>> This July 17,
2023 and we're at the KSU Archives.
The interview today is with Rabbi Stephen Lebow.
And why don't we just begin with your background.
My understanding is that you were born March 18,
1955 in Fort Lauderdale.
>> That's correct.
>> And could you just talk a little
bit about your background,
growing up in Florida, I'm sure.
Influences, mentors, temples, synagogues, those things?
>> Absolutely. So I was born in 1955 in Florida.
There's not a single rabbi in my family.
Sometimes you'll see children or
grandchildren of rabbis become rabbis.
I don't have that on my background.
But my father was a very
successful businessman in Fort Lauderdale.
He owned the first Toyota dealership in South Florida.
And because of his acumen of
being such a wonderful businessman,
he got elected to be the president of the synagogue.
And he did such a good job apparently,
they made him the president of
all the synagogues in the Southern United States.
So that was the family I grew up.
I wouldn't say that they were orthodox.
They didn't keep every law,
they didn't keep all the laws of
Kosher or the laws of the sabbath.
But I would say my family was what I would
call religious reformed Jews.
They lit candles every Friday night.
They lit their candles on Hanukkah.
They always had a pass over Sater.
All of the major Jewish holy days were kept by my family.
So I'm the baby of four children.
And my father was the president to the synagogue when
I must have been about six or seven years old.
And I would go every Friday night.
They would dress up little Stevie Libo
in his bow tie and pants and whatnot.
And my parents would take me
and I think that what happened, as I recall,
was I'm there in the row and I look up and there's
a guy on the stage and the guy tells a story.
And then at the end of telling the story,
then the guy sings a song.
Then everything's over and we go
in the next room to eat some cookies.
So in my febrile mind and my juvenile thoughts,
I thought to myself, well,
I could tell a story.
I could sing a song. I could
sure as heck eat some cookies.
So maybe that should be my life and career.
So the story it's a true story.
I remember, actually, some of it as if it were yesterday.
One Sunday morning, my parents are lying in
bed reading the Miami Herald newspaper.
And I pad in. I must have been about seven at that point.
And I said to my mom and dad, I said,
how do you spell ambition.
They told me. I pat it out.
Come back a few minutes later, I said,
how do you spell congregation
and they told me and I left.
Now, I'm not in the room at this point,
but I presume my father looks at my mother.
My mother looks at my father,
and they say something like what is he up to?
So they, in fact, now come into my room and with a cran,
I am writing to the Hebrew Union College
that I would like to be a rabbi.
I was seven years old.
I don't have the letter that I sent them,
but I do in fact, have the letter that they sent me.
And the letter is pretty amusing.
It says, you're the youngest person
to ever apply to be a rabbi,
and by the way, first you have to go to college.
Then there's graduate school for
five or six years after college.
And I remember the punchline was,
we're sending you a course catalog,
your parents will explain what a course catalog is.
So hence the '60s and the '70s ensued,
and by the time we were in the '70s,
it was time for everybody to be rebellious
and throw off the chains in the Yoko organized religion.
So it really didn't
travel with me through my teens, really.
But I entered Kenyon College,
which is a very small school in Gambier, Ohio.
It's very similar to Oberlin or Antioch.
>> It's a pretty elite school.
>> It's an elite school. It really is.
And there were only 1,200 people in the entire college.
I had more people in my high school than in my college.
And I was curious
and I wanted to learn more
about what it meant to be Jewish.
And I see on there's a handout it says there's
Jewish services on the day of freshman orientation.
So it's held in a little Episcopal Church.
>> I was going to say, this is an Episcopal school.
>> That's right. Well they had the Church Holy Spirit,
which they loaned to the Jewish students
and the chaplain for every Friday night.
So I'm sorry, go ahead.
>> Wow.
>> Absolutely. So I went in and I don't know,
the service was very short and afterwards,
everybody piles out of the church.
And I was standing by myself.
I didn't know anybody. As I said,
it was first day of freshman year.
And this young gentleman sidles over and he says,
do you know doctor Kullmann?
And I said, no, I just got here.
He says, you need to meet doctor Kullmann.
So he takes me over and this guy is bent over,
known like, looks like a character out of the Hobbit.
But they introduced me to him and he's very pleasant.
And I tell him I want to learn more about being
Jewish and I begin to take classes with him.
It is impossible for me to describe
the influence that he had on me,
as well as dozens and dozens of people.
The man spoke or read 20 languages.
He had the entire Bible,
new and old Testament,
Plato and Homer, everything memorized. He was a prodigy.
And to sit in his classroom was a wonder.
He would start talking about William Blake.
Then we'd go to Emily Dickinson.
Then we go to the Bhagavad Gita of the Indian scriptures.
Then it would be something that would be in the Bible,
and then he'd end with some conversation he once
had with Jack Kerouac the Batnick author.
It was like watching performance art.
You just sat there and sometimes you didn't take notes.
You just sat there and watched it.
And that brought me back to wanting to be
a Jewish scholar and in turn that
reconnected me back to that little seven year old boy,
and I decided then now at the age of about 18,
that I was going to go ahead and do it.
And that's when I began my studies, my rabbitic studies.
>> Doctor Kullmann, how do you spell it?
>> It's Kullmann. K-U-L-L-M-A-N-N. In fact,
if you like, I just wrote a memoir about him.
I knew that he had that influence on me.
And I wondered, well,
did he have that influence on other people because
he was there '68-2002.
Well, through the magic of the Internet
and Linkedin and Google and Facebook.
I found 39 other men and
women that he had changed their lives.
And so I collected from them.
Everybody wrote a memoir of their time at
Kenyon seen through the lens
of having worked with Dr. Kullmann,
and I published it recently,
just for us in our class and that thing.
>> Wow. What's his first name?
>> His name was Eugen, E-U-G-E-N.
It's German for Eugene.
Eugen, E-U-G-E-N Kullmann.
>> And so can we find a copy of the memoir?
>> I'll be happy to get it for you if you want.
>> Wonderful.
>> Sure. Happy to.
>> What's your first name of your father?
>> My father's first name is Irving,
but everybody called him Doc. That was his nickname.
>> Doc.
>> Doc. And because he would sell cars
and somebody would come out of
the car lot and my father would say,
this car here, you don't want
this car because it's not a healthy car.
He would say, you want this car.
This is a healthy car.
And the customers would
leave and the salesman would tease him and say,
what do you mean it's a healthy car?
What are you a doctor, the doctor of automology?
So that became his nickname.
In fact, there there's a building at the Synagogue
where I work over here in Cobb County,
and the name of the building is
the Doc Libo Center was named in memory of him.
>> Now, you used the term synagogue, temple,
we think of with reform Judaism,
but there are synagogues, I guess.
>> Yes. In fact,
there's three words that you can use for
basically what a Jewish house of worship is.
One is temple, one is synagogue, and one is schul.
And although they denoted as you said,
originally maybe Orthodox and reform,
they're now interchangeable at this point in 2023.
Anybody would pretty much
understand what you were saying.
>> So when you call it a synagogue, it's still reform?
>> That is correct. It's a Greek root,
whereas temple is a Latin root and
shul which means school is obviously a German root.
>> You talked about being rebellious.
So were you out protesting warzone?
>> I was lucky enough.
I was in high school when the war was raging.
>> '70s you'd been 18 about the time that it ended.
>> And and I knew I was going to be in that draft.
In fact, my thought
was I wasn't going to register at all,
which makes you a draft dodger.
And my sister who's a very famous and
accomplished judge lawyer came to me and said,
Steve, you can say you're not going to fight.
You can say that you're going to
be a conscientious objector,
but you cannot avoid registering for the draft.
So she convinced me that was the better choice.
So obviously, I was against the war and
marched in some small marches and that thing.
I guess my social consciousness was raised
in about '71, '72.
I was part of a group that followed Cesar Chavez,
the head of the United Farm Workers.
And I marched with Cesar Chavez.
>> Really?
>> I did. And one of the things that I organized,
I belonged actually to
a Jewish youth movement called NIFTI,
National Federation Temple Youth,
and I organized for them
a boycott of grapes and lettuce because that was
our way of trying to convince the American public
that the companies needed
to negotiate with the farm workers.
>> Now, when you marched,
was this in Florida or in California?
>> It was in Florida, actually. He had come to Florida.
>> So to work with the migrant laborers?
>> Yes. I believe if I remember correctly,
it was a sugar factory.
And in fact, a young woman was killed,
not during my march,
but she'd been killed,
I think the week before,
a woman by the name of Nan Freeman.
She was a student at the New College in
Florida and she was killed during the march.
And I'm pretty sure if my parents had known that,
they never would have let me go.
But that was my getting my toe in the water in terms
of social justice was being with Cesar Chavez.
>> And you say you had a conversion around '71 or '72,
but it sounds like your family is pretty liberal?
>> Yes. I think liberal in a sense
that my parents were the founders of
the Ecumenical Movement in
Broward County in South Florida.
They brought together should pardon the cliche,
the rabbis, the priests, and the ministers.
This was not uncommon at
my dinner table to have
someone who was an Episcopal priest or
Presbyterian preacher because my parents
were that bridge between the
Jewish and the Christian community.
And so that was really where their liberalism was evoked,
was working with other churches and
other religious institutions to bring people
together during what was actually a tumultuous time.
>> So well, I guess really one of
the questions I meant to ask and
you've partly answered it already,
but I was just wondering when you were
writing that letter as a seven-year-old,
how much you knew about
Rabbi Isaac Wise and the movement in Cincinnati,
and all of that at that time?
>> So that's a very good question.
I did not know who Isaac Mayer Wise
was because once again,
I was only about seven years old.
I think I lied in the letter.
I think I told you I was eight.
Because eight seemed older than seven.
>> Lied eight for the, okay.
>> Yeah. I think I was on the cusp of so many.
>> I'm sure they'd have been impressed
that you're one year older.
>> That's right. That's what I thought.
But no, I didn't know who Isaac Mayer Wise was.
What I knew was that
the main seminary and up until recently,
to train American reformed rabbis
is in the Midwest, it's in Cincinnati.
It sounds random, but it's not because
the early reformed Jews were all German speakers,
and Cincinnati had a very large ethnic German population.
So that's where it started.
>> I remember going by that Plum Street Temple.
>> That's right.
>> When I was at a convention up in
Cincinnati years and years ago
and I guess it was a society for
church history that if
you got there a day earlier they do
a tour of religious structure,
historic structure in that town?
>> I was ordained in that Plum Street Temple.
>> It's beautiful.
>> In fact, I'll tell you another story
is so as I told you,
I got that letter.
I guess I must have gotten a letter,
as I said, when I was,
I think by that time I was eight years old.
When I marched across the stage in
1983 to receive my rabbinical diploma,
the woman that had written me
the letter from the registrar was
the woman who handed me
my rabbinic degree, 20 years later.
>> Great story.
>> It's true. Miriam Weiss was her name.
>> Did you remind her?
>> She knew. She remembered, yeah.
I mean, how many eight-year-olds
send a letter in saying,
I want to apply to graduate school.
>> Well, I guess we could have done
more with your family background,
but I think you've hit the highway.
I did want to ask you,
you're talking about the ecumenical activities,
how did you feel that you were treated growing up
as being Jewish and being in the South?
