Candles and music were part of the interfaith vigil
CARMEL – Christians and Jews from throughout Putnam County gathered on the steps of the historic Putnam Courthouse Monday evening for a candlelight vigil to honor those brutally murdered in the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh as well as deploring hate graffiti in Nelsonville and the rise of anti-Semitic violence and hate crimes in addition to the increasing negativity against immigrants and people of color across the U.S.
The gathering was sponsored by a group known as Putnam Progressives.
As prayers were recited including the Hebrew blessing recited for the dead known as the Kaddish, Baila Lemonik of Mahopac noted that the vigil was being held to remember more than the 11 innocent individuals murdered in Pittsburgh but those “slain in a church in South Carolina; the two innocent people killed in Kentucky because they were black; those on the S.S. St. Louis where in 1939 Jews were returned to Europe where many were murdered by the Nazis.”
Lemonik said the vigil also recalled the lives of the “little black girls who in 1963 were killed by a white supremacist bomb in addition to the senseless racist lynchings and the murder of innocent Muslims and other people of color, be it by bullet, bombs or bullying.”
Lemonik feared that America was headed down a path of strife. “Two hundred years ago, Baron Von Rothschild was demonized by anti-Semites for being rich and philanthropic. Jews with wealth and moral character in Nazi Germany were both demonized in the same way as George Soros, a social justice philanthropist, was demonized by anti-Semites and anti-immigrants in our country. If this is not reminiscent of Nazi Germany, then what is?”
Some three dozen people gathered for the hour-long vigil with the only Putnam official in attendance, Sheriff Robert Langley, along with the Rev. Martha Vink of the Drew United Methodist Church.
