DEL.ICIO.USAtlanta commemorates The Temple bombing
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Monday, October 13, 2008
Calvin King opened his newspaper Sunday morning and saw a photograph that brought memories rushing back from that fall day in 1958 when The Temple was bombed.
King, a native Atlantan, said that’s why he felt compelled to come to The Temple on Peachtree Street Sunday for the 50th anniversary of the bombing, even though he’s not Jewish.
Joey Ivansco/jivansco@ajc.com
Janice Rothschild Blumberg at a presentation on the 50th Anniversary of The Temple bombing on Oct. 12, 1958.
King, an African-American, told the congregation he was a 12-year-old caddie at the Jewish golf course, The Standard Club, when the bombing happened. King was riding the Number 23 bus on the way to the course when it passed The Temple.
“As I passed Pershing Point, I saw the gaping hole. I was leaving church this morning and saw the gaping hole again (in the newspaper),” he said. “I felt pressed to come and make a statement.”
He sat down and the congregation applauded.
Later, King said the bombing “made me realize that racism was not only directed at blacks, but at the Jewish community as well.”
The early-morning explosion on Oct. 12, 1958, shattered the artificial peace that separated Atlanta from the violence erupting elsewhere in the South.
It was Atlanta’s first civil rights-era bombing, and it was aimed not at black leaders, but at Jews — specifically The Temple’s outspoken rabbi, Jacob Rothschild.
The bombing galvanized the white community. Mayor William B. Hartsfield denounced the bombers in a television address filmed amid the wreckage. Authorities suspected five men were responsible for the bombing, but only one stood trial; he was acquitted.
The bombing “was a shock to us as individuals,” William Schwartz, Temple president in 1958, told the audience. “You think it will never happen to you, just like 9/11 in New York, you get complacent and take things for granted.”
The bombing took place in the early morning hours before the children’s Sunday school classes.
“Youth choir robes were scattered all over the place after the bombing,” Schwartz recalled. “This is a day of remembrance, but I do celebrate the fact that no one was hurt.”
Janice Rothschild Blumberg, widow of Rothschild, remembers the custodian phoning her husband that morning.
“I heard him roar, ‘Oh no!’ and I sat straight up in bed,” she said. “I was in total shock.”
Her children, then 10 and 11, heard their parents discussing the bombing and became frightened. Blumberg sent them out on their bikes to notify nearby families that Sunday School had been canceled.
“He suspected all along he was endangering the congregation and his family to some extent,” Blumberg said. But her husband felt it was his duty to speak out, she said.
Civil rights leaders supported Rothschild. Coretta Scott King said, “Rabbi Rothschild shared in Martin’s dream as a basic tenet of his own religious teaching. He had the courage to proclaim his belief publicly long before it became expedient or even physically safe to do so in a Southern city.”
“The Bombing and Beyond, ” a panel conversation moderated by author Melissa Fay Greene, will be held at 7:30 p.m. Nov. 2 at The Temple as part of the 33rd annual Southern Jewish Historical Society conference on “Jews in a Changing South.”
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