Temple Kol Emeth, a Reform synagogue in East Cobb, announced Monday that Rabbi Lawrence “Larry” Sernovitz has been chosen to succeed the retiring Rabbi Steven Lebow, effective July 1.
Sernovitz comes from Cherry Hill, N.J., where he was the founding rabbi of Nafshenu, an egalitarian Jewish community catering to non-affiliated Jews. He also was a chaplain for the Cherry Hill Police Department.
“We’re thrilled to welcome Rabbi Sernovitz to lead the next chapter of Temple Kol Emeth’s rich history,” Rachel Barich, President of the Board of Trustees for the synagogue, said in a statement.
Lebow, who became Kol Emeth’s first full-time rabbi in 1986, announced his retirement last fall. In November, he presided over his final Ecumenical Thanksgiving Service, which he began as an interfaith community effort in the wake of 9/11.
“Temple Kol Emeth is an important part of the East Cobb community,” Sernovitz in a statement issued by the synagogue. “Rabbi Lebow has built an inclusive Jewish community that truly stands for something, and I’m eager to help existing members and new unaffiliated families find spirituality, connect and help to repair the world.”
Lebow’s community activities included protesting against an anti-gay resolution by the Cobb Board of Commissioners in 1993. He was honored for his community service and social change efforts by the Cobb Citizens Coalition, Creative Loafing magazine, the National Conference of Christians and Jews and the State of Georgia Holocaust Commission.
Sernovitz has been named a recipient of the Camden County MLK Freedom Medal for his efforts to bring South Jersey communities together following the fatal shootings at Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018.
Lebow will become the Rabbi Emeritus of Temple Kol Emeth, conducting occasional sermons at the synagogue. He also plans to continue service through teaching, writing and lending his rabbinic expertise to smaller regional congregations.
Kol Emeth will have a farewell celebration for Lebow in April.
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The year 2019 marked some dramatic change for several East Cobb faith communities, including one of its best known. Johnson Ferry Baptist Church has a new pastor, only the second its history.
Rev. Clay Smith was called from First Baptist Church in Matthews, N.C., to succeed founding pastor Rev. Bryant Wright.
Wright, who initially ministered to a tiny congregation in vacant office space in the early 1980s, shepherded the church into one with more than 8,000 members, with a sprawling campus on Johnson Ferry Road that now includes a large activities center, ball fields and a K-12 school.
In addition, Wright began the non-denominational Wright From the Heart Ministries, reaching radio and multimedia audiences, and was president of the Southern Baptist Convention as it welcomed historically black congregations.
At the end of 2018 Wright indicated his desire to step away from his Johnson Ferry duties, and will continue with Wright From the Heart.
Another long-time spiritual leader in East Cobb announced this year he will be retiring in 2020. Steven Lebow of Temple Kol Emeth became the Reform synagogue’s first full-time rabbi in 1986 and took part in community protests against an anti-gay resolution by the Cobb Board of Commissioners in the early 1990s.
Rabbi Steven Lebow of Temple Kol Emeth is retiring at the end of June 2020.
Later he took up the cause of working to exonerate Leo Frank, a Jewish factory manager who was lynched near what is now Frey’s Gin Road in 1915. In the wake of 9/11, Lebow started an annual Ecumenical service the week before Thanksgiving, inviting faith leaders and worshippers from around the north metro Atlanta for music, humor and interfaith messages of unity.
Earlier this year, Eastside Baptist Church made the news when the Southern Baptist Convention had listed it for possible “defellowshipping” related to a 2017 sexual abuse case.
Newspapers in Texas had reported on allegations of abuse in the SBC, but Eastside Pastor John Hull was publicly critical of the SBC for the listing, saying the congregation on Lower Roswell Road had addressed the matter promptly.
A former Eastside youth ministry volunteer was convicted of two counts of sexual battery in 2016 and is in prison; the church took actions to improve security, strengthen background checks and increase safety as Hull was coming on board.
The SBC later removed Eastside from the list, saying no further investigation was warranted.
In September, a longtime East Cobb church announced it was closing its doors, due to declining an aging membership and financial issues.
Members of Powers Ferry United Methodist Church gathered in early December for “homecoming” as the 65-year-old congregation prepares for its final service on Dec. 29.
Also as the holidays approached, two East Cobb churches became one. Geneva Orthodox Presbyterian Church, which had been sharing space with Hope Presbyterian Church on Sandy Plains Road, merged with Christ Presbyterian.