Not that Fort Aerdales necessarily the same,
but were you treated
just like everybody else or were there ever
any incidents that made
you reminded that you were Jewish?
>> Sure. I wasn't treated badly in the best of my memory.
I was often the only Jewish kid in my class,
and in a few occasions,
I was the only Jewish kid in the school.
Various, different times of life and that sort of thing.
But I don't remember any terrible
antisemitism at that point.
What you had is that you'd be singled out in
the class because the teacher was
trying to create a bridge,
and so while children had
a coloring exercise and
they would be coloring in a Christmas tree,
they would give me a picture of
Hanukkah Menorah to color.
It was good. I wasn't self-conscious at all,
I was very proud of who I was.
But no, I didn't feel tremendous antisemitism.
It's interesting, I just
mentioned this the other day to somebody.
The only prejudice I remember is not against Jews,
it's against African Americans.
And I remember, we took a road trip,
my parents and I.
And I must have been fairly young, younger than seven.
The reason I know that is that
we stopped in North Florida,
we got out for me to go use
the restroom and I go to use the restroom,
my mother grabs me like that and pulls me back.
I didn't realize it said for colored only.
I didn't know that as a little kid.
I had never seen Jim Pro laws before where I grew up.
Now, I will yes the question about anti-Semitism.
I didn't see it,
but I heard from
my parents and people in my parents' generation
that it would say that it was restricted
or you'd see a sign that said no Jews allowed.
Yes, that's Florida.
>> In Florida?
>> In Florida, yes. There were always
Jews in Miami Beach.
That stereotype, but it's true.
There were Jews in Miami Beach,
but there were places in Fort Lauderdale and in
Miami that were restricted to Gentiles.
>> What kind of places?
>> Hotels?
>> Oh, really? Yeah. Hotels in
some cases, just housing regulations.
If they figured out get out of my house.
In fact, that's why my parents changed our last name.
Any Libo that you would meet obviously
was a Lebowitz or a [inaudible] , or something like that.
>> What was the name before?
>> Lebowitz, L-E-B-O-W-I-T-Z.
And because of prejudice that they encountered,
which must have been going on in the certainly
the '30s and '40s by the '50s,
when I was born, my father had
shortened the name to Libo.
>> Well, I'm about 12 years older than you are,
but I know all the way through school,
we had Lord's Prayer and Bible readings classes,
do you still have that when you were growing?
>> We did. It's funny you asked that. I remember that.
But I remember the teacher being very sensitive.
I don't think they were
any readings from the New Testament.
Maybe they did the Lord's Prayer,
but what I remember was the 23rd Psalm,
which is ecumenical shared by Jews and Christians alike.
So I didn't feel really put on the spot in any way.
>> Good. So you go to
college and I had some questions about that.
By the way, in terms
of what we're going to be talking about later on,
I noticed that Kenyon College is noted now as
one of the best colleges in
the country for LGBT students.
>> That I did not know, but that's worthwhile to know.
I'm glad to hear that actually.
>> But what I want to ask you
undergraduate paper essay in the Psalms?
>> Yes.
>> That was your paper.
You won a prize for it.
I know essay has different meanings, but love, kindness.
>> That's right.
>> Whatever. I just
wonder if you remember what you said in that paper.
>> Well, it's interesting.
There's two terms that you can counterpoise
in Hebrew for that sort of concept.
And one is the term Tzedaka and Jews still use that.
Tzedaka is what a Jew would say for charity.
I'm going to do Tzedaka,
I'm going to write a check, I'm
going to do something for charity.
And that's counterpoised with Hesed which is loving,
kindness that you said.
What is the difference?
One of the differences is you can only do
Tzedaka to someone who's alive.
If they're living, you can help them out.
But once someone is deceased,
you can't make a monetary donation to someone who's gone,
but you can honor their memory and their wishes.
And that's what the Bible says is that,
for example, when Jacob is dying, he says,
do me this one last hesed
just make sure that I'm not buried in Egypt.
I want to be buried with my ancestors.
So Hesed it is differentiated that way.
It's not charity.
It's almost covenantal kindness.
It's a relationship that you and I enter
into that is not upper and lower,
but is absolutely congruent one with the other.
>> And your prize,
Simpson prize in religion,
first time that anybody who was Jewish had won the prize?
>> That's right.
>> And so it sounds
like you were pretty well accepted at that school?
>> Yes. So I would say I was well accepted.
I studied a lot.
That was my dedication to my mentor Dr. Kullmann.
So I actually went through college,
I never attended a single fraternity party.
They never occurred to me to go to a party.
I never attended a single athletic event.
And I didn't mean to look down my nose at anybody,
but I knew I was going to be
behind the eight ball because Dr. Kullmann,
when I went to him and said,
I want to revisit my childhood ambition,
my dream to become rabbi, he said, that's great.
Now you have to take three years of Hebrew.
Well, I was terrible in language.
He says, you got to take three years of Hebrew.
I'm like, really?
Now how naive I was, you got to take Hebrew.
I said, okay. And then he says,
when you're done with that, you're
going to study Aramaic.
When you're done with that, you're
going to take Greek or Latin,
and that's how things steamrolled in terms of that.
But I did feel accepted.
Most kids were not outwardly Jewish.
You could tell by the name, where they were from,
but I founded the Union of
Jewish Students at Kenyon College,
and that gave me
an opportunity to reach out to other Jewish kids.
I would bring in lectures
and make sure that the Jewish holy days
were observed and that sort of
thing when I was in Kenyon in the '70s.
>> You sound more like a first child than the last child?
>> Well, it's an interesting question.
There is a first child, my brother,
and was 12 years older than I am.
My brother was severely mentally ill.
He was a very smart person.
In fact, he ended up being my teacher in middle school.
But he ultimately develops schizophrenia.
And all the family ambitions
that would have gone to him as
the oldest child dribbled back
down and I think my parents were actually sexist,
they never for a moment,
thought that my sisters would uphold the family banner,
which they ended up doing.
But all the expectations of the first
born came down to the last born.
So I guess I'm a little bit of both.
>> Talk about your sisters a little bit.
You said that one was very accomplished.
>> Yes. So I have two sisters.
One is eight years older than me,
Susan Libo, the Honorable Susan Libo, Judge Susan Libo.
And my other sister's name is Sally Schiff.
It's funny, I left home at one point.
I became a rabbi and I thought that was
a big deal and I came home.
My sister was one of the chief judges of
Broward County and my other sister was
married to the City Councilman of Parkland.
And I thought I guess I'm not a big deal
anymore because everybody
has an elected office in my family.
But my family was very involved in the community.
I tell people,
that may be one of the reasons that I
left South Florida and came to
Atlanta to Marietta is that
my father cast a very long shadow,
and I did not want to be in his shadow.
I wanted to make something of myself,
not because of my family connections,
but because of who I was and what I did.
>> Well, you graduated in 1977 from Kenya.
You go to Hebrew Union College, finally.
>> Finally.
>> And well, I guess I was impressed,
Siskin Fellow for Research and Submitted Languages?
Doesn't sound I was going to ask
it sounds like you were a languished scholar.
>> Well, I don't know how great I was,
but that was the expectation.
And so I had to learn those ancient languages.
And I thought coming out of
undergraduate that maybe I would be a college professor,
maybe a rabbi too,
but a college professor.
So I enter into not Rabbical School in the late '70s,
but actually to get a PhD.
And I was studying languages that no one cared about.
I was studying languages that
maybe three other people were
studying in the United States, Ugaritic for example.
And it turns out that I didn't
care a bit for what I was studying.
It was completely irrelevant to who I was and what I was.
Well, it turns out I was living in
a graduate school dormitory,
and all of my friends were rabbis.
All of my friends were rabbilic students.
And they saw that I was struggling with this
that I was really not interested
in where my life was going.
And they said, they turned
my head around again and they said,
you ought to be a rabbi.
You're good with people,
you're interested in the literature,
you're interested in teaching.
You're not going to like being a professor.
You're going to enjoy being a rabbi and
that put the cap on it.
That's why I decided to turn myself back around
to where I was and enter
into a rabbinical school the following year.
>> I guess I'm amazed that it takes
five years to get through.
>> And I added that
six while I was working on a doctorate.
So I tell people,
I didn't actually get a paycheck
until I was 28 years old.
[LAUGHTER] I was in school all the time,
my family was supporting me,
and then like other students,
I had to take out loans.
>> I just want to confirm today,
but Columbia Theological Seminary, which is Presbyterian.
You get a master of divinity in three years.
>> Well, I tell people there's
some salient differences
between Judaism and Christianity,
but one of them is we're twice as old as Christianity.
So we're 4,000 years old
instead of 2,000 years old.
So we've had all these centuries to acquire
history and customs and holidays.
So there's a lot to learn to become a rabbi.
>> So five years.
You got to want to do it to go through five years.
>> That's exactly correct. In fact,
I tell my students, I say,
do you know what the difference
or do you know it's similar
between beating your head against
the wall and being in graduate school?
[OVERLAPPING]
It only feels good when you stop.
So by the age of 28, I was ready,
I was glad to be out of a graduate
school and take a real job.
>> I don't know how many graduate
students that have run into,
they have that same feeling.
>> I tell people being in graduate school is
one long hazing ritual.
You're trying to belong to a fraternity and the guys
out there and the women out there that are
supervising you are thinking something like,
I had to go through a tough time to get my PhD.
I want to make sure you go through a tough time.
>> That's PhD program no different.
>> Where did you get your PhD?
>> At the University of Tennessee.
>> You're a volunteer?
>> Well, perpetual adolescence
going through it seemed like.
But at any way, people do it,
I guess, and stick it out.
So you graduated in 1983?
>> I did.
>> You were president of the senior class?
>> I was.
>> So it sounds like you were
active in a lot more than classroom work?
>> I was although I got drafted.
It's a funny story.
I got drafted to be the president of
the senior class because I was
the only person that everybody talked to.
Rabbis usually have very strong personalities.
They have big egos.
I tell people rabbis have egos,
the size of Montana.
And these rabbinic students,
they were all knocking heads.
They were all not getting along with each other.
And somehow the theory came up,
let's let Libo be the president.
He's the only one that everybody likes
and so it wasn't any great accomplishment on my part.
It was the fact that I had lots of friends,
and that's something I liked it.
>> Well, I mean that's, something to celebrate.
>> I tell you.
>> So 1983, you go to New Orleans
assistant rabbi at Temple Sinai.
Why don't you talk about that experience a little bit?
What was it like to be
an assistant rabbi right out of school?
>> Sure. It's a daunting task
to go from rabbinic school to getting a job.
I guess it's like being a PhD too,
but you go through about 20 different interviews
and they winnow it down.
And I hadn't been selected for any of the jobs.
I was starting to get a little panicky
when I got a phone call
from Rabbi Murray Backman in New Orleans and he said,
we would like to hire you.
And I'm eternally grateful,
he's passed on now, that basically he gave me my shot.
He gave me the opportunity to be a rabbi.
So I moved to New Orleans Temple Sinai.
My [inaudible] wood was mainly
working with teenagers and kids.
I did come into contact with
adults and older adults and that thing.
But my main stress because I was young,
I was 28 years old.
