cards and the occasional highball, looked perfect for this milieu.
But the young rabbi interpreted Reform Judaism as a continuance of the mission of the prophets and took up the subject of the newly created Israel in his sermons, prompting some congregants to type him as a “Zionist.”
“They thought he was a regular Joe, a golfer, a card player, an Army veteran,” Greene said. “It was a sense of bait and switch.” But prophetic Judaism, for Rothschild, meant “deed not creed,” and the issue facing Atlanta in the 1940s and ’50s was, for him, segregation.
Many members of his congregation would have preferred him to keep a lower profile. Few had forgotten the awful events of 1915, when Temple member Leo Frank was lynched by a mob and the crime went unpunished and seemingly was tolerated.
A unifying force
The aftermath of the 1958 bombing was the reverse. “The great majority of Atlantans just embraced us,” said Blumberg.
The outpouring of support from Atlanta included cash, which helped pay for repairs and a planned expansion. In 1960, the congregation opened an activities building called Friendship Hall.
The Temple kept growing. In 2004 a new activities building, Schwartz Goldstein Hall, where bar and bat mitzvah receptions often take place, has displaced Friendship Hall, now a chapel.
Today The Temple holds services in Hebrew (and some in English) and many in the congregation wear tallitot and yarmulkes.
This isn’t necessarily becoming “more Jewish,” program director Ronnie van Gelder said, but it’s in step with the greater Reform movement.
Yet it’s possible to see the growth of traditional ritual at The Temple as a result of the remarkable change in 1958, when the Jewish community learned that its place in Atlanta was secure, after the catastrophe that turned into a blessing.
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