When Andrew Klein saw swastikas and the word “Nazi” defacing his temple earlier this year, the 12-year-old was truly disgusted.
“It was a nasty thing to do,” said Andrew of the hateful messages scrawled on a wall, window and sign at Temple Beth Jacob in Redwood City in February and again in April. “I don’t know why anyone would want to do something like that. It was really wrong.”
But tonight as he and his family, and families of other Beth Jacob congregants gather for Erev Rosh Hashanah services and throughout the High Holy Days, all will essentially be forgiven.
“When people walk in tonight they’re going to have only a good impression of the temple,” said the preteen, who will celebrate his bar mitzvah next month. “They won’t even know that there was graffiti there because it looks so no nice.”
That’s because not so long ago he and a large group of congregants gathered for the temple’s yearly Mitzvah Day, participating in events to benefit Beth Jacob, the Jewish community and the community at large.
They planted flowers out front, cleaned the preschoolers’ playground equipment and spruced up the youth lounge with a fresh coat of paint. They also wrote letters of support to Israeli soldiers, collecting books for the Jewish Coalition for Literacy and canned food for the Second Harvest Food Bank.
This year, in addition to doing mitzvot, the annual project day, held on Aug. 25, had further significance for many Beth Jacob congregants.
Straddled amid the hurt and pain of the graffiti attacks and the lessons of forgiveness and newness of the High Holy Days, “the day was also very healing for us. It helped us to spiritually and intellectually focus on forgiveness,” explained congregant Stephanie Rosekind.
“You can make something good out of whatever comes into your life,” she added. “Certainly beautifying our synagogue as we head towards the new year is a way of growing and looking forward and focusing on what is good.”
For her project, Rosekind planted a mass of blue, yellow, white and pink flowers along with several other volunteers near the entrance of the synagogue from the parking lot to the building. As she and the others planted, her son Barry, 12, and Andrew contributed to the “sweet, cooperative effort” by carting big buckets filled with water back and forth between the flowers and the water supply.
“We can’t deny the terrorism and ugly anti-Semitism in our world,” said Rosekind, “but we can go on with beauty in our own lives.”
Andrew’s mother Linda Klein, also planted flowers and said it was “a good feeling” to plant them so close to where the vandalism took place. She said Beth Jacob has been like a second home to her family, including her husband and three sons.
“We want it to look inviting and nice. This was a way to sort of nurture our temple and take care of it.”
Upon completing their projects the temple treated volunteers to lunch and Fred Luskin, director of the Stanford Forgiveness Project, addressed the crowd on the benefits of forgiveness.
“His whole theme was the need to shift the story from what happened to us that was hurtful and painful to what to do to make life more rich,” said Emily Scheinman, a member of the temple’s social action committee. “Just like we took time out of our busy schedules to be together and show kindness to each other and commit to making our shul a better place.”
Beth Jacob first became the target of vandals in early February when graffiti, including a swastika (drawn backward) and the words “Nazi ya!” was discovered dirtying a window of the social hall and a wall outside the chapel.
These markings, drawn in red ink, were preserved by the temple’s rabbi, Nathaniel Ezray, for a few days afterward in order to help congregants process a response and “return to a sense of calm.”
Then on April 8, a swastika the size of a fist was found scrawled in black on the synagogue’s parking sign just hours before a Holocaust memorial service.
Although a $5,000 reward was offered by the Anti-Defamation League and the Redwood City Police Department, the perpetrator was never caught.
But those incidents weren’t the first to plague Beth Jacob. The temple was almost entirely destroyed by arsonists in 1979 — a case that, to this day, remains unsolved.
In the mid-1980s the building was twice defaced by anti-Semitic graffiti — once by an Aryan resistance group and then by a disgruntled employee.
Mary Lipp, who volunteered to clean up the preschool playground along with daughter Sophia and husband Josh, said none of the hateful incidents has ever set the temple back.
“Nobody loses hope or faith,” said Lipp, who is six months pregnant with her second child, a son due in December. Because of her pregnancy, Lipp was unable to do any of the cutting and heavy hauling of the overgrown bushes and trees, so she just stuck to washing playground equipment with 3-year old Sophia. Sophia also made a card for an Israeli soldier.
While what happened here really upset her, she wants “to forget about that” — and forgive, said Lipp.
Everyone, she added, should keep “getting together and making things stronger and better.”