After The Bombing

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A bomb, a synagogue and a tale of resiliency in Chattanooga

On a summer’s evening 40 years ago, an explosion ripped through the Beth Shalom Synagogue here in Chattanooga. The blast punched two holes in the hotel next door and cracked windows for a block aground the synagogue on Pisgah Avenue, a residential street off Brainerd Road. The wood-frame building fell into a pile of ragged boards and the roof tumbled to the ground on a crazy angle.    

The night of Friday, July 29, 1977 deepened as the police and fire fighters arrived and cordoned off the area. No one was in the building. No one was injured and no lives lost. But in the coming hours and days, the small congregation of Beth would learn that the explosion was no accident, no errant gas leak gone boom. 

News reports would tell how police found an electrical cord plugged into a hallway socket in the hotel next door that ran to the crater under the synagogue. The explosion was a bomb and whoever was its creator wanted to maim and destroy. 

Today, the new building the Beth Shalom congregation built on Pisgah Avenue stands empty, the lettering removed from the small, near-windowless building. But it remains a testament to the resiliency in the face of violence. 

It’s a story worth retelling at a time when the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League Jonathan Greenblatt said in November “the American Jewish community has not seen this level of anti-Semitism in mainstream political and public discourse since the 1930s.” 

Before the bomb set in the crawl space under Beth Shalom went off, worshipers were inside. Eight Jewish men were there to pray ahead of the sabbath that began at sundown. And while they slipped skullcaps on their heads and offered up prayers in Hebrew, the eight men were two short of a Minyan (a quorum to fully conduct prayers). They left early. 

The bomb devastated the place of worship. All the chairs, the table on which the congregation rested the Torah scrolls when they unrolled them to read, gone. It was made from dark oak in the style of the heavy stands found in many eastern European synagogues and the blast broke it apart.

The Torah scrolls were inside, the hand-copied scriptures, exact down to the word and stroke. The biggest question was their fate. Jews through history risked their lives to protect Torah scrolls. 

The newspaper from that time published a photo of Chattanooga’s assistant police chief at the time Ernie Campbell, cradling one of the three scrolls in his arm. A half step behind him Rabbi Meir Stimler waves. The scrolls were covered in dust yet otherwise untouched. 

Adapting and Planning

A few days after the bombing, Stimler moved away. It was a congregation without a leader, without a building. Only each other and the Torah scrolls.

Phil Lutin, who attended the reformed synagogue in town contacted the president and founder of Beth Shalom, Morris Ellman. Lutin said, “I didn’t have $100 in my pocket. All I could think to give was my services.” Lutin recalled when he called Ellman, “The first words out of his mouth was ‘We’re going to rebuild.”

Other communities of faith offered help. Lutin recalled how small churches scraped together $100 dollars or so to give to the Jewish congregation. Together with the modest insurance payout, the congregation collected $150,000 in 1970’s money. Because most Christians gather on Sunday and Jews on Saturday, a few churches offered their places of worship.

Furthermore, Lutin said, the members of the Beth Shalom congregation knew the Torah. They moved its scrolls to the house next door. As Lutin said, it’s not necessary to have a Rabbi to have a synagogue. For the time being, the living room was its synagogue, the bedrooms its classrooms.

Beth Shalom was a small community, Lutin said. They didn’t have the wealth like other Jewish congregations in town. They didn’t consider that they could simply go to worship at other synagogues. “Jews just don’t do that,” Lutin said. 

At least one member’s arm bore the tattoo that the Nazi’s scratched into his arm at a concentration camp. The feeling in the congregation was that they survived a systematic effort to wipe them from the face of the earth, Lutin said. They would recover from a bombing. 

The leaders of the congregation went about the process of soliciting plans for a building. Initially, an architect designed an ornate synagogue that would have cost twice what Beth Shalom could pay. Lutin, who was an environmental engineer, helped manage the project. A young architect, Nino Piccolo, who was working for the Chattanooga-based architectural firm Selmon T. Franklin Associates at the time designed a building for a lump sum. 

It was modest and contained a central meeting area, a hall that wrapped around the central meeting place, a kitchen and office space. A construction company, which is no longer in business, C & I Specialty Co. built the structure for a fixed price. That way, the project fell under budget. 

Once the plans were finalized, the congregation cleared the rubble and Lutin helped. He sifted through the rubble to collect as many pieces as he could of the Torah stand. The heavy oak frame had splintered in the blast. “It was a jigsaw puzzle.”

A timeline created by Beth Shalom in 2006 said the community broke ground on the new synagogue April 1979. 

A packed out building

At the end of construction, in October 1979, Rabbi Yitzchok Adler joined the congregation from spending two years in Savannah. He was the last step in rebuilding the congregation, he said. He was a young rabbi, having been ordained and taken his Savannah post around the same time of the bombing two years before. 

“It was only 4,000 square feet, but you’d think it was the Taj Mahal,” Adler said. It was a building with few windows—and no crawl space. 

The congregation celebrated Yom Kippur in the recently dedicated synagogue. After that service, Lutin decided to regularly attend Beth Shalom. In September 1979, the congregation celebrated its first Bar Mitzvah, according to a timeline history of the synagogue filed in the Chattanooga Public Library’s historical archives.

The place of worship becomes near and dear for a person of faith. “It becomes part of your world,” Adler said. “I don’t think it’s unique for a Jew.” An emotional tie develops, regularly attending a house of worship with a close-knit group of people. It’s something that’s lost when houses of worship become bigger, with their multi-million dollar operations and hundreds if not thousands of attendees, Adler said. 