So I was put on the watch in
terms of taking care of the teens and
the kids and the preschools and that thing.
>> Somewhere along the line,
Madeleine Sable comes into the picture.
I'm assuming it was in New Orleans.
>> Yes. It was in New Orleans.
There's several stories of how we met.
Let's see, not to make it too long,
but we had a friend in common.
And it was a Sunday.
I remember to this day.
It was a Sunday afternoon.
And this friend of mine, Lisa Kirstein
calls me up and says,
there's a Jewish singles
event at [inaudible] bar,
and I want you to take me.
And I said, Lisa, I said,
it's a singles event.
You don't need an escort to go to, she says, well,
I don't want to go by myself. I say fine.
So I'm driving over to this singles event,
and I said to her, well, who's going to be there?
And she says, Maddie Sable.
And I said, Matt, is that even a Jewish name?
>> Maddie.
>> Maddie, that's what her name is Madeleine.
>> M-A-D-D-I-E.
>> They call her Maddie. And so
I said I don't even sound Jewish.
Maddie Sable I've never heard that name before.
So I go into the bar and I'm sitting
there in a booth and sure enough,
this woman comes into the bar.
And this is like a bad romantic comedy, but it's true.
The girl crosses the dance floor,
it's as if there were a spotlight on her.
And I'm looking at that one girl going, oh, my gosh,
I want that one and
that turned out to be Madeleine Sable.
I asked her out on a date a couple nights later,
and we've been together 38 years.
It's a true love story.
>> Was she already a psychotherapist.
>> She was. She was already a therapist.
She was a school counselor at
the Metairie Park Country Day School in
New Orleans and she taught at
Tulane University in Education.
>> So I assume you got married about 1985?
>> We got married at the very end of 1984.
We literally, we met in January '84.
We started really dating in March of '84.
By May, we were engaged and by December, we were married.
So within 1-12 month period
before a year was over, we were married.
>> So you would have been about 29 at that time?
>> Yes. That's right.
>> Well, when you're in school,
it was all that down.
>> It does.
>> So how did you hear about
the opening at Temple [inaudible]?
>> So one of the things that
people do not know about rabbis,
is that we're required to belong to a union.
We belong to a professional union.
All rabbis belong to.
We're heavily unionized.
>> A union?
>> A union, yes. And it's
a small boutique union because
there's only about 3,000 reform rabbis,
maybe 4,000 tops, but you
have to belong to the Central
Conference of American Rabbis.
They negotiate for us.
And it's felt below
our stature that a rabbi does
not circulate his or her resume.
What you do is you sit back and
a congregation reaches out to this central conference,
this union and says,
we're starting a temple or we have a temple here or
synagogue there and we'd like to hire some people.
I got a phone call and at this point,
this is 1986 when
I came to Atlanta and
the person on the other end of the line,
the director of placement says,
how would you like to go to Marietta,
Georgia and I say to myself,
Sure, Where is Marietta Georgia?
Yes. It did not register in at all,
but I took my wife and we came to Marietta, Georgia.
>> They could have said North of Atlanta.
>> They could have said that. And what
happened was is that really she fell
in love with Marietta Georgia.
All the members of the congregation
were young couples like ourselves,
families with young children.
And she said to me,
this is where we can grow,
we can stay here.
It'll be a good synagogue for you to want
to stay there and it turned out as usual.
She was 1,000% right.
That's exactly what happened as we stay here.
>> Voice of truth.
Some neat names, your Voice of Truth and at time.
>> Tree of Life.
>> The Tree of Life. It was
first and Cobb and then all members were second?
>> That's right, we were second.
>> And so brand new when you came there,
three years old, I guess,
but were you the first permanent full-time?
>> I was. They had
a very part-time fella
come up from Atlanta and lead a couple of
services but it didn't
work out and they had they were struggling with
membership and that thing so
he only stayed for a month or two months tops.
And that was when they began to
advertise for a full-time person
and that was when I came in in the spring of '86.
>> So you come in full-time.
How many members were there
at that time? How many families?
>> There were about 40 families when I moved here,
by the time I retired
a couple of years ago there were 400 families.
Now, the reformed Jews count
their membership by families as opposed to individuals.
So if you count men women and children,
it's about 1,000 people that the Synagogue touches.
>> So young couples and this was at a time when
the Jewish population was beginning to
grow in East Cobb County, especially.
>> It was. And it's
interesting and I'm sure we'll get to it
later on in the interview but Native Atlantans,
many of them were afraid to come to Cobb County.
They had heard from their parents or grandparents,
this is not a good place to
go because of the Frank case,
people still they had
a historic memory even into the '60s and '70s.
>> Sure.
>> So Cobb County, at least in my congregation,
grew by people that were transplants,
people from the Northeast,
from Midwest, from the West.
We maybe had 10% that were
native-born Atlantans or Georgians
and hence 90% were from some other place.
>> Well, you know what, in a sense,
that's the history of Cobb County.
>> Absolutely.
>> I think that most of our history were
about 37% native Georgian in Cobb County,
which means about two-thirds of
Cobb Countians Historic since World War II,
have come from somewhere else.
>> That's right.
>> And that's the story of East Cobb certainly.
So it's not so much that they're coming out of Atlanta,
they're coming from all over the country.
>> That's what happened.
>> Attracted by the growth.
>> That's right.
>> Just skipping downtown Atlanta
altogether and coming from verb to verb.
Well, I found some figures on
the growth of the county that Atlanta Jewish Federation.
They did a study in 1947 and there were only
10,000 Jews in Metro Atlanta altogether,
practically all of them downtown.
But by 1984, the number had grown, well,
from 10,000-59,000 for the metro area,
it's still pretty small but two-thirds
were in the suburbs by '84.
So it's a history of Jewish, Atlanta,
I think that everybody
was leaving the city and moving to the suburbs.
>> It's absolutely true. In fact,
one of my analysis showed
that most of the reform synagogues that
flourished outside the perimeter were in
a sense seated by Temple downtown.
The Temple downtown had Jack Rothschild and later on,
Dick Lerman came from there and Rabbi Lerman founded
Temple Sinai which was
the first suburban reformed Jewish congregation.
They had another Rabbi at the Temple who was an assistant
and he came out and started at
Temple Emmanuel and Dunwoodie.
So the Temple downtown became
the mother ship and they would
have a second Rabbi and he would say,
well, I want to stay in Atlanta.
So we'd go out and there's
one in Roswell called Kahel Client.
That was another fellow
Rabbi Winnicker that had been a Rabbi at the Temple.
So really these reform synagogues
were spud off of
the original of the temple down on Peachtree Street.
>> Well, in terms of the numbers, by 1984,
there's about 8,000 Jewish residents in Cobb County,
3,000 of whom were in Zico 30067.
You are 30062, I think?
>> Yes. And my wife and I moved to
City of Marietta a few years ago,
so we're in 3006.
I'm proud of it, by the way.
>> Good. But between '84 and '96,
the number in Cobb grew from 8,300-16,400.
>> I wouldn't be surprised if it's bigger than that now.
>> It's got to be. And well,
just about all concentrated in 30062, 30067 or 30068.
>> Well, as I'm sure you know
the stereotype among the Jews is
that we value highly education.
And so Jews, like other ethnic groups,
were drawn to places that have
better schools and those Zip codes
that you mentioned they have
good schools so Jews naturally are drawn to that.
It's true in terms of Atlanta
but certainly true of Marietta,
there's no one Jewish area.
If you go to Chicago or Cleveland,
there's a Jewish area,
an Italian area, an Irish area. That's not true.
Jews are highly assimilated in Atlanta and we
are in lots of different neighborhoods but
we're not centralized in one neighborhood.
>> So you don't have a building when you got it?
>> That's correct.
>> And for a while you were
at Mount Zion, United Methodist.
>> On Johnson Ferry.
>> And they were very kind. They really helped
us come into existence by housing us.
>> And then for a while,
the Jewish Community Center.
And I'd like to ask you about that, by the way.
>> Sure.
>> I remember it there.
The old Dodging home place
Dodging family Dodge Middle School?
>> I see.
>> I did an interview with
Carolyn Dodge and Midwest and her brother
Dorsey Dodson out there and
remember the community center there at that time,
but it's not there anymore.
Can you tell that you know anything about this on OS?
>> I do. The money
and the old money in the Jewish community
is centered either in town or to
a certain degree in Dunwoodie and Sandy Springs.
The Jewish people who live in
Cobb County are of more modest means.
They're not poor, they're
at the top of middle class or whatever it is,
but there's no deep pockets in Cobb County,
the way you would find in
City of Atlanta or Sandy Springs.
And unfortunately, the Jews in
Cobb County did not support the JCC sufficiently,
economically so eventually, other than their preschool,
the rest was a loss leader in terms of that.
Now, when the JCC closed,
we absorbed their preschool,
so their preschool is now a part of Temple.
>> So that's the Sunshine School?
>> That is correct, it's now housed at Temple Calmuth.
>> So you were there for a while.
You were Transfiguration.
>> That's right.
>> Some would say the protestant the Catholic [inaudible].
>> We tried to hit everything. What can I tell you?
>> Well, they certainly had
out of empty space on Friday nights and say.
>> That's true, too. Yeah.
>> So how did that work out?
Did they invite you?
Do you ask them if we could use the space?
>> Usually. I mean they wouldn't know to invite us,
they didn't know we were looking for a place.
Usually myself or one of
our emissaries went and knocked on doors and said,
"We're a young Jewish congregation.
We don't have a roof over our heads,
would you be willing to bring us in."
In terms of the Transfiguration Catholic Church,
when I moved here,
I lived at 30066.
I lived at 1515 Blackwell Road,
which it's right next to the Catholic Church,
the Catholic Church of the Transfiguration.
And I have a dog and
the priest of the Church of Transfiguration has dogs.
And so we would be walking back and forth and taking care
of our dogs and I said to the priest one time.
I said, Father Pat.
>> The Archbishop?
>> That's right the Archbishop.
>> He grew up with my wife.
>> Really?
>> Yeah.
>> That's neat.
>> They knew each other from
school St. Joseph Elementary.
>> Pretty good. So the circle comes around, I guess.
And I said to him, would you mind us coming here?
And he said absolutely not.
And the huge cross,
which is over the altar in the Catholic Church,
doesn't bother me a bit.
I am grateful to be
in a place that would allow our worship.
But we had several members that
were more conservative elk,
and it troubled them a little bit to have
a huge cross in
the midst of trying to lead a [inaudible] service.
They brought it up and Pat Bishop said, you know what?
We cover the cross on Good Friday as part of our liturgy.
Let me ask my people in the vestry and they said,
actually if it makes you feel better,
you can cover the cross.
Well, this hits the newspaper as something positive,
as something of Catholic church the headline,
Catholic Church Welcomes Jews.
They make everybody comfortable.
Well, the next thing we know
the next day o on AM talk radio,
some right wing religious fanatic was
railing about how the Catholics had sold out to the Jews.
That it was terrible that they were allowing
the Jews to meet in their place of worship.
Well, the next thing I know,
Father Pat gets on the phone and he gives them,
you know, he gives them a piece of his mind.
So he was a defender of the Jews in terms of my eyes.
He's a great man, Father Pat. Yeah.