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Retiring Temple Kol Emeth Rabbi Steven Lebow with clergy following the 15th Ecumenical Thanksgiving Service (ECN photos and videos by Wendy Parker).
Rabbi Steven Lebow was scheduled to give the final benediction near the end of the interfaith Ecumenical Thanksgiving Service at Temple Kol Emeth in East Cobb Thursday night when the event took a most surprising turn.
The rabbi who had a vision for a celebrating religious and social pluralism in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks has rarely been a man of few words.
But when another clergyman rambled down an aisle at the synagogue, crooning Kenny Rodgers’ “The Gambler” as the packed house delighted, Lebow was left speechless.
The mystery guest was retired Monsignor Patrick Bishop of Transfiguration Catholic Church, who worked with Lebow to get the service started. The affable “Father Pat”—who retired in 2014—warmly embraced Lebow and nearly brought the retiring rabbi to tears.
Lebow is stepping down in July, after becoming the first full-time leader of the East Cobb Reform synagogue in 1986.
“For 30 years . . . you have stood for the marginalized and the outcast,” Bishop said. “You screamed and hollered when injustices were done to others, even facing serious injustices done toward you.
“Fifteen years ago you had a dream, to bring people of goodwill, who could share in these troubled times, not division and poison and polarization and the ugliness of the world we’re living in right now, but the goodness of people. . .
“It’s easy to get cynical. We need each other, to say, ‘Hey wait a minute, the darkness does not prevail. Light will win out.’ You, my dearest rabbi, have been a light to nations.”
His remarks embodied the service’s theme of “Are We Our Brother’s Keepers?” and that featured music and personal reflections. The service attracted several hundred people and included participation from nearly two dozen faith communities in metro Atlanta.
“I wasn’t surprised,” Lebow said about the visit from Father Pat. “I was flabbergasted. In a community of several hundred people, this was kept a secret from me. I am on cloud nine. I am delighted to be with an old friend.”
Hal Schlenger, a Temple Kol Emeth congregant who heads the service’s organizing committee, said the key to flabbergasting the rabbi was to tell hardly anyone.
“Six people, and my wife,” he said after the service.
The festivities included a Muslim call to prayer by members of the Roswell Community Masjid, songs from an interfaith choir from the participating faith communities, reflections from youth about addressing climate change and global warming, and poignant pleas for peace.
“Fifteen years ago, this was a vision I had,” Lebow said at the start of the service, and then brought the crowd to a loud applause. “Take a look at this. This is what America looks like.”
The message was clear: Helping others in need, regardless of whom they may be, is at the essence not only of faith, but in the spirit of brotherhood and community.
“The best way to help someone is to teach them how to help themselves,” said Kol Emeth member Henry Hene. “There’s no better way to help one another than to do it together.”
Mansoor Sabree, director of the Intercity Muslim Action Network of Atlanta, bolstered that message by explaining the work of his organization to help formerly incarcerated people transition to outside life.
“We see this as a chance to join an interfaith community,” he said, “and lead in a way in which we trust in God and in our humanity.”
The German-born Syrian-American pianist Malek Jandali, of the Atlanta-based charity Pianos for Peace, also issued an emphatic message for people of goodwill to combat hate and violence in a most eloquent way.
In his work, he has visited refugee camps in war-ravaged Syria, where his parents had been beaten for their son’s song, “Watani Ana,” written to protest the Syrian regime.
“Truth is being attacked,” Jandali said, “and art is the answer.”
The participating faith communities included:
Baha’i Faith Center
Chestnut Ridge Christian Church
Emerson Unitarian Universalist Church
First United Lutheran Church of Kennesaw
Northwest Unitarian Universalist Congregation
Sandy Springs Christian Church
St. Catherine’s Episcopal Church
Temple Beth Tikvah
Temple Kol Emeth
The Art of Living Foundation
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
Transfiguration Catholic Church
Trinity Presbyterian Church Atlanta
Unitarian Universalist Metro-Atlanta North Congregation
Unity North Atlanta Church
Proceeds from the offering will benefit IMAN Atlanta and Kol Emeth’s “Give-A-Gobble” program to purchase turkeys and Thanksgiving dinners for those in need.
Lebow’s co-host in recent years has been Noor Abbady of the Roswell Community Masjid, who said in closing that while she’s going to miss being by his side, “the spirit of being each other’s keepers lives on.
