People of different beliefs need to reach out to each other with kindness, even after devastating events such as the Oct. 27 shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue, a Bloomington rabbi said Friday.
“It will bring people together, and it won’t give space for the hatred,” Rabbi Yaakov Hoffman said.
Hoffman was one of many who came together Friday evening for a Union Board event in the Indiana Memorial Union to discuss the synagogue shooting that left 11 people dead.
Although this is the third Tree of Life shooting-related event in Bloomington this week, this one was different. Friday evening is the start of Shabbat, or day of prayer, in Judaism. Hoffman lead an optional portion of a Shabbat service as part of the event.
Hoffman and members of Jewish groups IU Hillel and Aish Bloomington sang Kabbalat Shabbat, the opening prayer for a Shabbat service. Ushers handed out text for the prayers written in Hebrew and phonetically spelled in English for audience members to sing along.
Fliers for the event had the words “Hate Has No Home Here” written in multiple languages including Hebrew, Spanish, German and Hindi. Patricia Cornejo, a Union Board co-director of lectures, opened the event by reading the names of those who died at Tree of Life.
“They were doctors, dentists, real estate agents, researchers, but more importantly they were human beings,” Cornejo said.
Günther Jikeli, an associate professor who specializes in anti-Semitism studies, lead the discussion. He spoke about the recent rise of anti-Semitism, citing white supremacy, Islamic extremism and anti-Israel leftism as sources.
He said anti-Semitism doesn’t just take the form of Jewish oppression but also as conspiracy theories that Jewish people have too much power in society.
While violence against Jewish people in Europe is typically committed by Islamic extremist groups, Jikeli said anti-Semitic violence in America is perpetrated by individual white supremacists.
One audience member asked Jikeli how to confront Holocaust deniers, saying she found out one of her co-workers didn’t believe the Holocaust had occurred.
Jikeli said it was important to make resources about the Holocaust widely available and to not devalue the word “holocaust” – which at its base level means large-scale destruction, usually specifically caused by fire or nuclear war – for smaller violent occurrences, like killing livestock.
The other Union Board lectures co-director Olivia Owens said discrimination against Jewish people must be publicly exposed in order to be quashed.
“Any solution, any path to healing, starts with dragging the ugliness and the evil out into the broad daylight,” Owens said. “It’s starts with awareness.”
Despite the ugliness, Hoffman said that Shabbat is still a time of joy for the Jewish people. Jewish people are even supposed to stop publicly mourning during Shabbat.
“On Shabbat, you’re supposed to get up and show even a little bit of joy,” Hoffman said.
