With the forces of anti-Semitism and hatred rising, it’s important to remember that hate wears many disguises. Our vigilance must be not just against anti-Jewish sentiment but also against bigotry in all its forms. In that spirit of solidarity, our Jewish Federation has come together with our own Jewish Community Relations Council, the Anti-Defamation League, the Kaiserman Jewish Community Center and the American Jewish Committee to offer a Civil Rights Mission on January 11-14, 2020. It will be an extraordinary journey through the struggle for Americans of color to be treated as equal citizens, a struggle both historic and ongoing.
Over the course of three days we’ll visit three pivotal Southern cities — Atlanta, Montgomery and Selma — to learn about events that helped shape our nation. We’ll experience a Sunday service at Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was baptized, raised, ordained and mourned. We’ll meet a participant in the 1965 “Bloody Sunday” voting rights march on Edmund Pettus Bridge, then together walk across that very same bridge. We’ll hear the story of Leo Frank, a Jew lynched by a white mob in 1915 — the only known case of a Jewish lynching in America.
Finally, we’ll visit the new National Memorial for Peace & Justice, the first national memorial for victims of lynching. Honoring more than 4,400 murdered African-American men, women and children, it is a breathtaking, challenging and thought-provoking work of art that was inspired, in part, by Holocaust memorials in Germany.
Please join us for this important and unforgettable journey. For more information about the Civil Rights Mission and to register, click here or contact Missy Stein, Director of Missions & Travel at mstein@jewishphilly.org or 215.832.0629.