Clergy Witness to White Supremacy’s Violence and Hatred in Charlottesville

Interview with Rabbi Mordechai Liebling, co-founder of T'ruah, the Rabbinic Call for Human Rights, conducted by Melinda Tuhus

Hundreds of counter-protesters came to Charlottesville, Virginia to stand against the Unite the Right march of neo-Nazis, Klu Klux Klan and alt-right supporters on Aug. 12. Among them were about 50 clergy who had been invited to come to the city by local anti-racist organizers. The clergy participated in an interfaith prayer service on Friday night and during a march Saturday morning before a violent confrontation began between white supremacist groups and anti-fascist militants known as antifa.

The violence in Charlottesville resulted in one person being killed, 32-year-old Heather Heyer, a progressive activist, and 19 others injured when a speeding car slammed into a crowd of counter-protesters. The accused driver, James Alex Field of Ohio, has been charged with second-degree murder. Two Virginia state troopers also died when their helicopter monitoring the rally crashed.

Rabbi Mordechai Liebling is a Philadelphia-based rabbi who is a co-founder of T’ruah, the Rabbinic Call for Human Rights, and was among the clergy who traveled to Charlottesville. Between The Lines’ Melinda Tuhus spoke with Liebling, who explains that he’s drawn to social justice activism due to the fact that both his parents are survivors of the Holocaust and he feels it’s his responsibility to stand up against hatred whenever possible. Here, he describes some of the events of the tragic weekend in Charlottesville and his thoughts on the way forward to defeat hatred.

RABBI MORDECHAI LIEBLING: So I was at a multi-faith service on Friday night where we had a standing room-only crowd of 700 people or so. And, when this powerful service was over, we were told that people who were parked on one side of the church couldn’t leave the church because there was a torchlight rally on the side and it wouldn’t be safe for us to leave. So we waited about a half an hour and then figured out a way to get out of the church through a back door and go down an alley. And we came out a couple of blocks away from the crowd, but we could hear the mob chanting and we could see some of the glimmer of the torches. It was quite frightening.

BETWEEN THE LINES: That sounds like what happened during the civil rights movement when Dr. King and his supporters couldn’t leave churches after their rallies.

RABBI MORDECHAI LIEBLING: Exactly what I said when I turned to the person next to me – I said to her, this reminds me of King in Birmingham, when they couldn’t leave the churches at night because of the mobs outside.

BETWEEN THE LINES: So you and your group attended a march on Saturday morning away from the park where the Unite the Right rally was going to be, and then you approached the park. What happened then?

RABBI MORDECHAI LIEBLING: They were chanting, you know, a variety of slogans. I mean one that was particularly, you know, creepy was “Blood and Soil,” which is a classic Nazi chant and you know, they were chanting, “You will not replace us.” Apparently, the night before they were chanting, “Jews will not replace us.” They marched into the park and then they marched out and they came up and they were literally inches away from us and tried to provoke us a little by getting flags in our faces when they walked by. And then I’d say a half hour or so after that, the antifa started, came up marching. The level of anger and hatred was extraordinary. And that went on for, I don’t know, another half hour or more. One group would march past us and another group marched past us at one point and felt we were like caught in between and they started taunting each other and shouting and we realized that there were not enough of us. There were, you know, hundreds of them on each side and about 50 of us that we couldn’t hold that space any longer.

So our leadership gave us the cue to leave. So we, left and I would say within five minutes of our leaving is when the violence broke out between both sides and they started fighting with each other.

BETWEEN THE LINES: Mordecai Leibling, a lot of antifas who are willing to mix it up physically with racists say that others are not willing to do what it takes to really change the game. What do you say about that?

RABBI MORDECHAI LIEBLING: Yeah. As a person who has a long-term commitment to nonviolent direct action and to changing things through nonviolent methods, I don’t think that the kind of rhetoric and behavior by Antifa is going to bring about the change that we want to bring. What we’ve learned, you know, historically is that that kind of unbridled anger doesn’t work to bring about the kind of change that we want. We absolutely have to stand up to the white supremacists and condemn what they do. And we need to come out in massive numbers. Had there been 200 clergy out there instead of 50 clergy out there, I think we probably, we would have had a much greater success at preventing the kind of violence that happened. And had we had 500 clergy out there, we probably could have done what we had intended to do initially, which was to put a ring around the park and to try to stop the alt-right from entering the park.

If we had enough people to physically do that, we could have done that to do nonviolent direct action. So, I think that we need to understand that leadership of the white supremacist movement is ideological and is going to use the current, you know, economic and political crisis to their own ends. But the rank and file are those of their members who are people in a lot of pain, and those are the same people who are the victims of the opioid epidemic. You know, real wages have not gone up in this country in 25 years, we have the worst wealth and income gap probably since the Civil War. And this is symptomatic of that and we need to address the real problems of economic inequality in this country and structural racism. And we do that in the united way by building the broadest possible coalition.

For more information on human rights, visit T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights website at truah.org.

Related Links:

Subscribe to our Weekly Summary