Worship spaces once celebrated — not just tolerated — are now being attacked.
Austin Albanese is a writer based in Rochester, New York.
In October 1882, the Jewish community of Charlottesville, Virginia, laid the cornerstone for the city’s first synagogue, Congregation Beth Israel. It was not a private event. The Freemasons presided, joined by “a multitude of citizens,” as one newspaper put it. Civic leader Richard T.W. Duke Jr. praised Judaism’s moral teachings and called Jews “well worthy of emulation by their Christian brethren.”
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