Of Church Bells and Adhans

The property layout was ideal for my grandparents’ house.  After World War II ended, my grandfather was able to become a homeowner instead of a renter and so, Zayde purchased a house on a Philadelphia real estate lot where he could also conduct his scrap metal business, instead of using one rented quarters for a family residence and also renting a garage for his truck, tools, and storage.

From a school playground dismantlement job, Zayde salvaged and fixed up a swing set, and erected it in the back yard for me and his other grandchildren (and often, other children in the neighborhood) to play upon.

The driveways on the property were arranged such that he could drive his truck in through one entrance, access the garages in the rear of the property, and then continue forward up the other driveway to exit without having to back the truck out onto the heavily-travelled Old York Road.  The garages were a long row of wooden structures built against the rear brick wall of the building that housed the Temple Judea congregation, the synagogue with which Benzion Netanyahu and his family (including wife Cela and sons Yonatan, Benjamin, and Iddo) would affiliate during his sojourn in the Philadelphia area.  In a reversal of roles, Zayde rented out one or more of those garages to tradesmen who used them to store their tools and equipment.

Temple Judea was not the only house of worship proximate to the property.  There also was (and still is) the Holy Angels Roman Catholic parish church, whose property was atop a stone wall at the side of the garages.  Zayde’s issues with the parish church were about the boys from the parochial school playing on the roof of the garages.  He certainly did not oppose boys playing and having fun because many of the same boys used the swing set without any objections; his concerns were strictly safety issues (how he resolved the matter with the parish priests is the stuff of a whole separate story).

My grandmother’s issues with the church, however, went beyond the schoolboys’ recreational tendencies.   When the Holy Angels church rang the bells in its bell tower, they conjured up memories from Bubby’s childhood back in the Ukraine, when it was not unusual for the signal to start a pogrom to be the tintinnabulation of the bells in the churches.  Bubby was certainly relieved when they relocated to a different Philadelphia locale after Zayde retired; the house was sold to Temple Judea (which demolished it and the garages, and paved over the property to make a parking lot).

The neighborhood demographics have changed during the ensuing years.  The Holy Angels Parish has become Korean.  The cobblestones and trolley tracks of Old York Road have been paved over. Temple Judea merged into another congregation in the suburbs three kilometers up Old York Road, where Temple Judea’s collection and archives are now curated. The old Temple Judea building, which now houses an organization that services elderly Asian people, has a trompe l’oeil mural painted on the very brick wall against which my Zayde’s garages once stood.

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The new reality is that while the Christian churches and their organizations had historically fomented attacks upon the Jewish communities of the world, there undeniably is increasing instigation of antisemitic violence in the name of Islam.  On 22 November 2024, at the Kansas City Islamic Center, an imam preached a sermon advocating the killing of all Jews; the same venue had previously hosted a speaker who gleefully celebrated the 7 October 2023 Hamas massacres.  Similar explicit calls to fight against (and presumably kill) Jews were made at a mosque in Clifton, New Jersey less than a month later.  Sermons hostile to the Jewish people have been delivered at mosques in locations as diverse as Rockland County, New York;  Richmond, Virginia; Highland, Indiana; Philadelphia; and Lafayette, Louisiana.  Nor are such calls from imams limited to the United States; they emanate worldwide.  There is empirical evidence to suggest a correlation between the content of the speeches made at mosques and the likelihood that the mosque attendees will become radicalized against the Jewish people.

Notwithstanding my grandmother’s apprehensive flashbacks to her childhood traumas, and the long-troubled history of the Roman Catholic Church’s relationship with the Jews (which persists to this day), the ringing bells at Holy Angels portended no threat to the security of the local Jewish community.  Unfortunately, the same cannot be said about the adhans from the mosques of America, whether in Philadelphia or anywhere else.

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