Editor’s note: This essay, which is republished with permission from Rooted magazine, is part of Mississippi Today Ideas, a platform for thoughtful Mississippians to share fact-based ideas about our state’s past, present and future. You can read more about the section here.
Fire is an important and sacred part of Judaism. We light candles at the beginning and the end of the sabbath and one for each night of Hanukkah. We burn Yartzheit candles to remember loved ones on the anniversary of their deaths. We hold our fingertips up to the light of the braided Havdalah candle as we recite the blessing over the flame. Just last month, at our temple’s Hanukkah celebration, I looked around the darkened social hall at no less than a dozen lit menorahs and felt chills go down my spine. It was a beautiful sight. When the email went out Saturday morning that there had been a fire at the synagogue, and that our religious school would need to be held off-site the next day, I truly wondered if someone had left a candle burning overnight.
That evening, I learned that the fire was not started by a candle or a random electrical fire; it was arson. A man we now know to be the pimply and hateful nineteen-year-old Madison resident Stephen Spencer Pittman broke into my synagogue with an ax and set it on fire. There’s a video of him online now, his face covered with a mask, dousing the Beth Israel lobby with gasoline. I’m not sure how Pittman came to believe our small congregation of 150 families was the “synagogue of Satan” or how he reconciled his actions with his Christian faith. From what I’ve read, he is a shallow, unserious and sloppy young man whose interests included weightlifting and hating Jews. But none of that matters. What matters is that he chose gasoline and a fire torch. The flame followed the path of the accelerant. Nobody blames the fire for what happened next. The fire did what fires do: it burned.
Flames devoured the lobby, where our religious school kids grab their slices of challah and cups of apple juice from a rolling cart. The air inside the lobby was so hot that it busted out the glass of the lobby’s circular skylight. Among the photos of the wreckage, this image of the skylight was almost beautiful in its contrast and composition: the bright circle of daylight against the charred background of the ceiling.
Fire heavily damaged the Beth Israel Congregation synagogue in Jackson, including this lobby, on Saturday, Jan. 10, 2026. Credit: Courtesy of Beth Israel CongregationThe flames burned the administrative offices where sometimes I’d find a student sneaking a piece of hard candy off Ms. Sheila’s desk. It couldn’t have taken much encouragement for the flames to make their way to the adjacent library, whose walls were lined with wood and books, aka fire starter. The books and two Torahs in the room would have have incinerated within seconds.
Just the week before, our rabbi-in-training Ben Russell had taught the Sunday school kids how to kiss a prayer book that falls to the ground. Accidents and drops happen, Ben explained, but any text that contains G-d’s name must be treated with tenderness. We hadn’t discussed what happens when a sacred book, let alone a Torah, burns. That violence would be unthinkable.
A lighted dreidel is displayed in the Beth Israel Congregation synagogue in Jackson in December 2024. Credit: Courtesy of Rachel MyersEven now, it’s clear how all this could have been so much worse. The fire department and law enforcement responses were swift and effective. Beth Israel’s leaders were on site within hours. And the sanctuary – though covered in a thick layer of black soot – was not burned down. After the flames were extinguished, a congregant was able to find his way the ark, through halls darkened with ash and without power, to wrap the smoke-damaged Torahs in plastic trash bags before transporting them home. The Torah that survived the Holocaust and was behind glass remained miraculously unscathed. The classrooms, the synagogue archives (which coincidentally I had just spent time with in October), and the Institute of Southern Jewish Life offices are smoky and sooty but mostly untouched by fire. A layer of black grime coated my students’ Hebrew workbooks, but was easily scrubbed away with damp paper towels. From the outset, the emphasis of our congregation has been on rebuilding, bolstered by support from the wider Jackson community and from Jewish congregations around the country.
What Spencer Pittman will never understand is how much harder, and how much more satisfying, it is to build than to destroy.
At Sunday school, we always start the morning with Havdalah. Typically practiced after nightfall on Saturday, Havdalah a ritual of separation, meant to mark the end of Shabbat and the beginning of the new week. This Sunday, instead of in our sanctuary, we were in the bright, sunlit room of a local museum, chairs facing one another in a circle. With Ben out of state at rabbinical school, there was some bickering among the children over who got to hold and light the Havdalah candle, but it was quickly decided that it would be Eli, who, after all, had been the one to run and cut a sprig of rosemary in place of the temple’s now soot-covered spice box. We sang the blessing over the fruit of the vine, we smelled the rosemary, we praised G-d for creating the lights of the fire. Then came everyone’s favorite part: the satisfying sizzle as Eli extinguished the candle’s flame in grape juice in the kiddush cup. After the proper amount of sizzle appreciation, we sang the last part of the Havdalah blessing, hamavdil bein kodesh l’chol, marking the separation of the sacred from the mundane, the light from the darkness.
Ben Russell, standing, speaks to children during prayer in the Beth Israel Congregation synagogue in Jackson on Sunday, Sept. 14, 2025. Credit: Courtesy of Rachel MyersFor Jews, only the sabbath – starting Friday evening and ending Saturday evening – is considered sacred as far as days of the week go. But this Sunday felt anything but “mundane.” Our temple had burned and with it our naiveté that hatred couldn’t destroy the same building twice. But we were together, and it was a sacred togetherness.
After Havdalah, Rachel, our religious school leader and temple board member, showed us the photos she had taken from the wreckage. Some of the children were silent. Many clamored with questions. It looks like a haunted house, Emry said, referring to a photo of a charred hallway. Everyone agreed. Eli pointed, See this is where the couch was, and there was the Tree of Life on the wall. And that’s the skylight in the lobby, Evie added. Rachel asked the kids what they wanted in a newly rebuilt library. Comfier chairs! Pink and purple books! A cotton candy machine! She showed us pictures of the aftermath of the bombings of the temple and of Rabbi Perry Nussbaum’s house by the KKK in 1967. The part of the synagogue that the bigots destroyed then is the same part that we’ll be rebuilding again.
What should we do now? Rachel asked the kids. Be Jewish! Addie shouted. Be more Jewish than ever!
We all agreed that was a good plan.
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Author’s postscript: Just want to add a final note of gratitude to all the friends and family (and friends of friends and friends of family!) who have checked in and showed support in small and large ways. The Jackson community has showed up strong, too. So grateful to live in this city. If you want to support, you can donate to the Beth Israel Re-Building Fund. More information is on the Beth Israel Congregation and the Institute of Southern Jewish Life’s websites.
Bio: Originally from Denver, Lauren Rhoades has served with AmeriCorps, started Mississippi’s first fermentation company and helmed the Eudora Welty House & Garden. In 2022, she founded Rooted Magazine, an online publication dedicated to telling unfiltered stories about what it means to call Mississippi home. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the Mississippi University for Women. Her debut memoir, Split the Baby: A Memoir in Pieces was published in June 2025.
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