With tensions over Israel’s war in Gaza, Roanoke’s Jewish community fights its own war of words
From the editor: As a freelance journalist, sometimes we spend months reporting a story, and working closely with sources, and with editors, and the piece is just about nearing publication—and then it gets killed. This happens for a variety of reasons: perhaps the news cycle has moved on, or the publisher has decided to go in a different direction, or the topic is too controversial; etc. Typically, these stories die a quiet death and never see the light of day.
This story felt too important to let go. Over the past several months, I was honored to get to sit down with half a dozen leaders in my community and hear their stories about Jewish faith, politics, ethics, and Zionism. We need more nuanced stories about Jewish-American life!
Thank you to all the 700/14 subscribers, especially paid subscribers, who help support my freelance journalism career, so that I can bring stories like this one to you.
Introduction
Just before sundown on a Friday evening in September in Roanoke, Virginia, a small city in the Blue Ridge Mountains, three dozen congregants gather inside Temple Emanuel. Rabbi Howie Stein, who has led this congregation for less than three months, stands on the bimah, flanked on his right side by an American flag, and on his left by an Israeli one. Halfway through the service, the congregants chant in unison: first, a prayer for the United States of America, then a prayer for Israel, then a prayer “for the hostages.”
On the other side of this city, on a similar Friday night, a young Jewish activist named Lianna King joins a dozen other protesters outside Elbit Systems of America, an Israeli weapons manufacturer located on Roanoke’s industrial outskirts. Some wave Palestinian flags; others hold a large banner with the words “Drop Elbit, Not Bombs” stenciled in red and black lettering. The local Elbit plant produces night-vision goggles, and Elbit Systems has supplied both the U.S. armed forces and Israel’s military.
In the two years since Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas attacked southern Israel, and Israel began a retaliatory war of devastation across Gaza, Jewish-American life in the United States has become increasingly fractured. Heated debates over Israel pit neighbors, friends, family members, and once-close allies against one another.
In Roanoke, a city where until recently, a liberal rabbi and a progressive Muslim state legislator could see eye-to-eye on most issues, now they trade barbed accusations on social media — about antisemitism, racism and genocide. Even a gubernatorial candidate and a U.S. senator have weighed in on the city’s heated discourse.
Appalachian Jewry is a small minority. Many mountain cities have only one synagogue; Roanoke has two: Temple Emanuel is a Reform synagogue, a major Jewish denomination that emphasizes inclusive practices such as the use of English-language prayer. Only two miles away, Temple Beth Israel is a Conservative synagogue, a denomination that represents a middle ground between the Reform and Orthodox denominations. Rabbi Jama Purser, who leads Temple Beth Israel, declined to be interviewed for this story.
But even within such a small community, Roanoke Jews are not a political monolith. Divisions over Israel’s war have formed new fault lines here, and as Israel and Hamas negotiate for peace half a world away, a war of words rages in Roanoke over Jewish safety and Palestinian freedom.
Trouble at Temple Emanuel
Before Rabbi Stein took the helm, Kathy Cohen served as Temple Emanuel’s rabbi for 29 years. In retirement, she says her full-time job now is “taking on the issue of local antisemitism.”
Cohen grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania where her parents were married in the Tree of Life synagogue — the same temple where, in 2018, an assassin murdered eleven Jewish congregants in the worst act of antisemitic violence in American history. Two of those victims, Cohen says, were her father’s friends.
Over the course of three decades in Roanoke, Cohen says antisemitism has been a consistent problem. She recalls an incident in 2000, at Temple Emanuel, when neo-Nazis gathered in the Roanoke Valley from across the United States to celebrate Hitler’s birthday. The date of this gathering coincided with the first night of Passover. When the FBI confirmed a credible threat against Temple Emanuel, Cohen went ahead and held Passover services anyway — with armed guards at the door, and a SWAT team on the roof. Twenty-five years later, armed security is now a daily presence at the synagogue. Since Oct. 7, 2023, Temple Emanuel has become a fortress.
Ryan LaFountain, Roanoke’s Commissioner of the Revenue, is familiar with this level of security. As one of the highest-ranking Jewish elected officials in the region, he worries about his child’s safety when he drops her off at Temple Emanuel’s highly acclaimed preschool every morning.