>> Yeah. That's a Jewish guy on the cross up there.
>> That's what I hear. And in fact,
according to Rabbi it's not as a Jewish guy,
but it's a rabbi up there.
>> Yeah. Okay. So in
your office was it somewhere near Merchants Walk?
>> My original office was in
a sort of decrepit part of Merchants Walk that
had gone downhill and
it was a little bitty, almost a cubicle.
And we left there and that's when my office
switched to the old Jewish community center
on Post Oat Road.
And so my office was an old crumbling house at,
he says the Dodging family.
Yeah. So I was some house
that stood on that on that site.
And I was there until we
began to build our own building in 1990,
which was completed in 1991.
I finally had a place where we had
a roof over our heads and I had an office.
>> So it takes five years?
>> It took a long time for me to seriously,
took a long time to whip them into shape
because it's very expensive to
buy land in Cobb at that point,
and there's a zoning regulation in Cobb County,
that if you found a church, segue,
whatever it is, there's a minimum of five acres.
You must have five acres and
a setback from the road which is understandable,
they don't want you to dominate
your parking lot and that sort of thing.
Yeah. Well, that's expensive.
1990 was $20,000, $25,000 an acre.
Well, that's big money to my people.
And then to build a building,
the first one was, I think,
probably $1 million, the first phase.
Well, that was huge money.
And so it took me a while.
I had to go from house to house to
house meeting in the evening,
convincing people that it would be a good thing if we had
a permanent presence here in Cobb County.
>> How many members? How many families?
>> Probably about 100 when we started to do that in '91.
>> You're going 40-100.
>> That's right.
>> Within five years.
>> Yeah.
>> I still love to take on $1 million mortgage.
>> It was big money in those days, that's for sure.
Of course, the second phase in 1997,
ended up being $5 million.
>> Oh, my goodness.
>> Well, we stole the architect from Home Depot,
a guy by the name of Marty Greenberg.
And I don't know if you know many architects,
but they're frustrated artists.
They want to build something beautiful.
So this fellow Marty Greenberg had made
his fortune building Home Depots.
Well, Home Depots are all boxes.
Yeah. Big boxes and it's orange.
And so he came to me and said,
"I would love to design your next synagogue."
And I said, "This is what we got.
This is our budget." I said,
"Can you make something nice for $5 million?"
And he said, "Oh, I can make
something really nice for $5 million."
Have you ever been in our synagogue?
>> I have not.
>> It's the prettiest synagogue in Atlanta.
I mean, all the money was worth it,
it's stained glass windows,
all around us, a beautiful sanctuary.
>> I'll have to come.
>> Yeah. We'd love to have you.
I was always very proud that we
had put together such a beautiful sanctuary.
>> Fabulous. So how many acres do you have?
>> It is five acres. It is just a minimum.
>> Okay. So you've
got a permanent facility on Old Campton Road,
Terra Mill, what's your address,
Terra Mill or Old Campton?
>> 14 15 Old Camp Road.
>> Okay. And so it sounds
like everything was going on swimmingly at that time.
And then all of a sudden you're
getting into all kinds of controversy.
Might be interesting to talk about that.
And I saw somewhere,
about 2000 you had about 900 members?
>> At one time we were close to 900.
Yeah. You got the recession,
9/11, other issues that have happened.
So the synagogue shrunk down to about 400.
I think that the tippy top was 800-900 at some point.
>> So it didn't hurt
your membership that you were
getting involved in controversy?
>> No. There were people that questioned
it that were not of my political persuasion,
but I tried to assure them that I didn't
represent one political party over another.
I simply represented the fact that certain policies might
be wrong and they needed to be addressed.
>> But before we get into those controversies.
>> Sure.
>> Well, there are a couple of things to ask you about.
First of all, you all count
yourself to a big tent congregation.
Could you talk about that a little bit?
>> Sure.
>> I know you open to anybody, I guess,
but talk about what your concept is of a big tent.
>> Absolutely. By the 1980s,
at least 50% of all Jewish people were
married to non-Jewish people, mostly Christians.
And almost every synagogue in
the city was close to those intermarried couples,
or they would let you join,
but your spouse didn't have any rights or
privileges of being part of the congregation.
And when I came in 1986,
"I said that will stop.
We will be a bigger tent.
We will have people of all different backgrounds."
I have people that grew up Orthodox Jewish,
a lot of conservative,
a lot of reform, interfaith.
We've had a great success.
Even though we don't go out and advertise,
we've had tremendous success and
people converting to Judaism.
Sometimes because they married a Jewish person,
but also because I think the Jewish faith has
a good message of being a good person in the community.
And so we had people that were not married to
Jewish people but wanted to join the Jewish faith.
We had several dozen people who
converted and became part of the Synagogue.
>> You don't ever think about
Judaism as being evangelical.
>> That's right. There is a historical reason
for that is that traditionally,
Judaism was highly conversionary.
Where else would all the Jews have come from?
We were converting left and right in
the Roman Empire and ancient Near East.
But when Constantine became emperor of the empire,
Constantine's mother was a Christian.
She converted and she convinced him that he
should adopt Christianity as
the religion of the Roman Empire.
At that point, it was against
the law to convert to Judaism.
He made it again the law by threat of death.
And so not only would the convert be killed,
but so would the rabbi who was assisting that conversion.
Right. So at that point,
I don't think conversion ground to a complete halt,
but it went underground.
There was still some going on,
but it was never advertised and so the Jews made
a virtue out of
necessity and said, "We don't convert people."
Well, that's actually not true.
And that's part of the concept of
the big tent is like you said,
"We don't go out and we don't knock on the door and say,
Hey, have you come to terms with Moses?
Have you met Moses, " or
a little bracelet. "What would Moses do?"
We don't do that but we
make sure that people know that we're there.
People do come in the door.
Totally, sometimes they know more about
Judaism than the average member
because they've actually read the Torah.
They've actually read the Old Testament.
One of my complaints about
the modern Jewish community is that I say, well,
the average ten year old Baptist school child
knows more about the Bible than
the average 25 year old with a master's in
engineering from Georgia Tech
because they've read the Bible,
and it's been read to them since they were little.
And Jews in many cases,
modern Jews are they're culturally retarded.
They are not advanced in terms of
what the Bible is about. That's it.
>> I don't know.
>> Handicapped, I guess, would be a better word.
>> I don't know how they could go to
the services every week
and not know a lot about the Bible.
>> A rabbi's job is to try to communicate those values.
But the word Bible means library,
and so it's large particularly old Testament Tora.
It's pretty heavy book,
and Jews, as I said,
have a very high level of education,
but not literacy when it comes to the Bible.
>> I was going to think too that there are a lot of Jews
in Cobb County who are not religious I guess.
>> It's an interesting quandary.
I've been asked this all the time by people who are
Christian because they'll know people who were Jewish,
but they'll say to me, that fellow is Jewish.
He told me he's never been in
a synagogue in his entire life.
How could he be Jewish?
It's an interesting question.
You're not a Christian just because you go to church.
A Christian is someone who
will talk about their salvation.
Talk about John 3:16.
God so loved the world,
and gave his only begotten son,
whosoever would believe in Him would
not perish but would live forever.
That's what makes a Christian.
But in Judaism, there's really two paths.
One is, it is true, it is a religion.
But for other Jews,
it's more of a cultural identity.
It's almost like saying I'm French
Canadian and that's my cultural identity.
There are Jews that have never set
foot or don't set
foot in a synagogue, they're still Jewish.
They're the same as any other Jews.
We don't discriminate.
>> Okay. We're going to be getting into LGBT.
>> Sure.
>> Just a minute. But in terms of your congregation,
was that part of the big [inaudible] ever?
>> It became part. I didn't I didn't
know if we had any gay members at that point.
Most of the people were straight as far as I knew.
But as I'm sure you know, from your research,
when the anti-gay resolution was passed,
that was when it took me
about a year to get my toe in the water.
Not because there was so much opposition to it,
but because I wasn't that politically organized.
The resolution comes out,
I think, '93, if I remember.
>> I think that's right.
>> Yeah. Would you like to hear that story?
>> Sure.
>> Absolutely. So one Saturday night,
my wife says, let's go to a play at the Marietta Theater.
>> Theatre in the square?
>> Theater in the square. And I
personally don't like plays.
I like movies. They're much more interesting.
But my wife, Blesser Madeleine Sable,
she was a theater major at Tulane,
and so she wants to see a play.
Well, if she wants to see a play,
I'm going to the play. That's how it works.
>> We have a big theater in
the square convection here at the Archie.
>> That's very cool. So we go to a play and the play is
about two straight couples who
take a summer vacation on fire Island in New York.
Now, it turns out Fire Island has a large gay population.
But the play is about these two couples.
They make a reference or two about gay neighbors,
but the play doesn't have anything to do with
homosexuality or gay lifestyle,
whatever you want to call it.
We saw the play, play was okay,
about five days later,
we see in the Marietta daily journal that
the Cobb County Board of Commissioners has
endorsed a resolution against
the so called gay lifestyle that
gays are one degree or another,
are antithetic to the health safety
and welfare of the Cobb community.
What happens is when they do that is they give
permission to every nut job in Marietta in Cobb County.
I don't know if you remember this.
There were people marching in the streets
in on the Marietta Square that said,
thank God for AIDS.
AIDS is going to cure us of the sin and of the plague.
And so the resolution
comes out and I do
absolutely nothing. What was I going to do?
I wasn't involved politically
and nobody asked my opinion.
So I go about my daily routine.
Finally, a year passes and there's
one or two small protests against the resolution.
But my wife turns to me,
my wife who happens to be my conscience turns to me.
>> Sounds like she's all the time getting you to trouble.
>> She's always getting me into trouble.
My wife, Madeleine says,
you call yourself the reform rabbi of Cobb County.
When are you going to do something?
I'm like, fine.
So I thought, this was a time in the in
the 1990s when it was still not popular to be pro gay.
I knew that I could not circulate a resolution or
a statement that was in any way pro gay
because there were people in various denominations,
they would lose their jobs
if those ministers signed
on to the statement that I wrote.
So I simply wrote it's almost in retrospect,
a mom and apple pie resolution,
which says it's not the job of
the county commission to take judgments on any one group.
That's not how we should operate in a civil society.
There was no Internet at that point.
I went through every phone book I could
find and I sent the letter
out to really hundreds and hundreds of churches.
I got 37 yeses and hundreds and hundreds of nos.
And those 37, some were Presbyterian Lutheran,
couple of Methodists and that thing,
they were very courageous because at that time,
gay rights was not really recognized in those churches.
I get a phone call one day when just before our statement
comes out and it's from Methodist minister and he says,
I know about your statement.
I want to know who's going to sign that statement.
I said, sir, it's not really.
>> This is not the Methodist minister that you had?
>> Same guy.
>> Same guy, Andy Michael.
And he say I want to know who's going to be on there.
I said, it's not really appropriate.
We haven't released it yet.
He says, I'm going to tell you something.
I'm going to make sure those people don't
have jobs by the end of tomorrow.
So I was going to say whatever. I hang up on him.
Those 37 ministers came forward and supported
me and supported taking a stand against the resolution.
So a year later, by that time,
I thought my job is to get straight people involved to
get mainstream clergy involved
and the business community involved.
