(Jewish Group) Rabbis Torn About Women's March, Despite Secret Meeting With Sarsour, Mallory
(THIS IS THE JEWISH GROUP! RESPECT!!)
Last week, 13 prominent rabbis held a secret meeting — with Tamika Mallory and Linda Sarsour, leaders of the Women’s March.
The reason: to try to decide whether the rabbis and their congregations should attend the third annual march, scheduled for this coming Saturday. And if they should attend — which one?
There will be two Women’s Marches in New York, a reflection of the schism in the broader movement. Much of the split is about Mallory’s ties to the anti-Semitic Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. For a long time, many Jewish women felt ignored by the march leadership, and the leaders thought that Jewish women didn’t understand their perspective. Hence, the meeting.
“There’s been a prioritization of understanding the pain that the Jewish community has been in,” said one leader who attended, Rabbi Felicia Sol of B’nai Jeshurun, an independent synagogue in New York that hosted a citywide Jewish prayer service before the 2017 march.
The gathering, say those in attendance, was productive, but painful, and still inconclusive. It generated a letter of support for the march, signed by 9 of the 13 rabbis in attendance. And as of Tuesday night, lots of the rabbis still didn’t know what they would be doing come Saturday. They are grappling with the same choice as many other Jews across the country: to attend a march that espouses principles most of the liberal community agrees with, or to stay home in protest of the anti-Semitism allegations and lose the opportunity to build alliances with other minority groups in attendance.
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