by Elissa Caterfino Mandel

My husband and I only made it to 1963.  The Birmingham Civil Rights Institute was serpentine, chock full of heart-wrenching detail.  Impossible to navigate in the hour we had.  The Confrontation Gallery waylaid us — mostly because of the holograms.  There they were — projections of African Americans from the past, from behind bars, testifying about the slave trade. Every story was compelling, each with its own version of misery. “They held me for hours without food.”  “They took away my children.”   “I was cold and tired.”  Unfortunately, I’m paraphrasing because I don’t remember the exact words.  But I cannot shake the haunted faces – or the idea that this is still happening in other parts of our country.

Starting last Thursday, in honor of Black History Month, a group from our temple flew south. We were there for one reason. And it had nothing – well maybe a little — to do with BBQ. We followed a small part of the route of the Civil Rights trail. After flying to Atlanta, we journeyed to Alabama by bus, 31 temple members in all, plus the rabbi, cantor, tour guide and bus driver.

Our days were full – the Rosa Parks Museum; The Equal Justice Initiative; The National Memorial For Peace and Justice; The Edmund Pettus Bridge; The NAMES Project Foundation; a service at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta.  It was like binge watching atrocity.

This journey was the temple’s first attempt to organize for adults what has traditionally been a youth group trip.  One mom on the trip had a son who’d ridden the bus the previous spring. They were constantly texting stories back and forth.

Our story began when we found our seats on the bus — at 8:30 in the morning – for a day that would end up being 16 hours long.   Boarding that bus, we were blissfully, or maybe stupidly, unaware that once we crossed into Alabama, we’d cross into a different time zone. Soon we’d learn it would also be a different dimension.

It’s not that the Southerners we met weren’t friendly.  At the Kiddush after a Shabbat service in Montgomery, my husband and I were invited to join a few local couples at their weekly dinner at Noodles.  (We couldn’t go but appreciated the invitation.)  At a church service in Atlanta two days later, the preacher announced TSTI by name, and congregants walked through the aisles to shake our hands.  Maybe by virtue of how we’d agreed to spend the weekend, we were like honored guests.  But guests can leave and go back to their lives

Of course, I knew many of these civil rights stories before.  I’d listened to lectures on them, read books, watched movies.  But for me, there is something different about having an experience seared into your memory through your hands, as activist Joanne Robinson suggested when we were in Selma. (She demanded that we pick up rocks from a schoolyard where activists once gathered. She wanted us to know how it felt to touch the same ground as people who had done such important work. )

It’s meaningful also to feel something in your feet, as when we walked across The Edmund Pettus Bridge, the site of Bloody Sunday. (We briefly retraced the route of freedom marchers attempting to get to Montgomery, only we walked in relative comfort. Granted it was only about 40 degrees, but we did not have to contend with tear gas, rampaging horses or police-wielded clubs.)

It’s earthshaking to hear your voice singing hymns with an 85-year-old bishop recounting his stories in a Birmingham park.   “Praise Jesus,” he sang as he raised his hands over his head, prompting us to do the same.  The story that moved me, the one I hope I don’t forget, is about the time in 1968 when he drove Dr. King to the airport for a flight to Memphis. It was the last time he saw Dr. King alive.

I had been excited about visiting Alabama, to add it to the list of states I’d visited.  Walking on the grounds of The National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, I was impressed by the depths of my ignorance.  The Memorial contains tombstones of the lynched, 4400 people in all. And those were just the names that made it into the records.  Some of these monuments are on the ground, others suspended.  They’re made of corton steel, forbidding in their number, which, I learned later, is 800. Each monument represents a different county where a lynching occurred.

Until I read the inscribed names, I didn’t realize how many people had been lynched; I had no idea that lynching had occurred on a daily basis for so long.  Somehow I knew the names of Emmett Till and Leo Frank but not the thousands of others.  Reading the inscriptions, the group tallied as many as 50 people gone in a single county in a single day.  There were men, women, and children murdered for contrived infractions like smiling at the wrong person.

In one section, the slabs hung down from the ceiling, like bodies hanging from a tree.  I walked with my head lifted to make sure I could see the names. People with their eyes on the sky can easily collide with the steel.  Maybe that’s the point — to collide with the steel, to physically feel the pain.

Each slab has a double, aligned in rows on the ground so as to reinforce the tragedy’s magnitude. The hope is one day the offending counties will reclaim, and exhibit, their slabs, thereby owning their legacies.  The Memorial’s almost a year old.  So far all the slabs remain.

When I returned home, people asked, ‘how was your vacation’? Hmm. I feel grateful for the experience because of the members of the temple I now know a little better, including Rabbi Cohen and Cantor Moses. But I wouldn’t use the word vacation to describe the weekend.  It was, in fact, a reverse respite – a tough time, mitigated by the awareness that I knew I would go home after three days.

I’d like to think I would follow the example of other temple members I met on the trip.  One volunteers for CASA.  Another woman has journeyed to the Texas-Mexico border to work with seekers of asylum.  And those are the only the ones I know about.

Now I am left with questions.   Most notably, how do I make sure this isn’t something that is just another memory? I don’t want it to return a year from now, brought back to me only on Facebook.  (Out of habit, I did post photos.)  But it’s not about “being seen” as a humanitarian.  It’s about being one.  I don’t have to go as far as I did last weekend to do something meaningful. There are umpteen people a few short miles from South Orange, maybe even in South Orange, who might need assistance. Would all they want from me were my “Kilroy was here” pictures?

Maybe the best way to have the experience last is to do what Rabbi Cohen and Cantor Moses suggested: to make a concerted effort to listen better. It’s not just listening, though. It’s seeing, also. Seeing differently. Taking opportunities to view the world through the lens of “the other”.  Both the rabbi and cantor advised caution.  Don’t just jump in, assuming you know better, they said.  Someone this weekend quoted something in passing that I know I’d heard before.  But this time it resonated. “God gave us two ears and one mouth, so we ought to listen twice as much as we speak.”

The journey we took was sponsored by an organization called Etgar36. For more information, go to www.etgar.org or call 404-456-6605.