And we put on a tremendous rally.
It was in 1994, if I remember correctly.
In August of '94 had
several several thousand people
there protesting the anti gay resolution.
>> What I've got for your statement,
Cobb County welcomes all its residents
irrespective of race color,
religion, sexual orientation and gender?
>> Yeah.
>> That's pretty innocuous.
>> I would think so. In 2023,
those aren't fighting words, are they?
>> Things have changed.
>> Doesn't changed the law. And I've changed.
I remember people saying to me,
you know, do you believe in gay marriage?
And it sounded such an odd juxtaposition at that time,
that what we called it when we would do
a gay marriage or gay wedding,
what we called them commitment ceremonies.
It was not until later
that everybody became comfortable saying,
yes, it's it's about marriage equality.
It's about having the same rights that a straight couple
has a gay couple should have
the same rights of marriage as well.
>> Right. When was it even legal to get married?
>> It was not was not legal.
>> Okay. So a commitment ceremony.
I think I saw where you may have been the first clergyman
in Georgia to perform same sex marriage?
>> Yes. In fact, I was probably the first clergyman in
the deep South to do it because I was as I said,
I was stationed in Louisiana.
Then, of course, we had Mississippi,
Arkansas, and then Georgia,
there was nobody I would get people
from all over because there was nobody
in those states who would
perform gay weddings or commitment ceremonies.
So that was how I got
started. Trying to get some more water.
>> Okay. Do you need to take a break?
>> I'm good. How about you?
>> I'm fine. I think Craig no have told me that a sermon
on comparing eating shrimp and
the penalty for that to being gay.
And the penalty for that?
>> Yes. So when you
try to look at the what does the Bible
say about gay sex or gay couples.
The New Testament says virtually nothing about it,
but it is true in a couple of places in
the so called Old Testament in our Bible,
scripture, whatever you want to call it.
It says that gay sex is a [inaudible].
When you look it up in English, it says abomination.
Sounds pretty bad.
Sounds like that's not a good thing.
It turns out, you have to
look in every place in the Bible
says [inaudible] is not keeping Kosher,
it's eating shrimp, [inaudible] maybe
breaking some other law.
What they were saying is abominations of
baggers they simply were
saying it's not something that should be done.
There are other quotations
which have been used by anti-gay
that said that two men
if they performed
homosexual rights, they should be killed.
It turns out that the Hebrew Bible is pretty
strict and people get killed all the time.
If you say that you're a witch,
you can be killed.
If you're immoral son
and you don't listen to your parents, you can be killed.
So nobody follows those rituals anymore.
Why would you continue in this case in the 1990s,
'80s '90s and later.
Why would you continue to
discriminate against people that were gay?
Based on the Bible.
It doesn't make any sense. You can
say that you're against it,
but not based on the Bible.
>> Yeah. I couldn't find any penalty for eating shrimp,
even though it said there's an abomination?
>> No. Yeah.
>> And, you know,
we're saying those things
about that they could be killed.
Do you think they ever were?
>> No. It's a good question.
Because the Bible will
prescribe all sorts of death penalties for people.
And the later writings,
the rabbis looked back and said, You know what?
They were being strict
on this and that and the other thing.
They never actually killed anybody.
There was no death penalty in Judaism.
In fact, one of the rabbis around
the year 100 AD
said not a single person was ever executed.
It was simply meant as an exaggeration.
>> It was little hyperbole.
>> It's what it was. That's how
the Bible works sometimes hyperbole.
>> I know an eye for and eye,
but pretty quickly to that what was
an eye were and that's what you're going to pay.
>> That's right.
>> So a lot of people
probably taking verses out of context.
>> Sure. You can you can justify anything with the Bible,
remember that the enslavement of
Black people was justified by the use of scripture.
>> Absolutely.
>> The exclusion of women was justified by scripture.
And you can use the Bible to
beat somebody over the head if you want to.
>> Still is.
So well, did you ever meet Gordon Weisson?
He was the one that was behind him?
>> I met Bill Byrne.
>> I wanted to ask you what was
your relationship with Bill Byrne?
>> We ended up being pretty friendly.
I had him actually speak in the synagogue long after
the family values resolution had gone away.
I think Bill was running for governor the one.
[OVERLAPPING] I invited him to speak to the congregation.
He was a military veteran and he'd
flown a helicopter in Vietnam.
I had a heck of a lot of respect.
I didn't care for him supporting Gordon Weisson.
But if you remember the story,
Bill Byrne own daughter came out as getting.
And so we ended up
being on speaking terms and that thing.
Gordon Weisson I'm glad I never met because I
find the man objectionable. So I'm glad I never met.
>> Well, that's interesting.
I did an interview with Bill Byrne.
>> [OVERLAPPING] I haven't heard of him. Does he
still live in the community?
>> I think so. But he's been in a low profile.
>> Sure.
>> But I did an interview with him 20 years at least
ago and asked him about all of this.
And basically, what he said in the interview is that,
it wasn't his resolution. [OVERLAPPING]
>> It wasn't his resolution.
He got hijacked into that because he didn't
want to appear being pro-gay.
So he went along with Gordon's resolution.
>> Well, he basically said that
he agreed with the sentiment,
but he thought that it was totally
unnecessary to create an unnecessary controversy.
>> That's right.
>> And that seemed to be
public opinion as far as I can find out.
>> And the greatest opponent of that.
I'm sure you remember was Otis Brumby Jr.
He brought the weight to
the Marietta Daily Journal and
said this is a silly resolution.
This is causing controversy
where we don't need to have it.
This is discriminatory.
This is not what we want people to think of
when they think of Cobb County and the city in Marietta.
I met with him. He was an ally.
He was a good man, Otis Brumby
Jr. As is his son, Otis Brumby.
So it's a great family.
>> And certainly not any far out liberals.
>> No. Otis Brumby Jr
described himself as a Nixonian conservative.
And it's interesting because I've one of my controversy,
you probably don't know this,
but I've supported a lot of Republicans in office
from Johnny Isakson to Sam Olin's to others.
And of course, the people that I supported as Republicans
along the way would no longer be considered Republicans.
They would be so called rhinos
because they're to middle of the road.
>> Sure. I think I saw somewhere that
you called yourself a card carrying Republican.
>> That was probably an exaggeration, if I said that.
>> That's something.
>> Actually no.
>> You don't register in Georgia, anyway.
>> I got hijacked
at one point to voting in the Republican primaries,
because George H. W. Bush ran against Pat Buchanan.
And so I was contacted by my friends in Republican Party,
you need to vote Republican in
the primary because we've got to get
rid of this guy, Pat Buchanan.
So maybe at that point I was an actual Republican.
>> Well, in East Cobb
perhaps you want to have any influence,
I guess you voted in Republican primary.
>> That's right.
>> So I guess
the other thing too from the Bill Byrne interview
that he negotiated with white song
a much milder resolution
than what he had originally written.
>> Really.
>> And then he felt honor bound to
support what he had compromise.
>> I see.
>> The compromise was offensive enough,
but apparently, the original was much worse.
>> It's hard to know exactly what was going on
in Gordon Weisson's mind at that point.
I remember historically what had happened
was just prior to that resolution,
City of Atlanta had extended
benefits to domestic partnerships.
And that was felt by by people in Marietta,
that was a bridge too far.
We're not going to recognize domestic partnerships.
>> Right.
>> And then all of a sudden, we accord
Wyson's resolution.
I don't know if you remember this.
But within a few weeks of that resolution,
the Cobb County Commission defunded the arts as well.
>> I know.
>> The theater and the orchestra.
The joke is, of course,
only gay people would go to the theater in the orchestra,
which is an absurdity.
But the commission just lean so far right.
It was out of touch with the community.
And at the same time, as I said,
it gave permission to others to
say and do terrible and stupid things.
The head Commissioner of
Fulton County was a scoundrel named
Mitch Scandalous and when
this resolution was going around in Cobb,
got to remember this point is about 95.
It's a year before the Olympics.
And Scandalous says I'm going to
blood test every single athlete that comes into Atlanta.
But great Laganas,
the great diver had just come out as gay,
and Scandalous Looks is going to
waive that AIDs card and say well,
we're not going to let anybody into the Olympics
who is HIV positive.
So it gave permission to a lot
of terrible people to say a lot of terrible things.
>> To talk about the Olympics and how that
figured into this controversy.
>> Sure. There were a couple of
Olympic venues that were scheduled to be in Cobb.
I think one was an equestrian event and
one might have been
a sailing event or something like that.
>> Something about volleyball.
>> I think you're right. I think it was volleyball.
And although I was
not the head of that part of the Olympics at
a Cobb but I supported
them in terms of what we were doing on my end.
And so the Olympic Committee pulled
those Olympic venues out of Cobb because they didn't
want to be associated with anti-gay resolutions
and discriminatory statements.
So those things were pulled from Cobb.
And it's interesting as I
had hoped and as I had predicted,
the business community got behind us,
and they interviewed Bernie Marcus of
the Home Depot and he said, You know what?
We don't need a resolution like that. That's not helpful.
And all of a sudden
Chamber of Commerce people, Kwan people,
others said, You know what,
that resolution is a really bad idea.
and we need to move away from it.
>> So the Cobb Chamber took that position?
>> There I don't know if it would be
officially or just people that would
talk about it at chamber or meetings or that thing.
>> And of course, some Depot's
headquartered in Cobb County.
[OVERLAPPING]
>> If you remind me, I'll bring
my scrapbooks in sometime.
[LAUGHTER]
I saved all my clippings. So what can I do?
>> Fantastic.
Okay. Anything else to say you on
that issue, do you think?
>> Well, it was the first time that I got death threats.
>> Oh, I did mean to ask you, yeah.
>> Those days you're pretty open about how to find you
and where your phone number is.
And I didn't mind so much having them threaten my life.
When they threatened my children,
that caused me a lot of pain?
>> For sure.
>> And a lot of anger.
>> When you have two daughters?
>> I do have two daughters.
And so from that time and for several years,
I usually had bodyguards.
I had protection travel with me.
>> Wow.
>> If I gave a speech, nowadays,
every synagogue in Atlanta
has a policeman that sits outside of it.
>> Because of that right?
>> Every synagogue has a policeman.
It says Isam if you saw what happened?
Yeah. Three weeks ago.
There is there is now a policeman who sits
in front of every synagogue in Atlanta, Georgia.
But at that time,
that was not Dereg but
because of the death threats against me,
I had to travel with personal security.
>> Well, that's sad. Let me
go back and ask you something else from the early days.
I've got that Temple [inaudible] didn't become
a formal member of
the Union of American Hebrew Congregations until 1987.
>> That's right.
>> Were they to begin with?
>> They were independent and they were
served by the reform movement
and by the Hebrew Union College,
but they did not meet all the criteria of being
an actual congregation until
the year after I had started here.
>> What kind of criteria did they have to reach?
>> They had to pay their clergy.
They had to have a constitution.
They had to have a membership drive.
They had to really check all the boxes,
and as I said,
they had a part time guy and they
stiffed them. They didn't even pay them.
So which point the union,
as I said, that I belong to,
and the UAHC stepped in and said,
you can't do you can't do it to anybody,
but you can't do it to a clergyman.
