More than 100 clergy members from across faith groups in the Twin Cities stood in solidarity Tuesday morning, supporting the planned “Strike Day” in Minnesota. Rabbis Tamar Magill-Grimm, Max Davis, and Lynn Liberman, and Cantors Tamar Havililo and Rachel Stock Spilker represented the Jewish community at a press conference at St. Paul’s Lutheran Church of the Redeemer.
“We cannot be silent in the face of these multiplying injustices,” Magill-Grimm said. “Across Minnesota, clergy and religious leaders from many faiths will open their houses of worship for prayer vigils and reflection, communities will come together to greet what is happening at the hands of ICE and the unlawful and unconstitutional siege being carried out against families, workers, children and entire neighborhoods.
“As people of faith, as leaders of faith communities, we are called to say ‘Enough. Not on our watch.’”
Rabbi Tamar Magill-Grimm speaking at a press conference. Cantors Tamar Havilio and Rachel Stock Spilker are behind Magill-Grimm to the right.
Magill-Grimm, senior rabbi at Beth Jacob Congregation, said that Jewish texts and teachers are clear.
“We draw strength from the prophets, from Isaiah and Jeremiah and from the most repeated commandment in the Torah to love and protect the stranger in your midst,” she said.
Friday’s event, “ICE Out of Minnesota Day of Truth & Freedom,” starts at 2 p.m. at The Commons, 425 Portland Ave. S., in Minneapolis, which is the green space outside of U.S. Bank Stadium. The clergy at Tuesday’s press conference echoed the calls of the organizers of the event: a day of no work, no shopping, and no school.
“We, the assembled clergy here, call for a day of reflection, of prayer, of invocation, and a day of solidarity on Friday,” said Imam Asad Zaman, the chair of the Muslim American Society. “We have witnessed people being beaten up for the simple act of videotaping and photographing activities, and we have witnessed a mother being murdered moments after she dropped off her child. And these heavy-handed tactics appear to be designed to spread fear across the state. The people of Minnesota, however, have responded with calm. The people of Minnesota have responded with peaceful protests.”
For Friday’s action, MARCH Minnesota is welcoming an estimated 600 clergy from around the country, with up to 80 of them Jewish clergy. Members of T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights, Bend The Arc, and the Religious Action Center of the Union for Reform Judaism are among those expected to travel.
On Thursday, the clergy will be gathering for training to help learn what the ask is of the organizers of the Friday march: ICE must leave Minnesota immediately; the officer who killed Renee Good must be held legally accountable; no additional federal funding for ICE in the upcoming Congressional budget and ICE should be investigated for human and Constitutional violations of Americans and our neighbors; and a call for Minnesota and national companies to become 4th Amendment businesses, cease economic relations with ICE, and refuse ICE entry or using their property for staging grounds.
“It’s an incredible statement of support and solidarity from across denominations across the country,” said Rabbi Arielle Lekach-Rosenberg, the senior rabbi at Shir Tikvah, and one of the organizers of Thursday’s clergy convening. “It’s such an immense declaration of support and concern on behalf of our colleagues. We’re so grateful that they’re going to be here with us.”
The events were announced on Friday, Jan. 16, and Lekach-Rosenberg isn’t surprised at the outpouring of support.
“People are so hungry to find ways to engage,” she said. “I think that the concern for this incredible escalation and the disproportionate force that’s being called down on immigrants, brown and black people, observers on street corners. This attack on our democracy is something that people across the country are so concerned about. And I think that this call gave people something concrete to do.”
Said Magill-Grimm: “This is a moral issue. It’s not a partisan issue. And I understand that not everyone will agree on it. But when I see this much support for our neighbors, and when I see what’s happening – things that are really, truly illegal – it’s not really about trying to balance a lot of different perspectives.”
The Rev. JaNae Bates Imari, the co-executive director of ISAIAH, which is one of the organizations leading the charge on Friday’s event, said she wasn’t surprised that so many clergy from different faith communities were willing to come together.
Rabbi Max Davis of Darchei Noam (middle, with cap) and Rabbi Lynn Liberman (to Davis’s right), the Jewish community chaplain at St. Paul Jewish Federation. (Lonny Goldsmith/TC Jewfolk)
“It wasn’t hard in the sense [that] there’s a massive amount of organic energy that people, who sometimes would be unlikely suspects, are calling for ICE to leave Minnesota,” she said “We have even seen people across partisanship calling for ICE to leave Minnesota. We know that now is the time for those who maybe haven’t always been fully aligned to come together.
“All these different conversations can happen in silos. And so it did take quite a bit of work to make sure that we all know we’re all saying the same thing right now, and it is important to be able to continue to discuss that with the rest of the country.”
Jewish Community Action, which celebrated its 30th anniversary last month, is also a part of the events on both Thursday and Friday. Geri Katz, the director of organizing and coalitions, said that many Jews in the community have recent, generational memories about being the stranger in this country.
“We have a real personal reaction to seeing immigrants treated inhumanely,” she said. “I think a lot about the stories that I heard from my relatives. So many of us have relatives who were refugees after World War II, who came here not because they wanted to leave their homes, but because they had to.
“I think we see sometimes history repeats itself. I think history is rhyming with what we’re experiencing now. It’s not exactly the same, but there are a lot of parallels.”
MARCH – Multifaith, Anti-Racism, Change and Healing, is an interfaith group that has been around since the late 1990s. Katz said the group is explicitly a pro-queer, anti-racist group of mostly clergy. The interest in coming to bear witness to what’s been happening in Minnesota is so strong that the registration was cut off early this week.
Katz said that while the surge in ICE officers has been going on since early January, JCA and others have been preparing, including watching and learning how people in Chicago reacted to the ICE surge there in the fall.
“We learned a lot from watching what happened in Chicago, and that helped us, I think, get up to speed really quickly,” she said. “We’re asking clergy to come here, to be a witness and to learn from what is happening here, to take part in protecting the community, and then to go home to their own communities. [And] to encourage people to keep their eyes on Minnesota, but also to get prepared in their own places, because this is going to keep happening, and we have to keep learning.”
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