“We don’t need to be of the same religion to be decent human beings.”
Lebow said he still plans to remain living in Cobb County, but admitted “I’m gonna miss” presiding over the service he initially thought would draw only a hundred or so people.
If they have him back, he quipped, “I’ll still tell a few bad jokes.”
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Atlanta attorney Dale Schwartz, a key figure in Leo Frank’s posthumous pardon in 1986, holds up a photo of the 1915 lynching near what is now Frey’s Gin Road. (East Cobb News photos and video by Wendy Parker)
The Leo Frank memorial that stood near the site of the infamous lynching in Marietta 103 years ago this month has been relocated and on Thursday morning was rededicated.
Across the street from that venue on Roswell Road, representatives of the Cobb and metro Atlanta Jewish community and others gathered to honor the memory of Frank, regarded as the only Jewish lynching victim in American history.
Squeezed between the new Northwest Corridor Express Lanes on Interstate 75 and a taco eatery, the marker is located in a “parklet” created by the Georgia Department of Transportation.
The small slice of greenspace, with soft soil underneath reflecting its very recent planting, also has become the new focal point for continuing efforts to fully and formally clear Frank of the murder of 13-year-old Mary Phagan, a girl from Marietta, in 1913.
“Leo Frank is innocent,” said Rabbi Steven Lebow of Temple Kol Emeth in East Cobb, a leader in pushing for a full exoneration of Frank.
“Your presence here today is one more step toward full exoneration.”
The dignitaries included Marietta City Council member Joseph Goldstein and State Sen. Kay Kirkpatrick of East Cobb, as well as representatives of the Georgia Historical Society, the Cobb SCLC and various Jewish organizations.
Frank was a supervisor at the National Pencil Company in downtown Atlanta in 1913 when Phagan, a worker there, was found murdered in a basement. Frank was put on trial, convicted and sentenced to death and later imprisoned in Milledgeville.
When his sentence was commuted to life, a mob from Marietta traveled to the jail. The mob, which allegedly included prominent local citizens, law enforcement and elected officials, kidnapped Frank. They brought him back to Marietta and on Aug. 17, 1915, hanged him from an oak tree near what is now Frey’s Gin Road.
The trial and lynching earned national headlines, inflaming anti-Semitic tensions in America and helping revive the Ku Klux Klan, but also giving birth to the Anti-Defamation League.
In more recent years, the Frank case has inspired several films and books as Jewish leaders worked for a pardon. That effort was sparked by a 1982 admission by Alonzo Mann, a pencil factory worker, that Frank was wrongly convicted.
After a silence of nearly 70 years, Mann said he saw Jim Conley, a factory custodian, carrying Mary Phagan’s body the day she died. Mann also said was told by Conley he would be killed if he told anyone about what he saw.
At Frank’s trial, Conley was the main witness for the prosecution against Frank. The state of Georgia granted Frank a pardon in 1986, but only on the grounds that he did not receive a fair trial.
“We’re still trying to get a new trial that would, in effect, exonerate him,” said Dale Schwartz, an Atlanta attorney who also has led the charge for a pardon.
The Leo Frank saga was national front-page news for more than two years, from his trial and imprisonment to his lynching.
He retold the story of the pardon effort in detail, as well as his own Jewish family being attacked by the Klan for hiring black workers at a clothing store in Winder during the Jim Crow era.
The Leo Frank memorial was originally dedicated in 2008 by the Georgia Historical Society, the Jewish American Society for Historic Preservation and Temple Kol Emeth.
It had to be moved four years ago to make way for an entrance ramp to the Express Lanes, which are scheduled to open by the end of the summer. The marker was kept in storage during that time by Georgia DOT.
Jerry Klinger, founder and president of the Jewish American Society, said the new site is the perfect venue for what he said is “an important story.”
Rabbi Steven Lebow of East Cobb’s Temple Kol Emeth.
“We have an opportunity to transform the meaning of this location beyond Leo Frank,” he said.
Klinger noted nearly a century’s worth of anti-lynching legislation that has never been passed, as well as a bipartisan bill recently introduced in the U.S. Senate.
He said his organization will soon locate a black granite anti-lynching marker on the site, also in honor of Frank, and has placed a floral arrangement near Phagan’s gravesite at the Marietta City Cemetery.
“We chose to remember the first victim but also chose to remember all the victims in the United States who have suffered the horrors of lynching,” Klinger said.