You need to show us that you can have
a normal effective good
working relationship with a rabbi,
and then we'll admit you to
the larger union. So that's what happened.
>> Now, it sounds to me
Union of American Hebrew Congregations that name changed?
>> That's correct.
>> In2003?
>> Yes.
>> So now, it's just Union of Reform.
>> Yes that's right.
>> But they're the same thing.
>> They're exactly the same.
>> Well, you have won
a number of awards for standing up for your principals.
Could you talk about some of them?
>> Well, a person
doesn't do the right thing because they
get an award at the end of the day.
It was nice to be recognized.
I appreciated that.
Mainly for the anti gay resolution and that thing.
I I received awards.
Couple of times just for taking the stand.
If I remember correctly,
I was the first Jewish clergyman to talk about
sexual abuse from the pulpit.
I had been abused as a child by a family member.
So I just thought I could give
strength to other people that had
been in that terrible family situation.
And so I began to speak about being a victim of
abuse in front of large crowds of people.
And it made an impression and so one of
the organizations awarded me.
Clergymen of the year by
the National Conference of Christians and Jews.
>> For advocating for children's rights.
>> Yeah.
>> I was going to ask you about that.
Are you still working on that?
>> No. I'm sure you'll get to it later in the interview,
but the main social exhibit I have and I'm in
semi retirement is still
working for the complete exoneration Leo Frank.
>> I was going to get to that.
>> I know you would.
>> That's pretty prestigious
National Conference of Christians and Jews.
>> You know what's the old saying that in
$5 might get you a couple of coffee star points.
>> Nineteen ninety five best clergy of Atlanta
by creative of things and of all things.
One of the 50 most influential people in
North Atlanta by the Atlanta Business Cronicle.
>> Sure.
>> That's pretty prestigious.
And a humanitarian of the year by
the State of Georgia Hobocast Commission.
>> Yeah. That was one that was
an interesting award because I
shared it with Pat Conway,
the great Southern novelist.
And I don't want to pretend we were good friends,
but we spent an afternoon together.
And Pat Conway's story of
his relationship to Jews and the Jewish community is that
his mother raising him read to him
the diary of Aunt Frank and said to Pat Conway,
now you know what good people
do and you know what evil people do.
Always remember to be one of the good people.
That I got to share that with Pat Conway that year.
>> Wow. Now,
Bill Byrne says that that resolution
became invalid because a new commission was
elected and under Georgia law
a resolution doesn't last
beyond the term of the people that passed it.
Is that your understanding?
>> That's my understanding as well.
>> They never withdrew.
>> They didn't withdraw it.
>> But it withdrew it.
>> It hit a natural sunset as it were.
What happened and I I didn't
normally go out of my way to support specific as I said,
I had Bill Byrne speak and I
knew Johnny Essen quite well.
But I tried not to favor one politician over another,
but it was at that point that
Sam Ons came to me and he said,
I'm going to run for Cop County Commission.
I said, you got my support 1,000%.
And so we supported Sam and I feel
like his coming on to the Cop Commission put
the imprimatur on the fact that
the resolution no longer stood that having
Sam Ons there and having a Jewish guy for
the first time on the Cop County Commission.
That was a great step forward for Cop.
>> So he took Gordon West Arms.
>> That's exactly what happened.
>> And Gordon West Arms moved away.
>> Bye bye. Don't let
the door hit you on the ass on the way out.
>> Now, I think you said that
Sam Owens came to you and asked for your support?
>> Yes.
>> And what did he say when he came?
>> So a long time ago. But I think it was basically,
I'm going to do this.
You know where I stand I am going to run as a Republican,
but I'm going to run as
a middle of the road moderate person.
Can I count on your support?
And I said absolutely.
I said, technically speaking,
if you're religious institution,
the IRS frowns on
making recommendations of one candidate over another.
You can lose your tax status theoretically.
If you're a 51c3.
I can't speak for the congress,
but when I had occasion,
I would have him come and say a few words.
I mean, I could have
invited Gordon Weisson too if you wanted to speak,
but I don't think Gordon Weisson wanted to
have anything to do with me at that point.
>> Probably not.
>> Yeah.
>> So of course,
Samoans also from four other way.
But I understand he
might have been a Democrat at one time.
>> That's my feeling too.
Yeah. He was Sam Wins got his political start by being
the head of East Civic Association,
various subdivisions and whatnot.
>> So he back to
the commission and I guess about four years later,
he became the commission chair.
>> That's right.
>> And personally,
I always thought he was a fabulous commission chair?
>> Absolutely he was. I thought it was
a good attorney general too.
But he felt a need to move on to
other things and I appreciate that.
>> I did an interview with him on
his tenure as president.
>> Which was short-lived.
Was it did it even last a year?
>> A little bit over a year.
>> Well, we don't need to get into that.
I'm sure this interview.
>> No problem.
>> Unless you had anything you wanted to say?
>> No, I did not.
>> But I've always been an admirer of Sam.
>> Me too.
>> But at any rate,
let's get into the Leo Frank case.
Did anything about Leo Frank
before you came to Coben Ken?
>> I had taken a class in American Jewish history,
and I think it was covered in about two or 3 minutes.
It's usually bundled together with the case
of Alfred Dreyfus in France and
Mendel Baylis in Russia that a Jew
was singled out and persecuted,
and tried for various things or another.
Then it happens well,
I'm in New Orleans.
It happens in 1984,
'85 that a young writer by the name of Steve Oni
writes it's only about a six page article
about the Frank case in Esquire magazine.
And that piqued my interest.
But to tell you the truth,
when I accepted the job in Marietta,
that was the last thing on my mind. I wanted a job.
I wanted to go somewhere and be a rabbi.
And it didn't really affect me until
I got here and I would hear stories from people,
this is what happened.
The the Goldsteins had to
be smuggled out under cover of darkness.
It was, the Jews that did
live in Marietta it was very dangerous for them.
So that I became more interested in the case.
>> Of course, 1915 was the lynching.
>> That's right.
>> So we were 70 years
beyond there at this time, I guess.
So I didn't realize
that Steve Oni had written an article.
[OVERLAPPING]
>> He sent to his publisher.
He published Ajil to write a book.
He said, Sure. I'll take a couple of years.
It took me 17 years to write that book.
>> Well, he did a good job.
>> He did a great job.
>> But I shouldn't have said that
because I wanted to ask you
what you thought about the book.
What you thought about that in a dead shell.
>> In the dead shell it's obviously the Locus classicus
the pinnacle of the scholarship of
the Leo Frank case and then the lynching as well.
As he says, it's the most famous murder case in
the history of the state of Georgia
because it was two unsolved murders,
the murder of Mary Fagan and
then the lynching of Leo Frank.
And Steve Oni spent a large part
of his adult life documenting that.
When I try to get people interested in the case,
and I say, well, you've got to read the book.
Well, the book is 700 pages long.
You could hurt a child with that book.
It's how big that book is.
But the thing is you don't understand
the Frank case unless you read and the dead shall arise.
You need to understand the book
admittedly is on a granular level.
It tells you what happened
every single day of
the trial and things leading up to that.
>> That's a fabulous book. It's a great book.
If you don't know the background of the case,
then somebody could ask you, well,
how do Leo Frank was innocent? You have no answer?
If you don't know the background of
the case, what actually,
as I said to somebody, you got to be able to tell
the difference between New Lee and Newt Morris.
There's lots of dramatic characters in the Frank case,
and you've got to be able to speak about
that and the themes knowledgeably.
And that's what Steve Oni did.
>> Well, I think that only
actually said at the end that he was,
maybe 90%, sure, but you never know 100%.
>> He he ends the book by not saying Leo Frank
was 100% innocent in almost every interview.
And I've collected these in
almost every published interview
that Steve Oni has given since the book came out.
He says unequivocally that Leo Frank was innocent.
>> He made a pretty compelling case
against Jim Connelly, I thought.
>> Yeah. Well, the case is pretty Jim Connelly
is a career criminal.
And it's pretty obvious when you start to
put two and two together, certainly,
given the 1982 testimony of Alonzo Man.
That Jim Connelly and
Jim Connelly alone was the murderer.
>> Well, I guess one thing about the book.
I heard for years who was part of the not the mob,
but the organizer the Mucket that organized things.
>> Governor Brown.
>> But nobody would say those names in public.
And I think one of the things
that One's book did is that it brought it all out.
I mean, Morris, you mentioned the judge.
State legislature was involved.
>> Only calls the Frank
lynching state-sponsored terrorism.
>> And the State legislature chaired
the prison committee, I guess.
>> That's right. Yeah.
>> I'm trying to think of the name,
but it doesn't matter.
You mentioned Joseph Vemm Mackey Brown.
Former governor. That apparently was involved.
I know one of his grandsons continued
to protest as grandfather wasn't involved.
I don't know. Chief prosecutor of the Blue Ridge Circuit,
Herbert Clay. Was involved?
>> Yeah. There's a Brombe involved?
>> Scream of Cobb County society.
And then some other folks
that actually went down to the prison.
>> The worker bees.
>> Somebody was wealthy enough to have a car in 1915?
>> He had five cars.
>> And that's pretty unusual.
>> That is unusual in 1915.
>> But I guess really one of the questions is how do you
explain how the Cream of Coop Counting
society could think the way that they did?
But they're so convinced that Frank did
it that they would be involved in lynching.
>> To me, the case is clear that
the villain of the Frank case
is not so much the lynchers as it is Tom Watson.
Tom Watson manages to whip the populace up.
Day after day and week after week insisting that Frank
is a sodomite Jew for
example and that he needs to be lynched.
And so that gave permission to
whatever was the worst in men's hearts. I can't explain.
How can anybody explain and one of
the issues of the lynchers is
they were very good people up till then.
They were very good people after that.
They were pillars of their community,
many of them but they did
a very terrible thing on August 17th, 1915.
And I don't know how to explain why evil
occurs with some people and all of others.
>> Well, I guess it's
still about the worst case of
anti-Semitism in American history..
>> Yes. It definitely is the worst case
of anti-Semitism in American history.
>> So talk about your involvement with the case.
>> So in 1995,
I got a phone call from someone who said,
I'd like to show you some things
about Marietta history and Jewish history.
I said, sure. So he gives me an address and
I pull up and it's right where Fry's gym Road is.
And it's a little low slung office building.
It's two storeys high.
It's got a dentist office in it.
And it's got I think an accountant.
And I believe if I remember correctly,
it was called the VPI building.
It was owned by a developer by the name of Roy Farner,
who was a great man and
you'll hear in a moment a true gentleman.
And the person who had called me said, well,
this is where my people did
something really terrible to your people.
I thought you would want to know.
>> My people.
>> Well, that's what he said and that's it.
And then he went away.
And I thought to myself,
my people, your people.
Then I realized I was
standing on the site of the Frank Lynch.
The tree had been long gone.
Any vestages of Sheriff Frye's habitation was long gone.
That day, I made the acquaintance of Wave Varner,
who owned the land and owned the building.
And I said, Mr. Varner,
there has never been a service here on
this spot to memorialize where Leo Frank was killed.
And he said, no, he said, I'm
aware that this was this body.
He said, no, wasn't anybody related to me?
He said, we didn't come to Koch County until the 1950s.
