New York City houses of worship working to strengthen Black-Jewish alliance
NEW YORK -- As we remember the late Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., there are two New York City houses of worship strengthening the Black-Jewish alliance.
During Dr. King's road to justice, he often visited churches and synagogues in the fight against racism.
Inside the East End Synagogue in the East Village, two communities have become one. Middle Collegiate Church has been holding services there after a fire burned down its historic home two years ago.
- For more on Middle Collegiate Church, click here. For more on East End Temple, click here.
Sunday, Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis and Rabbi Joshua Stanton brought their congregations together for an MLK Teach-In.
"We have a prophetic alliance around liberation, around exodus, around freedom and frankly around the command to love," Lewis said.
"In learning from the Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis ... The civil rights movement is not over. Racial justice has not become a reality in our country. Reparations for what our country has done have not materialized," Stanton said.
It's a relationship akin to the bond between the late Rabbi Israel Dresner, King and Rev. Dr. Ralph David Abernathy.
Dresner, from New Jersey, was the most arrested rabbi, protesting segregated buses and restaurants.
Dresner and Abernathy's children met for the first time last week at the Holocaust Museum in Los Angeles.
"When my dad met Dr. King for the first time in jail in Albany, Georgia, in 1962 and shook his hands through the bars of the cell, Rev. Abernathy was right there with him in that cell," Avi Dresner said. "We really both felt like both our dads were smiling down on us."
Renewing this alliance is happening beyond places of worship.
Saturday, at the West Side Comedy Club on West 75th Street, the show "Agree to Laugh," a Black Jewish comedy night, makes its New York debut. Erik Angel and Onika McLean are friends and part of several comedians who will perform.
"We've come up together, and I just feel the divisiveness lately, uh, no, we are always better together," McLean said.
"We wanna bring the positive to push from the other side," Angel said.
- For more information on "Agree to Laugh," click here.
"We don't all have to be a King, but we can all be a revolutionary lover and think about the small steps we can take toward justice. That's our shared calling," Lewis said.
Forging bonds from generation to generation.