The Southeast regional office of the Anti-Defamation League in Atlanta also planted a crepe myrtle tree and invited guests to shovel dirt around it to honor the dead.
Shelley Rose, the ADL deputy regional director, said Georgia is only one of five states that does not have a hate-crimes law, and said it’s important to press for such legislation here.
Rabbi Daniel Dorsch of Congregation Etz Chaim in East Cobb offered a benediction he dubbed “A Really Horrible Thing,” based on what a supermarket clerk told him in reference to the Frank case, not long after he moved to the community two years ago.
The rededication, Dorsch said, can help “to inspire us to go out and create a world where there will be no more horrible things.”
The new Leo Frank memorial site is located between Huarache Veloz Mexican Taqueria, 1157 Roswell Road, and Interstate 75.
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An interfaith choir from the participating faith communities performed “Amani,” “America the Beautiful,” “I Will Sing Hallelujah” and “Take Down These Walls.” (East Cobb News photos and slideshow by Wendy Parker
A special focus on young people in need and those who serve them was part of the 13th annual Ecumenical Thanksgiving Service Thursday at Temple Kol Emeth, with the theme “Dare to Be.”
That formed the basis of reflections from adults and teens representing several faith communities in and near East Cobb, as well as efforts to help Cobb youths.
With Thanksgiving a week away, a packed audience at the East Cobb Reform synagogue heard about the work of the Center for Children and Young Adults, a Marietta non-profit that provides more than a roof for homeless teens. It provides education and a sense of family for the youngsters, several of whom also performed musically at the service.
Angela Thornton of the CCYA.
Angela Thornton, the CCYA’s advancement officer, spoke about the success stories of several young people her agency has taken in, including a current student at Reinhardt College.
“Our youth dare to do every single day,” she said. “It’s not just a shelter. We’re a home.”
November is Homeless Youth Awareness month, and Thornton said nearly 40 percent of all homeless people in the United States are teens and young adults.
Proceeds from the offering at Thursday’s service are going to purchase Thanksgiving food for the CCYA, as well as to the Give-A-Gobble community food support program, a longtime beneficiary of Kol Emeth’s Women of Reform Judaism organization.
Gathering music performed by the drum circle of the Emerson Unitarian Universalist Congregation and Unity North Atlanta.The Muslim call to prayer by Hassan Faye of the Roswell Community Masjid.
In another symbol of interfaith generosity, Fred Macey, a member of the Emerson Unitarian Universalist Congregation on Canton Road, presented a tapestry of Mecca he acquired on a trip to Saudi Arabia in 1975 to the Roswell Community Masjid.
Fred Macey bequeathed a tapestry of a Muslim worship in Mecca he purchased more than 40 years ago to the Roswell Community Masjid.
Macey, who also sang in the choir, explained his gesture in the service program:
“May mutual respect between worshippers flourish for generations to come, as people of all faiths grow together and work, worship, pray, share music and food—and especially listen to one another in the coming years. May we always find joy and peace in the recognition that you and I are one.”
Kol Emeth Rabbi Steven Lebow, who started the service in the aftermath of post-Sept. 11 sentiments in Amrerica, asked attendees to think about “what they saw” while taking part in a celebration of many faiths.
While some may have seen others as different when they arrived, he said, “after the 90 minutes, you came to the realization that this is what America looks like!”
He got a standing ovation, and the choir sang “Take Down These Walls” before the attendees gathered in the synagogue’s social room for “noshing” and continued fellowship.
Rabbi Steven Lebow of Temple Kol Emeth, who started the Ecumenical Thanksgiving Service in 2005.
The faith communities taking part include: Ahmadiyya Muslim Community; The Art of Living Foundation; Baha’i Faith Center for Learning; East Cobb Islamic Center; East Cobb United Methodist Church; Emerson Unitarian Universalist Congregation; Faith Alliance of Metro Atlanta; Holy Trinity Lutheran Church; Interfaith Community Initiatives; Islamic Center of Marietta (Al-Hedaya); Temple Kol Emeth; Masjid Al-Muminum; Pilgrimage United Church of Christ; Roswell Community Masjid; Sikh Educational Welfare Association; Gurudwara Sahib; St. Catherine’s Episcopal Church; The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints; Transfiguration Catholic Church; Unity North Atlanta Church.
More photos from the 13th Ecumenical Thanksgiving Service:
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