But I was told that this was the site of
the Franklin Shan and he agreed
and this was in August of '95 that I held
the first ever memorial service for Leo Frank.
It's called a Yizkor service.
And many of the Y-I-Z-K-O-R, which means memorial.
And I was able to get people
from the Senegos and the Jewish communities in
Atlanta to come up and we observed
that Yizkor for Leo Frank
on the anniversary of his death.
To this day, I don't go there anymore
because that site's now been
covered over by a super highway.
But I was able to get a plaque
placed by the Georgia Department of Transportation.
They allowed the plaque coes
for the Georgia historical society.
And so every year for the past,
whatever that is, 30 years,
I go to that site and I offer
a Jewish prayer in memory of Leo Frank.
>> Well, what do you
think is the importance of the case
for the very different Cobb County that we are today?
>> In some ways, it shocks me that
Frank has never been exonerated.
It's clear now and it's been clear
for many years that Frank was innocent.
In fact, early on the attorney for Jim Connelly,
a great man by the name of William Smith,
later really went against
the lawyer-client privilege and he told Governor Slaton.
He said it wasn't Leo Frank.
It was my guy did it,
which is unheard of that
a lawyer would go against the lawyer-client privilege.
>> That's why Slaton commuted the sentence.
>> We think that was one of the things
that pushed him in that direction. Yes.
>> And then there's a riot at the governor's mansion-
>> That's correct.
>> When he has to flee the state as his term ended.
>> That's what happened.
Yes. To me, it's important because it's a matter
of justice and justice has no shelf life.
People will say such an old case, why do you care?
And I tell them well, there's no statute of
limitations on doing the right thing.
It's not a legality anymore.
It wouldn't affect anything legally,
but it would be the state saying that
you can't make the future good unless
you make the past right and making it
right has to do clearing the name of an innocent man.
No. You see Leo Frank never had any children.
Had no children. No grandchildren.
He's got nobody to stand up for him.
If you think about it, in a sense,
if it were your great grandfather,
whose name had been sullied,
you would advocate and say
that they need to be exonerated.
But he has no relatives to stand in for him.
So it fell to me as the rabbi of Cobb County.
I became in effect, Leo Frank's rabbi,
and it came to me that this is something important
to show that really justice delayed is justice denied.
So justice needs to be done to clear this man's name.
>> There was what was it in after Alonzo Man there was,
what was the Board-
>> Board of Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles 1984.
>> They stopped short of saying that he was innocent.
>> Well, in '84, they refused to hear the case.
Alonzo Man comes forward in
1982 to the National Tennessean.
And they don't quite know what to make of it.
It's obviously been decades now.
So they put him through a battery of lie detector tests.
Turns out everything he says holds together,
including the chronology that
we now know of what really happened.
So by 1984, the anti-defamation league
lobbied the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles
to exonerate Frank and they turned it down.
They wouldn't really even hear the case.
The ADL continued to lobby for that and in 1986, finally,
the Georgia Pardons and Paroles,
they offered a provisional pardon.
And by that, what that meant was that they would not
decide on the guilt or innocence of the case,
but simply that Georgia had failed to
protect Leo Frank's rights to have another trial,
to have an appeal, and therefore,
he was offered a posthumous pardon.
Well, that's pretty far away from
saying the guy was innocent. The exonerated.
>> So this same year, you came to this guy,
that they do this, and nothing's happened since then.
>> That's right.
>> So you're still pushing for,
>> I'm still pushing for a complete exoneration.
The man's name deserves to be cleared.
>> Well, any progress?
>> Well, with the Frank exoneration,
it's two steps forward and one step back.
But one of my greatest allies is Governor Roy Barnes.
And you may know Governor Barnes' wife, Marie,
that I guess it was
her grandfather or grand uncle
was part of the Lynch moot but
Governor Barnes is very
convinced and knows that Frank was
innocent and has worked with us on trying
to open up a number of legal pathways.
So we hope that eventually
one possibility would be the DEA of
Fulton County to reopen
the case and then have it dismissed for lack of evidence,
and that would in effect exonerate Frank's name.
>> So it's got to happen in Folk in
County that happened in trial-.
>> Because that's where the trial was.
I look forward to another interview in which I
can answer the question and I'll say yes,
in 2025, we finally cleared his name.
If you'll be there, I'll be there.
>> That would be nice.
>> Good.
>> I had a student who did a term paper number 2002,
Timothy Weiss, was his name.
Diaspora and Dixie Cobb County Jews in the 20th century.
>> I saw that. I've seen that quoted.
I've never seen the actual paper.
>> We're pulling it for you.
If we don't get it today, we'll get it for you.
>> Thank you. But was he a Jewish guy?
Just was curious. He's a undergrad at that point? Yes.
>> This was in history 275, the research class.
>> Were you the professor at the time?
>> Yes.
>> There you go.
>> But he did an informal poll.
I don't know exactly.
I need to pull the paper to remind
myself what was written 20 years ago.
But a poll of Jewish opinion.
I don't know how many people we've talked to.
I need to check again.
He concluded that anti-Semitism
or at least what people were telling him,
wasn't any worse in Cobb than elsewhere.
Most Jewish newcomers hadn't
heard of Leo Frank before coming
here and thought that Cobb had a friendly atmosphere.
Good place to live and work.
>> I think those assumptions are more or less correct.
But what I left out of the narrative is that in 1991,
when we were under construction,
some of these skinhead groups,
we think came in and damaged the building structure,
as well as all the mechanical instruments on the land.
So we cleaned it up and insurance covered it.
And at that time,
the GBI had intelligence inside these gangs.
And so the GBI came to us and they said, well,
they're going to strike again,
they're going to come again and try to really,
burn the building down.
So I got ahold of
the Cobb County police and I explained this to him,
this is what the GBI told this going
to happen. What are you going to do?
>> What did they say?
>> And the guy says, I'm not going to do
anything because it's prom weekend and
we're all busy at
various proms making sure that things go correct.
As a [inaudible] he totally blew me off.
So I let it get around the conversation.
I was frustrated and I didn't know what to do.
Well, it turns out some Jews do own guns.
And there were a couple of Jews,
I call them Jewish rednecks,
and they said, fine, they're going to
come on on Saturday night.
We'll be there to meet them. And the story goes.
I wasn't there, but the story goes is that when
this little gang of white nationalists come on,
there's that distinct sound that a gun
makes when you do that and they didn't come back.
They saw that there were people there with guns
ready to defend the site and they never came back.
>> I have never heard that story before.
>> That's true story. There had also
been written on the Sayyas trust me I got
all the stuff documented because it's in
my book of memories or whatever.
One of the things and this was an odd thing.
Not too long after that.
Somebody wrote on the temple call a sign,
and it said in German, Jews go home.
>> How did they know German?
>> Maybe they found it in
text history book either that or they knew German.
It was the oddest thing.
But we're still here and they're gone.
>> Well, there certainly have been
enough incidents even recently than cause one.
>> Sure.
>> It's still a problem.
>> Yes, anti-Semitism is
the oldest hatred in existence in history.
Already, we know from the Bible, it says [inaudible].
There's a new king, a new Pharaoh,
who arises over Egypt and he doesn't know Joseph.
What that really means in Hebrew was
he doesn't care for Joseph.
And the reason he doesn't care for
Joseph is because he's a Jew.
And of course, that is when
the Pharaoh begins to plot the destruction
of Jewish babies and the institution of Jewish slavery.
So Jew hatred is probably
the oldest hatred that we know of in world history.
>> That also points out to one
of the big problems, I think,
in translating from Hebrew is what the word no means?
>> That's right. Yeah. I probably not for attribution,
but I could tell you a few times where I
made that mistake in modern Hebrew,
to use the word no incorrectly.
It has a sexual connotation to it.
So you have to be careful how to use.
When it says when it says
Adam knew Eve or the man knew the woman,
yes it's implying a certain type of knowledge.
>> Sure. Peter Applebaum.
We had him on campus years ago.
He spoke on campus.
Dixie Rising how the South is shaping
American values, politics, and culture.
Right in this spirit in 1996, I guess it came out.
>> Yes.
>> Did he interview you for
the book? He talked about you.
>> Yeah. He interviewed me for the book.
And as a journalist,
you try to find a peg to hang your hat on.
Because you have to describe somebody.
Was he 5'3"? Did he weigh this?
Did he look like this? Was he bald?
So in the book in Dixie rising,
he says, Rabbi Leva who had a whiny voice.
So that was like a shorthand to describe me.
So I pick up the phone and I go,
"Peter, how can you say that I have a whiny voice."
It was just a joke between the two.
I didn't care what he said.
He wanted to give
some physical description to knowing me.
And he said the high pitched whiny voice.
>> Yeah. Wow. Well you've been in
a number of books and articles and what have you?
>> Yeah.
>> Bruce Jordan Murder in the Peach State had
a lot about the Frank case
and did he interview you for it?
>> He did not. What happened was after I placed
that first plaque in which so it's in 1995,
which is the 80th anniversary of the Frank lynching.
And the original plaque,
which was on this VPI building says
Leo Frank falsely charged,
wrongly convicted, wantonly murdered.
And it was published a lot in the AJC.
They would publish pictures of it and whatnot.
And so Bruce Jordan tracked me down because of that,
and he put a little bit in the book
about that. About that plaque.
>> You mentioned earlier the pastor of Mount Bethel,
UMC that made you anonymous phone call.
You had another controversy with him.
I think it was at
Walton High School Baccalaureate service.
>> Yeah. 2001.
>> And they didn't want to share the pulpit, was that?
>> Yeah. I got a phone call from
one of the Synagogue's members,
young woman, high schooler named Julia Levy.
Julia Levy was a high school
senior who was on the Baccalaureate committee.
And in previous years for the Baccalaureate Walden,
it had always been a Baptist minister who had spoken.
They stretched themselves and they
got a Methodist once in a while.
They didn't have a Presbyterian or a Jew.
So she she said to me,
we'd like you to be the baccalaureate speaker and I
said, No. Why no?
I said, I have young children.
I can't be out every single night.
I need to be at home to help take care of my children.
So we hung up and she was disappointed.
She calls me back three days later, and she says,
"Rabbi Leva, a Jew has never been invited to do this.
We know what a wonderful public speaker you are.
Can you consider doing this?"
I said, "Fine, Julia.
I'll be the speaker at the Baccalaureate.
Whatever you want."
Well, the next thing I know about two days later,
I read the headline in the AJC,
"Church barres Rabbi from Baccalaureate."
You could've knocked me out with a feather.
I was flabbergasted.
I said what the heck happened?
Well, what happened was that Randy Mickler at
Mount Beth United Methodist Church heard
that is going to be the premier speaker and
said the church is closed to Rabbi Leva.
We will not allow a Jew to address the congregation.
First place, it wasn't the congregation,
it was the kids from Waldron who were renting the place.
It had nothing to do with the congregation, actually.
And every time he opened his mouth,
he put his foot in it.
He would say things, well, we wouldn't want Muslims or
Hindus or Buddhist to come into the church either.
He'd never met a Jew. I'm convinced.
He was from a little bitty town in
North Florida and had gone to UGA.
I don't think he'd ever met a real live Jew,
but he had a certain animus,
certain prejudice against us.
