By Grace Gilson
JACKSON, Miss. — The emotion was palpable in the pews Friday night, Jan. 16, at Beth Israel Congregation’s first Shabbat service since its synagogue was targeted by an arsonist last week.
“We will not only survive, we will thrive,” the congregation’s student rabbi and spiritual leader, Benjamin Russell, told his community. He was draped in the only surviving tallit from the synagogue’s library, where the arsonist lit the fire.
“A few days ago, someone tried to wound us, someone tried to destroy what we love, someone tried to tell us that we do not belong in our own city, that being visibly Jewish is dangerous, that being proudly Jewish is a risk, that being a synagogue is an invitation for hatred,” Russell said.
“What they failed to understand is that we are not made of wood and paper and shelves. We are made of Torah, memory, community, stubborn love and 3,000 years of defiance.”
Roughly 170 Beth Israel congregants filled Northminster Baptist Church in Jackson on Friday night, after the church lent its space to the displaced community.
Founded in 1860, Beth Israel is the only synagogue in Mississippi’s capital.
The arson attack last week, which burnt out the synagogue’s library and destroyed two of its Torahs, was not the first time that Beth Israel’s congregants were faced with the task of rebuilding. In 1967, the Ku Klux Klan bombed the synagogue and, months later, targeted the home of Rabbi Perry Nussbaum after he advocated for civil rights and desegregation.
Reflecting on the congregation’s 160-year-old roots in Jackson, Russell said, “We have prayed through wars, depressions, pandemics, demographic shifts and anti-Semitism in every decade; and every single time we did more than survive, we adapted, we rebuilt, we showed up, and that is exactly what we are doing and will continue to do now.”
Throughout the service, little mention was made of the suspect who confessed to the arson, Stephen Spencer Pittman, a 19-year-old resident of a suburb of Jackson who told the FBI that he had targeted Beth Israel because it was a “synagogue of Satan.”
Standing outside of the charred entrance to the synagogue earlier in the day, Abram Orlansky, a lifelong Jackson resident and past president of Beth Israel, said that most of the conversations within the congregation has not revolved around Pittman.
“All he’s done is reaffirm the connection between this Jewish community and this city.”
On Jan. 15, a host of Christian faith leaders and Jackson city officials said a prayer for the congregation during a citywide prayer service. Zach Shemper, president of Beth Israel, said more than 10 churches had offered to host the synagogue for Shabbat.
“All this atrocity did was relocate where we’re having services,” he said.
Support also came from Jewish congregations across the South.
Temple B’Nai Israel, a Reform synagogue in Hattiesburg, Miss., lent the community a Torah and 50 prayer books. A synagogue in Memphis, Tenn., sent another 100 prayer books.
The oneg after services was provided by Touro Synagogue in New Orleans, and included a pecan praline challah king cake, a Jewish twist on the traditional Mardi Gras dessert.
The challah king cake loomed large over the evening. When Shemper announced the pastry at the end of the service, several children cheered and congregants applauded.
On Friday morning, Orlansky showed a photo of the cake on his phone and said, “That’s Jewish southern culture,” adding that there is a store in New Orleans called “Kosher Cajun.”
In Jackson, a city with no Jewish establishments or cultural centers, Beth Israel has been the central hub of Jewish communal life.
About a 45-minute drive from the synagogue is Jacobs Camp, a Jewish summer camp run by the Union of Reform Judaism.
Sarah Thomas, the synagogue’s first vice president, read an address by Rabbi Rick Jacobs, URJ president, during the service.
In the absence of Jewish infrastructure in Jackson, Russell said the congregants “make every space that we are in Jewish by our own presence there.
“Something that we see across the South’s Jewish communities is that there is a level of pride, because you may be the only Jewish person in your high school.
In high school, past president Abram Orlansky recalled, there were two other Jewish students in his grade. Today, he said his two children are the “only Jewish kids in their class, or either class on either side of them.” That makes Beth Israel a haven, he said.
“A shared experience I have with my kids is being able to come to this building and not be the sort of constant representative of the Jewish people to everyone you know,” said Orlansky.
“It is an honor to live in a place like this where people ask you about your religion, and people kind of look to you for answers about Judaism, but it can be a challenge, and so having a home where everyone around you is also Jewish is a respite.
