This week I sat in my synagogue’s sanctuary for the first time since the High Holidays. It was a Wednesday night, and I was attending an “upstander” training to learn what I was legally allowed to do if I found myself at the scene of an ICE encounter — something that seems more and more likely every day here in Minneapolis.
These training sessions are being held daily around the Twin Cities. They are happening online, in houses of worship, and at restaurants and breweries that are donating their spaces. But it felt important to me to attend one at a synagogue because I know the inner voice I’ve been hearing lately — none of this is okay — is an echo of everything I’ve learned through my Jewish education. And I’m not alone.
“A lot of my Sunday school experience growing up was about how to question authority,” a Jewish friend I’ll call L told me. I’ve watched this friend spring into action and organize hyperlocal efforts for protest, mutual aid and policy change. She told me it was her childhood religious school teacher who urged her to look into what her neighborhood could do to help. The teacher encouraged her to start something if it didn’t already exist, which it didn’t.
“I see the Jewish community stepping up and saying no. Saying they don’t agree with dehumanizing our neighbors, and [they are] putting their bodies on the line,” she said. “It’s made me feel hopeful.”
People keep asking me what it’s like here, and I’ve found it hard to describe. It’s eerie. It feels like the beginning of COVID. There is a palpable sense that we’re living on the cusp of before and after. Armed ICE agents are driving down my street, showing up randomly at construction sites and restaurants. All day long, my phone is buzzing, with horrible images and videos, but also with signs of hope, in the form of friends and neighbors sharing and fulfilling urgent needs.
A teacher friend sends a request for donations for her kindergarten students’ families, many of whom are too afraid to leave their homes to go to work. The local elementary school is asking if parents can stand along the walking route at school dismissal to make sure kids get home safely. Another friend is collecting stuffed animals and games to deliver to kids whose parents have opted them into online learning. Someone else asks if anyone has diapers to donate to a family with a newborn. A neighbor sends a message from an immigrant-owned business; she’s posted up there with her laptop, working remotely to be another set of eyes in case something happens.
“As a Jewish parent in Minneapolis, history feels too close right now,” my friend Sammi told me. “The sense of safety we usually rely on feels shakier than it ever has. We may not be the target right now, but every day still feels like holding your breath, waiting for the next horror or new low. I’m also angry, like bone-deep angry, at the hurt and cruelty ICE is inflicting on our neighbors. I feel a visceral responsibility to show up and help, to show my kids that we stand up for others, even when it feels uncomfortable or scary.”
Another Jewish friend, B, has taken on relief efforts at her daughter’s school in a suburb just outside of Minneapolis. She’s coordinating grocery purchases and pickups for families and helping with laundry because laundromats are no longer safe. “There’s inherently this feeling of tikkun olam, that it starts at home,” she said. “We feel for our neighbors. And, we know what it’s like when people don’t speak up.”
After I hang up with B, she texts me. “While we were on the phone, a family of four I’m working with was reduced to a family of three. Dad was taken. There’s literally a kid headed home to find out.”
I know we don’t like to throw around Holocaust comparisons. I get that, I really do. But it’s hard not to. My fifth-grader is acutely worried, in a way that frankly surprised me, and all I can think is that she has Holocaust trauma in her DNA. Her most basic biology is telling her not to ignore this.
When I asked L about how this moment is affecting her as a Jewish woman, she became emotional. “It’s so hard to talk about, especially through a Jewish lens,” she said, “because this all feels so similar to what our people went through. Connecting people to safe houses and reporting on people going through checkpoints — it all feels very Nazi Germany.”
“I watched a couple of abductions in front of me,” L added. “It just … it happened so fast.” The expressions on the faces of the people being abducted were chilling, she told me, like a photo you would see in a history book.
B makes a similar comparison a few times during our conversation. “I don’t love the Holocaust comparisons, even though I just did it twice,” she admits. “But the feeling of, am I going to be someone who opens their door to someone, or closes it — that part is the same to me.”
“I’m having a visceral response,” another friend, Shalva, said, explaining why she feels compelled to stand up for neighbors in this moment. “Not outrage, not fear, but an ancestral reaction. My body says ‘hide.’ Not because I am personally at risk, but because the thought of masked men knocking brings me to my knees. But I remember that I am the grandchild of survivors. And yes, they hid, they had to. But they also fought. In the smallest of ways.”
At one point during the training I attended, the trainer gave us key phrases to use if we were ever approached by an ICE agent. Things like, “Am I free to leave?” and “I’m taking a step back.” She acknowledged that in the heat of the moment, it can be hard to remember these seemingly simple phrases, so she asked us to practice them, to transform them into muscle memory. We repeated the phrases after her, a congregation of solemn voices echoing off the sanctuary walls just like they have every Shabbat for thousands of years. It felt like synagogue, it was synagogue, but the words felt out of place.
Or maybe they were in exactly the right place. At the beginning of the session, the rabbi said this:
“Jews love to argue about a lot of things. Immigration isn’t one of them. If someone isn’t from here, you treat them like they are. That’s ancient wisdom, from all the way back to Exodus.”