Now, I wrote to him and I figured because I
remembered this story that he'd been the one
that threatened me about the anti-gay resolution.
>> How did you know that he was the one?
>> I remembered the phone call.
>> But he didn't tell you his name,
did he on the phone call?
>> That's a good question. Yeah. I don't remember.
>> But I guess after it appeared in the newspaper.
>> That's what it was because he was in charge of
the ministers group that was in the newspaper.
That's right. That is what it was.
So I wrote to him and I said, "Pastor Mickler,
I have no intention of speaking about gay rights.
I will simply make a positive message about
their graduation and that will be all."
He still refused to admit me to the church.
This controversy raged on for weeks and weeks.
On the front page, first of Metro,
front page of the AJC.
Then it went all the way to the back
to the editorial page.
There's a famous Lukovich cartoon which I have in which
Jesus Christ is trying to
enter into heaven and Randy Mickler says,
"Sorry we don't accept Jews to heaven."
Well, things were not going well.
In fact, it went to Neil Bortz,
the famous radio commentator and even he
took off after Pastor Mickler.
>> Really?
>> Yeah. So things were not good.
And it was stirring up the community.
People were having fights and arguments,
and I would hear this from kids in school.
They were defending Rabbi Leva.
This other kid was defending
Pastor Mickler and it was
not good for the community at all.
And in my mind, I thought, great.
I said the next thing is
he's going to lose his job because
the Methodist Bishop was not happy with Randy Mickler.
And I thought, that's great,
because the next headline is going to
be Jews crucify minister.
And we can't have that.
So I went to the Methodist Bishop
and he called in Pastor Mickler and I said,
"Look, we have got to find a way to put an end to this.
This is not good for Cobb County and Marietta.
This is terrible for the community."
And he was shocked.
I don't know what to do. I said,
"Well, here's what we're going to do.
When we leave this room
today and the press comes up to us,
we're going to have our arms around each other and
we're going to say that we've reconciled.
And we're not going to worry about the service anymore."
The service in the meantime had been switched to
the Cobb County Civic Center.
>> So you've got to do it?
>> I did do it. But at that meeting,
I said to the Methodist Bishop,
"Let's find some kind of common ground."
And the common ground is that we would
build a house for habitat for humanity.
Yeah. I called it the house that healed.
And when we left the meeting that day,
we were able to say to the press, you know what,
we have our differences,
but we're going to concentrate on
the similarities between the two of us.
That's how that ended. And then,
yes, I did, in fact,
address the Baccalaureate but
it was done in the Cobb County Civic Center.
>> Remember what you told them?
>> Yes. I told them that they were
ordinary heroes that they could
aspire to be as they got older.
>> Great.
So well, sounds like a happy ending.
>> It worked out.
>> Mount Bethel has had a tough history,
the last year or was it?
>> Well, not to be too catty about it.
But Randy Mickler was considered by
both Methodist ministers as wanting to be baptist.
He was a Wannabe. And he
was extremely the Methodist church,
just like I said, with Presbyterians,
and people ask what is I said well, they're normal.
Presbyterians are a normal Christian,
and Methodist is they're not too far left,
they're not too far right at this point.
Well, Pastor Mickler was very upset about
these social issues and wanted to
drag Mount Bethel with him.
And so as you said,
they still have issues over who gets to be the pastor,
who owns the land that the church is on, that thing.
>> Well, it sounds like you
entered it as best you could, though.
>> That's right.
>> Have it that for humanity?
>> We constituted the first ever ecumenical Habitat build
because it's not after 2001,
911 there was such prejudice and
animus against Muslim Americans that I said,
we could use this Habitat build
to really show our strength as Americans.
And so every Habitat build has
participation with Muslim participants.
It's the only Jewish
Christian Muslim Habitat build that I know of.
>> Wow.
>> And we did that here in Cop.
>> Fantastic. I'm going
to ask you maybe about some of your views.
You had a sermon there were giants in the Earth.
>> That was the sermon that I gave
at the Copcunty Civic Center. That's the one.
>> And so the giants are about
ordinary people who are heroes?
>> That's right. If you
told I would've brought a copy for me with you.
>> Representative of American speeches,
the textbook in 2001.
Any particular giants that
you talked about in the speech?
>> Well, I talked about really just their parents,
as well as people that served,
whether they be policemen or whether they be nurses,
people that serve us every single day and they
don't look for credit.
They don't look for admiration.
And those are the people in our lives, for example,
I mentioned earlier in the interview,
I had a teacher that totally changed
my life when I was 19 years old.
And I said to these kids.
I said, you may not remember it now,
you may not think about it now,
but someday you will look back and you'll say,
there was a teacher, my junior year
in high school, my senior year.
And they opened my eyes to thus and such a thing,
they changed my life,
and that's what the sermon is about,
is for ordinary heroes.
>> I see. Well, I was going to
ask how the Textbook ever found your sermon,
but I guess it was in the newspaper.
>> It was in the newspaper. It was
a great honor because the people
and representative speeches are
basically Supreme Court justices,
congressmen, and senators.
So, I certainly the only rabbit that was ever in there,
but I don't know if any other ministers had had a sermon
published in there either. It was a great honor.
>> Absolutely. Well, you were
also in a textbook by Dana Evans Kaplan,
American Reform Judaism and Introduction.
That talked about your unique synagogue style.
What is unique about your synagogue style?
>> We were the first synagogue in Atlanta of
any denomination to use rock and roll music.
And it's not unusual in Christian churches nowadays,
it's called contemporary worship.
And in a Christian church,
sometimes you'll drive by
a Protestant Church and we'll say
contemporary worship at
nine traditional worship at 10:30.
Well, contemporary worship, what that
means is that it's rock and roll,
and some people like it and some people don't.
But I am a guitarist,
and I have a marvelous
cantorial soloist who works with me,
Blake Singer, and he's a wonderful guitarist.
And so when I came in 86,
we made sure that the walls
were trembling at the sound of rock and roll.
And that was one of the things that drew people to
us is that we had a modern ethos and a modern spirit.
I tell people we built the synagogue on rock and roll.
And we have a closing song instead of a traditional hymn,
we'd use a song by Bob Dylan or
we'd use Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen.
And so I was able to weave pop culture into
the Jewish faith and that was
help make it approachable for a number of people.
>> How long do your services usually have?
>> So the Jewish services,
I tell people are mercifully short
and the average Friday night service
would be about an hour.
A Saturday morning service includes a scriptural reading,
so that could be as long as an hour and a half.
Excuse me, the main bugaboo is
the Jewish High holiday services which are hours long.
And that's just part of the process,
and it can be three hours at a time.
Standing and sitting,
and sitting and standing.
And so they can be very tedious,
so I would use various tricks to try to make the service
interesting rather than give a 25 minute sermon,
which here I am preaching to the MTV generation,
the video game generation,
the Star Wars generation.
They couldn't stand to sit still for 25 minutes.
So what I did was, I would take
sermons and chop them into little chunks.
And at the very beginning of the service,
I would start the sermons, You know what?
To be continued. We'd have
a couple of prayers and so you know what?
Part 2 of five,
and I would split these long sermons into
little bitty tangible moments
that people could understand.
So that was one of my tricks.
>> I found a quote from you
Atlanta Jewish Times on April 8th,
2020 Passover time, it's your
Passover thought. Do you remember that?
>> I do not. Tell me what brilliant thing I said.
>> Above all, the Jews are survivors.
Jews have survived the exposion from Spain,
the Spanish inquisition, and the Holocaust.
At times, it seems like all history has
conspired to cleanse the earth of the Jewish people.
But our glory is that we have
survived even the worst darkness of history.
The Torah describes the Jews as the prisoners of hope.
We will survive COVID 19,
and by next year,
each of us will be able to say, next year injures.
>> The man who wrote that must be
brilliant or so well expressed.
I'm not sure I can do it again.
But I will tell you,
I do meditate on the fact that of
all the ancient peoples, they're all gone.
There's no Babylonians, there's no Assyrians,
there's no ancient Romans,
there's no Greek empire.
There's no Ottoman Turks and you go down
the list of each and every one of
those ancient or even medieval empires,
they're all gone, we're still here.
We're the survivors of history of the Jewish people,
and we're not going anywhere.
>> In my Sunday school class we're
doing the 12 profits now.
And I've been doing that.
I think one of the great miracles of history is that
the Jewish people came out of
the Babylonian conquest stronger
than they ever were before.
>> That's right.
>> That they survived.
That was a miracle in itself?
>> That's right. Our wisdom was portable.
You were able to transport,
no matter where you were,
what income you had.
But the wisdom was portable.
>> You retired in 2020, I believe?
>> I did. I tell people I used
to work as a congregational rabbi,
same thing as ministers.
You were on call 24/7.
>> I was going to ask you,
first of all, why did you decide to retire?
>> That's a good question.
My contemporaries were beginning to retire.
And I looked at myself and I said, you know what?
It's not that much fun anymore.
It's a lot of work to be a congregational rabbi.
It could be as much as 70 hours a week.
And I said, I want to
do something different with the next part of my life.
And I thought, and it's time to bring
in somebody new that brings in new ideas,
new technology, new themes, and new topics.
And so it's a market of pride as I decided to,
they didn't ever asked me to in fact,
I had a life contract, I had tenures.
>> That's going to say is that 1996,
they gave you a life tenure,
I think there's probably a lot of pastors that would.
>> They would like that. I was lucky.
But it just felt like the right time.
And I tell people, I used to
work for those 70 hours a week.
Now I only work 40 hours a week because in one week,
I'll have three funerals, two weddings.
There's no rabbis in North Georgia.
There are a little B congregations,
but no rabbis to serve them.
So I am the preacher circuit riding rabbi.
And once a month, I go to Rome, Georgia.
Once a month, I go to Gainesville, Georgia.
I used to go quarterly to Blue Ridge LJ.
So I tell people I'm the chief rabbi of
North Georgia because I'm
the only rabbi of North Georgia.
>> [LAUGHTER] Another quote from you.
Every day I realize how lucky I am.
Most clergymen never get a chance to spend
their entire professional careers in one congregation.
>> I said to somebody the other day,
we're talking about various things and I said, well,
we're lucky that we had
certain things happen to us in
life and he looked at me straight in the eyes and said,
no, we're not lucky, we're blessed.
And I thought that's a better way to look at it.
For whatever reason, God was on my side at that point,
and I got to sink these deep roots
into red clay soil and
that my children never had to move,
my spouse never had to move.
They grew up in a community where they felt safe
and where they felt rooted in where they came from.
>> You were saying before we started that
you moved into Marietta at some time.
>> Yeah. In fact, I talked about this
and some of the speeches that I give about Leo Frank,
but the fact of the matter is
the Frank Lynching site is
only a couple miles from where I live.
So from where I
put my head down on the pillow every night,
I can think for
a moment that that's where Leo Frank was killed.
>> Sure. Well, I'm about out of question.
A good thing that we should have
talked about that we haven't covered.
>> No. Let's see. You mentioned the back laureate.
You mentioned the growth of the synagogue,
you mentioned the Leo Frank case.
Oh, back there was something else I forget.
But anyway, you covered it all.
You must do this for a living?
>> Something like that.
>> That's right.