In birth, in death, a small congregation will celebrate and mourn together, Adler said. “When your entire congregation is less than 100 souls, one person missing, everyone notices,” he said. 

Instead, Beth Shalom felt a commitment to rebuild. “I think they were guided by a personal sense of responsibility,” Adler said. “A commitment to what that synagogue represented in the community.”

Under the five years of Adler’s leadership, Beth Shalom developed an award-winning youth program through the National Conference of Synagogue Youth, which has since changed its name. Jewish youth from across the south traveled to synagogue—boarding in the motel the bomber used to blow up the old building.

“I was as much youth director as I was rabbi of that congregation,” Adler said. Because of its commitment to the investment it made in children, the congregation more than doubled in size, Adler said. 

In 1984, the congregation learned who bombed their building. A white supremacist named Joseph Paul Franklin confessed he bombed Beth Shalom, ending the question of who attempted to seed terror and fear in the community. He wanted to kill Jews, he said. He called Beth Shalom a “synagogue of Satan,” according to local news reports from the time. 

Regarding Franklin, Lutin said, “He was a universal hater. He hated Jews, he hated blacks; he hated everyone.”

According to the FBI’s website, Franklin, a serial killer, murdered at least 15 people and left pornography magazine publisher Larry Flint wheelchair bound. Franklin wanted to inspire other white supremacists to violent action with his murders and attacks. When the law caught up to Franklin, several states handed him the death penalty and the State of Missouri put him to death Nov. 11, 2013. 

Adler left in 1984 to relocate to lead congregations in cities that had better educational opportunities for his child. Over the decades, the congregation dwindled.

Enter Chabad

At one point, the founder of Beth Shalom, Ellman, retired from his position as president of Vulcan Materials Company, Chattanooga division, and relocated to Atlanta. Lutin would visit him and one day, when they were having lunch, Morris told Lutin he failed. He wanted to build an orthodox synagogue that would last into perpetuity.

Morris told Lutin that he wanted people to replace the members of the congregation that were aging out. Lutin was one of those replacements, but Morris didn’t find enough, he said. 

“I told Morris I wasn’t going to fail on my watch,” Lutin said. “And I didn’t.”

About six years ago, Beth Shalom once again had no rabbi and the money the synagogue had on hand wasn’t enough to keep it operational for more than a year. 

Lutin said he became somewhat dictatorial. He called a meeting of the synagogue’s board, about a dozen people. There was an opportunity to give the operation of the synagogue over to Chabad, one of the largest Jewish organizations in the world which grew out of the Hassidic movement and grew an international reach after the Holocaust. 

At the meeting held inside the new synagogue, Lutin told the board “We don’t have a chance.” Without Chabad, an orthodox Jewish presence in Chattanooga would soon cease to exist. “We can vote if you want, but we really don’t have a choice.”

Every person but one voted to hand the operation of the synagogue over to Chabad. 

When Chabad took over the operation, it moved the Chabad Jewish Center of Chattanooga to Vine street, a historical district in the neighborhood of University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.

Shaul Perlsetin is the rabbi in charge of the decedent of the Beth Shalom Synagogue. When he first started, it was hard for the orthodox community to make the quorum for prayer. But it has slowly grown. On typical Friday evening prayer, about 15 men attend the service. 

Since leaving Beth Shalom, Adler went first to a synagogue in Jacksonville, Florida, and then to a synagogue in West Hartford, Connecticut. Adler has lead the Beth David Synagogue in West Hartford, Connecticut for 22 years. 

Over the past few weeks, waves of bomb threats have been called into Jewish centers across the nation, causing evacuations and searches for explosives. West Hartford, a town with a thriving Jewish population, received three anonymous calls phoning in a bomb threat, two at a community center and one at a Jewish high school. An 18-year-old man in Israel was arrested and the Justice Department charged him April 21 with making threatening calls to Jewish centers in Florida and cyberstalking. 

Spending time with Beth Shalom taught Adler that those calls are not idle threats.

Jewish life in Chattanooga

These days, the former synagogue on Pisgah Avenue is a shell. Chabad only uses the mikveh (used for ritual cleansing) on location, and it is working on building another at its current location. 

Orthodox Judaism exists in Chattanooga, though observing its tenants is difficult. Perlsetin gets his kosher meat frozen and shipped to him. His children take online classes. There’s not enough people to support a bakery or store. 

One thing’s for certain: The survival of the Torah scrolls was a miracle, Perlsetin said. 

Living in Chattanooga, Lutin said, “It makes you more aware of the requirements of orthodox Judaism.”

Lutin observes the sabbath as best he can, for example. Traditionally, orthodox Jews will not drive on the Sabbath. But distances in this city makes that requirement difficult to meet. 

He doesn’t weep about the congregation not worshiping at the Pisgah Avenue. “Everything has a time to it,” Lutin said. Its purpose was a building block for something bigger and better, something for others to perpetuate. 

The Pisgah Avenue synagogue was a $150,000 building. The synagogue moved into a multi-million-dollar building, a former Masonic lodge and it is in the process of being upgraded. 

A few weeks ago, Chabad held a Seder, a meal to symbolize the Jewish people’s flight from Egypt. 150 people attended, like old times. It was almost standing room only. They had to bring out more chairs.

In the foyer, hangs three frames and inside are the covers that protected the handwritten Torah scrolls from that bombing 40 years before. 

The three covers that protected the Torah scrolls that night 40 years before hang framed in the synagogue’s foyer. As for the scrolls, the rest in the Aron Kodesh, or the holy ark, until they are taken out to be read from, as it has been done for decades.