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A Few Clouds ‘Letters from Anne and Martin’ offers hope for the future
Interfaith program teaches lesson of love, acceptance
An unexpected winter sun streamed through the stained-glass window of the synagogue at Congregation Beth Ohr’s Temple Israel annex in Merrick, throwing colors on the guests who filled the seats. A black man walked quietly down one of the aisles, his hands “bound” by invisible handcuffs. He ascended the bema, sat in one of two chairs of a “cell” and, hands now unshackled, began scribbling notes in the margins of a newspaper.
A white woman with a patterned blue skirt sat next to him, clutching a diary to her chest. As the sound of marching troops crescendoed from a speaker, she covered her ears in fear.
This was the opening scene of “Letters from Anne and Martin,” which captivated congregants from Congregation Beth Ohr in Bellmore and the Church of the Transfiguration in Freeport on Jan. 12, a week before Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day. The program, presented by the Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect, combines excerpts from “Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl” and King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.”
Michael Bigman, of Bellmore, had heard of the program several years ago, but it recently “percolated” to the top of his memory, he said, following a string of anti-Semitic attacks in nearby Jersey City and Rockland County.
“We just [celebrated] the holiday of Hanukkah, which is about shining a light when it’s dark,” Bigman said. “I’m hoping this program will serve as a symbol of light during what I consider relatively dark times.”
Bigman asked Rabbi Dahlia Bernstein if the congregation could host the program, and she agreed. She connected with the church’s Rev. Dr. Raymond Wilson to invite his congregants to attend, as well. The leaders discussed expanding their reach beyond the program, so that weekend, Wilson preached from the bema at Congregation Beth Ohr and Bernstein from the pulpit of the church. Each service welcomed Jews and Episcopalians to worship together.
Wilson called the new realtionship between the congregations “an answered prayer.” “We want to take that extra step to show that we are in harmony with all people,” he said. “At the end of the day, we all worship, love and serve the same God.”
Forging these connections, Bernstein said, could help residents of different faiths feel at home with one another when love and acceptance appears out of reach. “When it seems like there’s just so much hate pervading every inch of free air space, people who feel that are reaching out and creating allies.”
Frank and King, who both would have turned 91 this year, shared this pursuit of love and acceptance. Joseph Dunn, a teaching artist at the center, said that while King rose to prominence more than a decade after Frank went into hiding, in different circumstances, the two might have been friends.
Alexandra Gellner and Parish Bradley portrayed Frank and King respectively. Gellner shared excerpts from Frank’s diary, which recounted her experiences evading Nazi persecution in Amsterdam in the early 1940s. Bradley read King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” which became a manifesto of the civil rights movement.
In her diary, which she affectionately called Kitty, Frank described “the horrors of the war outside, and her fears of what would happen to her family and her dreams of freedom,” Dunn said.
“I have only one hope: That anti-Semitism is just a passing thing,” Gellner said. “Who knows, maybe our religion will teach the world and all the people in it about goodness . . . Through the ages Jews have had to suffer, but . . . they’ve gone on living, and the centuries of suffering have only made them stronger.”
After King was arrested in April 1963 for organizing peaceful protests in Birmingham, Ala., eight clergymen published a criticism of his actions in a local paper, accusing King of being an extremist and a danger to his supporters. “With the help of an ally, Dr. King received a copy of the paper in his cell, and then promptly wrote his response to the statement along the margins and edges of the newspaper,” Dunn said.
“I cannot agree with [the white moderate] . . . who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom,” Bradley said. “All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality.”
The passages from each work, while written at two drastically different times, seemed to intertwine. As Bradley’s King asked the white moderate to consider life from his shoes — “when you are harried by day and haunted by night . . . living constantly at tiptoe stance . . . forever fighting a degenerating sense of ‘nobodiness’” — Gellner’s Frank described the rumors she had heard about the concentration camps.
“Through all the things that Anne Frank encountered, she still believed that man is good,” Bernstein said. Frank and King “had similar messages, and they’re people that we point to to remind us of the good that we can embody.” She added that her congregants, as well as those from the Church of the Transfiguration, left the program feeling more connected to one another.
“It was nice to find universal messages from both of them,” Bigman added, “so that we understand the things that connect us are greater than the number of things that divide us.”
