Published: 23 June 2020
Last updated: 4 March 2024
ABOUT 15 YEARS AGO, a large synagogue in Northern California installed a set of windows in the religious school engraved with the names of some 175 prominent Jews, from biblical figures to famous actors.
One of them, sandwiched between Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky and former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, was Judah Benjamin, the most prominent Jewish official in the Confederacy. Benjamin, who enslaved 140 people on a Louisiana sugar plantation, served variously as the Confederate attorney general, secretary of war and secretary of state.
The inclusion of Benjamin’s name on the wall didn’t arouse much protest until 2013, about eight years after the installation at Peninsula Temple Sholom, a Reform congregation in Burlingame. That was when a congregant named Howard Wettan listened to a podcast about the Civil War as his daughter attended Hebrew school in the building.
“I connected the dots,” Wettan said. “I saw the name once more and said there’s something really wrong with that.”
FULL STORY A California synagogue memorialised Judah Benjamin, the Confederacy’s most prominent Jew. Here’s how that changed (JTA)
READ MORE
St Louis residents call to change name of town due to anti-Semitic history (Jerusalem Post)
King Louis IX, the first French king canonised by the Catholic Church, burned over 12,000 manuscript copies of the Talmud
