Anti-Semitic incidents in East Cobb ‘are not who we are’

A rash of anti-Semitic incidents in East Cobb in recent weeks has jarred an area with a sizable Jewish community.

In response, representatives of that Jewish community, along with other East Cobb faith leaders and local public officials, said Monday their message will be that such actions won’t be tolerated.

With the Southern Division of the Anti-Defamation League they announced the launching of an education campaign that will include bias training and a chance for the larger public to become allies with those unlike themselves.

The first of those sessions will take place virtually on Sept. 9 starting at 7:30 p.m. It’s free to attend but you must register and can do so by clicking here.

Most of all, their response is that love and understanding are the only ways to overcome hatred.

“I want to say ‘I love you,’ ” said Rabbi Larry Sernovitz of Temple Kol Emeth, one of three synagogues in East Cobb, and where Monday’s gathering was held.

“I don’t need to know you to love you.”

He said those who scrawled graffiti in East Cobb—there are at least a half-dozen known incidents since the middle of August—were educated that such expressions can be tolerated.

What’s needed again and again, Sernovitz said, is “a million acts of kindness,” and he referenced the Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, who “believed that redemption can save the world.”

The gathering was prompted by swastika and other graffiti discovered in a neighborhood near Post Oak Tritt Road and Holly Springs Road. Residents there cleaned the spray-paint quickly.

On Sunday, Sernovitz told his congregation that at least five more similar incidents are being investigated.

Cobb Police Chief Tim Cox, who attended Monday’s event at Kol Emeth, said the first incident took place on Aug. 16, and investigators are not sure if the other incidents happened at once or on separate dates.

Lt. Bruce Danz, an investigator with Cobb Police Precinct 4, said all the incidents were in East Cobb. They included anti-Semitic graffiti being spray-painted on road signs on Post Oak Tritt Road that was removed by Cobb DOT.

He said in two-and-a-half years in Precinct 4, this is the first time he’s known of such incidents.

Danz said that “right now, we don’t have any leads,” but that police are “actively investigating.”

Cox said that anyone in the public who may have information about these or similar incidents should contact Lt. Abbott of the Precinct 4 Criminal Investigations Unit at 770-499-4184.

Several clergy members of the East Cobb faith communities were invited to speak, including Congregation Etz Chaim, Emerson Universalist Unitarian Congregation, Unity North Church East Cobb Church, the Church of Latter-Day Saints and the East Cobb Islamic Center.

Also speaking were U.S. Rep. Lucy McBath, Cobb District Attorney Joyette Holmes and Commissioner Bob Ott of East Cobb.

Ott said Cobb County Manager Jackie McMorris will be presenting a measure in September to reconstitute the county’s dormant Human Relations Commission.

Those plans had been in the works before the anti-Semitic attacks, but Ott said the timing of these events makes it more imperative to build bridges of understanding in the community.

“This is not who we are,” Ott said. “This is not what we are about.”

The human relations panel was created in the early 1990s, after county commissioners approved a controversial anti-gay resolution.

Among those leading the outcry against the resolution was Steven Lebow, the longtime Kol Emeth rabbi who retired this summer.

Sernovitz started in July as Lebow’s successor, and calls one of his first public actions in his new role “a teachable moment.”

“This can happen anywhere,” he said. “The strength of our community is how we respond.”

Related stories

• East Cobb synagogue informed of more anti-Semitic incidents
• East Cobb synagogue to begin anti-bias initiative
• East Cobb neighborhood vandalized with ‘multiple swastikas’
• Temple Kol Emeth chooses successor to retiring Rabbi Lebow
• At East Cobb interfaith service, pledging to be ‘my brother’s keeper’

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