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Itongadol.- The streets of Baltimore were quiet overnight Tuesday-Wednesday, with a curfew imposing a fragile calm in a city that once held the dubious title of America’s murder capital.Famous in better days for its location by the Chesapeake Bay and more ominously as the setting for the gritty TV crime series “The Wire,” Baltimore also has one of the largest concentrations of Jews in the United States. While the majority of the city’s Jewish population – estimated at some 30,000 – live in the northwest corner, Jewish Baltimoreans are all being impacted by the foment in a city notorious for its stark boundaries of race and class.
Rabbi Daniel Cotzin Burg of Beth Am Synagogue is all too familiar with Baltimore’s divisions. Burg’s 93-year-old synagogue was once in the center of the main Jewish neighborhood – before most of the community moved further north toward the city’s borders and the suburbs. Now, Burg’s synagogue is the only permanently active Jewish institution in Reservoir Hill.
Burg and his congregants are committed to remaining deeply involved in the neighborhood, the surrounding community, and Baltimore City. His congregants, he says, were very aware of recent cases of police violence against young black men – even months before fellow west Baltimorean Freddie Gray was taken into a police van and emerged an hour later with multiple breaks to his spine, paralyzed and comatose. Grey died of his injuries 10 days ago, spurring citywide protests against the police.
“Since Freddie Gray was killed, the conversations here have become more pointed and there is deep concern and consternation about the current state of race relations in this town and about the lack of trust between law enforcement and the civilian population,” Burg said.
Already a familiar face in Reservoir Hill, Burg joined the largely peaceful mass demonstrations organized last Saturday. “On Shabbat after services, I walked down and joined a few congregants who joined a group from Jews United for Justice, and we had a Shabbat prayer experience together. Then we joined the protests at the Western District [police] headquarters where Freddie Gray had been, and walked through west Baltimore in what in my experience was a very peaceful demonstration. It was very civil. There was a lot of anger and frustration, [but] certainly no violence where I was,” Burg recalled.
Over 10,000 people are believed to have held peaceful demonstrations Saturday throughout the city, but in the afternoon, smaller groups of protesters began to break away from the main demonstrations. Fights broke out between some baseball fans and protesters near the iconic Camden Yards ballpark, and as the sun set, others broke windows and allegedly stole items from stores near the historic Lexington Market.
“On Saturday, the violence was very limited to a few pockets. And while there was some violence – I certainly don’t want to justify it in any way — it was not the story on Saturday,” Burg said. “The story on Saturday was the thousands of people who came out to do what Americans do best, which was to protest in a civil fashion when they’re concerned about the state of their city.”
But after relative quiet on Sunday, the situation changed across Baltimore on Monday.
“What happened Monday did not begin as widespread robust demonstrations meant to honor the memory of Freddie Gray and agitate for the right kinds of conversations at the highest levels about police accountability and about relationships between law enforcement and the communities,” Burg said.
Rather, “this started out as a bunch of kids on social media doing what kids do, which is make kinda dumb choices sometimes. And lots of kids together can make even dumber choices and we saw that. It was not what Freddie Gray’s family wanted, and it was not what my neighbors wanted, and it was not what Baltimore City wanted and needed. Unfortunately, as one of my congregants said, looting has a tendency of becoming contagious, and that’s what we saw from a certain segment of the population — that things got out of hand.”
In Burg’s neighborhood, windows were smashed. Blocks away, protesters burned a CVS drug store and looted local stores, facing off against tear gas-armed police in riot gear outside a shopping mall. Helicopters circled over Burg’s historic synagogue, and Burg joined the non-Jewish faith leaders in his neighborhood to help restore calm.
Meeting on Monday with other clergy and Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings Blake, Burg said that he tried to get the word out to local residents where they could find food and other key resources.
When the sun rose on Tuesday, Burg and members of his congregation joined local efforts to rebuild.
“My job first and foremost is to [take care of] my congregation, but our values, mission and vision as a synagogue is to be accountable to and in a relationship with our neighborhood in Reservoir Hill and to Baltimore City. [We try] to capitalize on the opportunities that come at the nexus of history and geography that is a 93-year-old synagogue building in a majority African-American neighborhood,” Burg explained. “In that sense I serve as a community leader, a faith leader. So today [Tuesday] I was out in west Baltimore helping with the cleanup, and working with our partners leading prayer services.”
Less than a day after the city seemed to be spinning into chaos, Burg and other volunteers worked together to repair an urban farm that had been damaged by a burning car, pulling up crops burned beyond viability and repairing a greenhouse whose plastic cover had melted entirely from the heat – on to the crops inside.