Yet LaFountain no longer attends services at the temple, even on the High Holy Days, citing profound disagreement with the temple’s unwavering support for Israel. The “things I’ve learned and I’ve been taught by rabbis that I studied with,” LaFountain says, “seem to be incongruous with [Temple Emanuel’s] seeming requisite unconditional support of the actions of the Israeli state.” LaFountain believes there are other congregants equally troubled by the temple’s stance, yet there is no room for them to express dissent. (In response, Cohen says “congregants are welcome to believe whatever they want,” yet rabbis are also entitled to their “freedom of speech.”)
From Appalachia to Israel
Historically, there has been a wide debate within Jewish-American communities on the topic of Zionism, which is the political ideology that undergirds support for Israel, explains Jonathan Snow, a Roanoke College professor and expert in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “Zionism,” Snow says, “is, simply put, Jewish nationalism. It is believing that the Jewish people constitute a nation, and as a nation, they have certain political rights.” As a modern political concept, it has roots in the late 19th century, when antisemitism was on the rise in Europe and many Jews began to dream of re-establishing a national homeland. After Israel was founded in 1948, American synagogues became the main conduit through which American Jews connected with this new Jewish state. The vast majority of Jews in the United States, according to Snow, “say that an important part of their identity is some sort of cultural tie to the state of Israel.”
Some Jews in Roanoke who do not agree with Zionism have decided to make their own alternative spaces. These include the Blue Ridge Chavurah, a non-Zionist religious collective that recently formed in the New River Valley, and the Southwest Virginia Coalition for Palestine, which the Jewish activist Lianna King co-founded in the fall of 2023.
King, who is queer (and uses the pronouns “she” and “they” interchangeably), grew up with agnostic parents and attended Catholic school as a child, even though her father’s family are “aggressively Zionist” Jews. Their paternal grandmother, they say, was active in Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America. When King met up with cousins as a teenager, they felt like the black sheep, as their cousins on their father’s side knew Hebrew and practiced Judaism. So, when King left home to attend Hollins University, a historic women’s college in Roanoke County, she was determined to explore her Jewish heritage.
At Hollins, King enrolled in a “Jewish Traditions” course, and in their senior year, they participated in Birthright, a program partially funded by the Israeli government that shepherds Jewish young adults throughout Israel to strengthen their connection to the Israeli state.
King says that while on Birthright they visited the Golan Heights and watched Israeli munitions detonating across the border in Syria. “I was able to see it with my own eyes, and actually ultimately came home with PTSD,” she says.
After Oct. 7, 2023, King came to a realization.
“If I was Jewish enough to go on Birthright, then I am Jewish enough to call myself Jewish and figure out what that means for myself,” they said. With the Southwest Virginia Coalition for Palestine, they have organized political education events, including book clubs and film screenings, held fundraisers for families in Gaza and mobilized local residents to attend protests.
King believes dialogue and debate are necessary. They periodically exchange text messages with Rabbi Cohen, with whom they strongly disagree. The two even met for dinner once to talk through their opposing viewpoints on Israel. “Ultimately, we agreed by the end,” King says, “there’s no way that either of us are going to change our minds, but we do both agree that what is happening currently in Palestine is egregious.” Cohen, for her part, says she enjoyed the dinner with King and would like to continue the conversation.
Gaza and the Ballot Box
Over two years of war, however, this kind of dialogue has become harder to sustain. And with statewide elections looming in Virginia, Roanoke’s legislative representative to Virginia’s General Assembly, Palestinian-American politician Sam Rasoul, has become a lightning rod in the city’s increasingly heated debate over Israel.
Rasoul is a progressive who champions bread-and-butter economic issues like affordable housing and health care. Since Oct. 7, 2023, he has also taken a highly public stance on the war in Gaza. After the war started, Rasoul joined a hunger strike alongside other national politicians, including New York State Assemblyman and New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. He has also participated in rallies organized by Jewish groups such as IfNotNow, and frequently posts on social media about what he terms the “genocide” in Gaza.
