After Jersey City shooting, rabbis hope menorah mural will help community heal
he mural went up Monday, six days before the start of Hanukkah, and six days after the massacre.
In response to the Dec. 10 violence in Jersey City that left a police officer, three civilians and the two suspects dead, members of the local artistic and Hasidic Jewish communities have created a kind of interactive mural intended to honor the victims and overcome hate with love, darkness with light.
The 17-by-24 foot mural is a menorah painted on a brick wall four blocks from the entrance to the Holland Tunnel, facing west and visible to Manhattan-bound motorists who look left a block before coming to the Home Depot just outside the tunnel.
Against a black background, red letters spell out “#Light Over Darkness,” above a yellow menorah, the traditional 9-branch candelabra used to celebrate Hanukkah, the Jewish Festival of Lights.
Rabbis have invoked the light-over-darkness theme to sooth grieving loved ones and a horrified public in the aftermath of the deadly attack, which authorities say was motivated by anti-Semitism and hatred of police.
“While the menorah is a Jewish symbol, the message is a universal one,” said Rabbi Yirael Binnish of Chabad Bayonne, that city’s chapter of the Jewish community outreach organization. “An important message that Hanukkah teaches us is that we push away darkness with light.”
In a ritual familiar even to many non-Jews, a new candle of the menorah is lit on each of the eight nights of Hanukkah, symbolizing what is described in the Talmud as the miraculous duration of only a single night’s worth of oil possessed by the Maccabees to keep the menorah in the temple lit. There are nine branches on a Hanukkah menorah, including one for each night of the holiday, plus the shamash, or servant, used to light the other candles.
The mural was painted by a Chabad rabbi and artist, Yitzchok Moully, in an effort organized by the Chabad Young Professionals of Hoboken and Jersey City and the Chabad of Hoboken and Jersey City.
Moully, who is now based in Hillside, used to have a studio in Jersey City, and he had been wanting for some time to create just such a work among the many murals that have proliferated there in recent years.
He had discussed the issue with Rabbi Shmully Levitin, director of the young professionals group, and the day after the shooting occurred they decided, along with Rabbi Moshe Schapiro, founder of the Chabad of Hoboken and Jersey City, that now was the time.
Levitin then reached out to Gregory Edgell, a congregant acts as a liaison between muralists and Jersey City building owners. Edgell got in touch with Adithya Bathena, the local businessman who owns a building on Erie Street that already had 25 similarly sized murals painted on its south and west-facing walls.
Bathena, an unqualified supporter of public art and the menorah project in particular, granted permission, and Moully went to work. Moully enlisted the help of Newark artist Avery Nice, and the mural was finished on Monday. Moully posted a YouTube video documenting the mural’s creation.
To fully realize the work as a true menorah, albeit a two-dimensional one, the rabbis, artists and anyone else wishing to attend, will hold lighting ceremonies starting Sunday night, the first night of Hanukkah. Then, following the holiday tradition, on each of the remaining seven nights, a different artist will “light,” that is, paint a flame on, one more of the menorah’s branches.
The general public is also invited to write small messages or prayers on the work, or to leave them in a basket that hangs from a protrusion from the wall. A few messages had already been written on the mural’s black background, including, “Tell someone you love them,” and “Smile at your neighbor.”
“It’s something for the community to share their hopes and prayers,” Moully said. “We believe that any act of good creates positive energy in the world, and being that it’s the holiday of Hanukkah coming up, we thought it was perfect timing.”
In another phase of the project, the names of the four shooting victims will be added to the project.
Those four are Jersey City Police Detective Joseph Seals, a 14-year department veteran, husband and father of five whose funeral was held on Tuesday; Moshe Deutsch, 24, a Hasidic man who was visiting from Brooklyn; Leah Minda Ferencz, 33, a co-owner the Kosher grocery with her husband; and Miguel Douglas Rodriguez, 49, of Jersey City, who worked in the store.
On an overcast Tuesday that many in the city will never forget, Seals was fatally shot at Bayview Cemetery near the Bayonne border, after he encountered David Anderson and Francine Graham there in a U-Haul truck.
The pair then drove about 15 blocks to the JC Kosher Supermarket on Martin Luther King Drive, which authorities say they had targeted as a hub of the Greenville neighborhood’s budding Hasidic Jewish community. There, they parked the van across the street and walked into the store shooting, attracting a swarm of police. Four hours and countless rounds of ammunition later, after police crashed through the storefront in an armored vehicle, the suspects and the three victims inside the store lay dead.
A week later, Jason Su was walking along Erie Street across from the mural, heading back into work there at the Port Authority Technical Center. To Su, 26, who lives in Jersey City, it was a message that needed articulating.
“There’s a lot of hate in the world, man,” he said. “I would say it’s timely.”