Vice-president Sarah Thomas, who is also a lifelong Beth Israel congregant, said growing up she was also the only Jewish student in her grade, but when she came to Beth Israel on Wednesdays and Sundays she found a “safe space.”
“We talked about things that were happening outside of here, and how we were going to respond with our Jewishness to a world, or a community, that was different,” she said.
Thomas said the Beth Israel building was an “epicenter of life” for the community’s 140 families.
“What I want people to know about the Southern Jewish communities, especially the smaller ones, or the only ones within a 90-mile radius, is everything related to Jewish life happens here,” said Thomas.
Shari Rabin, an associate professor of Jewish studies and religion at Oberlin College and the author of the 2025 book, The Jewish South: An American History, says: “Synagogues are such important institutions in these smaller Southern communities,” said Rabin. “It’s really important for Jewish communities there to have a public address to show we’re here, we’re part of the landscape, other Jews can find us here.”
But Rabin said that public visibility also has a potential dark side.
“It can also make these institutions a target for those who are poisoned by various ideologies and decide that they want to make Jews a target.”
Following the attack on Jan. 10, most of the synagogue’s leaders said they had initially assumed the fire had been caused by an electrical malfunction or another accident.
While anti-Semitism has risen across the country, in many Southern states, including Mississippi, the trend has felt less pervasive. From 2022 to 2024, the number of anti-Semitic incidents in the state rose from seven to 20, according to the ADL’s annual anti-Semitism audit.
“To know that someone could do this in your own community is frightening, but it’s also eye-opening,” said Russell.
“We always say, not me, not me, not me, not us, not our community, and I think what I have learned, and my message for everyone, is that you never know.”
The day after the arson attack, Rachel Myers, the second vice president and co-director of the religious school at Beth Israel, hosted the synagogue’s Sunday school at the Mississippi Children’s Museum, where she works as director of exhibits.
There, Myers showed the class of 14 children a slideshow of the damage inside the synagogue and helped them brainstorm ways to rebuild it.
She said one child imagined a cotton candy machine while another said, “Let’s do a mural of all the rabbis on the wall.”
For the teens in the synagogue, Myers said the main question that was asked was “why.”
While Myers said she hadn’t yet planned her lesson for the teens, she said she would lead with explaining that “when people are bad and angry, they look for somebody to blame, and in this case, this young person decided to blame Jewish people.”
After being a part of the congregation for almost 20 years, Myers said she had never before experienced anti-Semitism in Jackson.
“I think I know that there’s a rise of anti-Semitism, and I think I know that there’s a rise of mis- and disinformation on the internet,” said Myers.
“I know there’s crazies on the internet, I don’t read the comments, but the fact that someone, that crazy, left the internet and came and did a physical act of harm to us — it is surprising.”
Student rabbi Russell said that he was concerned for the teens of Jackson.
“I think the biggest thing is we have to watch our kids and our teens, the fact that they’re being radicalized so quickly online by social media and other things on the internet,” said Russell. “Of course, we have to monitor, but the real antidote is just to stop breathe and love each other, even when we disagree.”
As the congregation mingled over the challah king cake following the service, Joshua Wiener, a Beth Israel member since 1981, said he believed that Russell and Shemper had represented the community well.
“As [Russell] said, anti-Semitism has been around since even before Pharaoh, but it hasn’t touched us here, and so I think there’s just shock at what happened, maybe a little relief that it wasn’t worse, and maybe some relief that it was not an organized effort,” Wiener said.
He said Jackson’s Jewish population has always had an “outsize presence and influence, and a lot of that is just because of how welcomed we have been in the community.” At the end of his sermon, Russell offered an instruction to the worshippers, several of whom were visibly emotional.
“This is the time to say, out loud, I am Jewish, I am proud, this is my community, and I belong here. We are not going anywhere, because the opposite of fear is not bravery, it is presence.
“Every time we gather, every time we pray, every time we teach a child to read aleph bet, every time we put on a tallis, every time we celebrate a Bat Mitzvah or mourn with the family, we are safe. We belong, we matter, we will outlive every Pharaoh history produces.”