“There is a robust conversation happening within the Jewish community,” Rasoul says, and “many individuals believe that there’s a genocide happening, and it’s being done in the name of Judaism.” He praises those “Jewish allies who I see at the front of every protest that I’ve been to against the genocide.”
But in a Facebook post this past July, Rasoul did not mince words regarding those who support Israel’s war. In his post, he referred to Zionism as “a supremacist ideology created to destroy and conquer everything and everyone in its way.” He wrote, “Zionists have bastardized antisemitism, making the world less safe for my Jewish friends,” adding that Israel’s campaign in Gaza is, in his estimation, “the most evil cleansing in human history.”
Once an ally, Rabbi Cohen has emerged as one of Rasoul’s fiercest critics. “There are a lot of truths here and he is choosing one corridor of truth,” Cohen says. The danger in Rasoul’s rhetoric, she says, is that it may inspire Americans toward antisemitism.
Cohen has her own political ambitions, having recently unsuccessfully sought an appointment to an open seat on the Roanoke City Council. In that vein, she says it is inappropriate for Rasoul, as a public servant, to make statements against Israel. “As a delegate he has a responsibility to keep everyone in his district safe, including Jews.”
Rabbi Stein, Temple Emanuel’s new spiritual leader, agrees with Cohen. “To disavow the existence of Israel as a Jewish state crosses the line” into antisemitism, he says. “And also gives rise to the sort of antisemitism that becomes dangerous to Jews.”
Stein, who was raised by labor-activist parents involved in the Jewish Workmen’s Circle, a Jewish-American mutual aid organization with socialist roots, feels particularly hurt by progressive Democrats’ disavowal of Zionism. He says the political left in America was long “traditional allies of the Jewish community,” yet now that seat at the table for liberal Zionism has been yanked away.
Moreover, the Roanoke Jewish Federation, an advocacy organization that supports local Jewish educational and cultural programming, in a written statement notes, in part, that “Jews and non-Jews can be fully supportive of Israel and agree and/or disagree with the policies of the current Israeli government… However, Delegate Rasoul’s comments depicting Zionism as evil completely failed to acknowledge much less take responsibility for Hamas’ core commitment to killing Jews and destroying Israel.”
For his part, Rasoul is unapologetic. In eleven years representing Roanoke in the General Assembly, and even before holding office, he says he has consistently engaged in interfaith work with Jewish Roanokers. When Beth Israel, the city’s Conservative synagogue, was defaced with antisemitic graffiti in 2009, he led an interfaith group to write a letter to the editor “denouncing hate in all of its forms.” He has attended meetings at Roanoke’s two synagogues multiple times and consistently speaks out in support of Roanoke’s Jewish community, he says, adding that antisemitism is a real and pressing issue.
Yet Rasoul also believes that Zionists cannot call themselves progressives. Using the term “PEP,” Rasoul calls out those who are “progressive on everything but Palestine,” adding that “if you want to call yourself a progressive, you’ve got to be able to look in the mirror… and decide what side of history you’d like to be on.” There is only one moral position on Gaza, he believes, and that is to take a stand against Israel.
Seeking Freedom and Safety
Back at Temple Emanuel, Rabbi Stein steps up to the lectern to deliver his Friday night sermon. He begins by noting the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk just two days prior — 12 days before Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. “What does Jewish wisdom tell us about political violence?” he asks the congregation.
Citing a passage from the Talmud, Stein says that Jews favor dialogue and debate over violence. He implores his congregation to listen to other viewpoints with patience and humility and make an attempt to understand diverse perspectives. However, Jewish wisdom also teaches that there are not “two sides” to every issue. Jews welcome a free and open debate of ideas, yet they also demand safety. The question, in today’s America, is how to have both.
Following his sermon, congregants file into the social hall where a prayer is chanted over the wine, and then another prayer over the freshly-baked challah. Rabbi Cohen sits at a table with several elderly congregants catching up on gossip, while Stein circles the room shaking hands and wishing each guest a “good Shabbos.” These are the rituals and rhythms of Jewish life in Roanoke that feel so precarious, as armed guards stand watch at the temple doors, looking out through the plated glass upon another dark night.
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