c. 1996 Religion News Service

(RNS)-Though five years have passed since Melissa Fay Greene’s acclaimed”Praying for Sheetrock”earned the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, the author hasn’t been idle.

Now she has produced”The Temple Bombing,”a look at the 1958 bombing of an Atlanta synagogue. “I had the idea for it on the plane ride home from the National Book Awards,”Greene said during a telephone interview.”A number of publishers in New York wanted to know if I wanted to do a history of Southern Jews or a history of the Klan. But both of those had been done. This struck me because the Temple bombing had it all-Jews, the Klan, the bombing.” The Temple, Atlanta’s oldest and most prominent synagogue, was bombed the night of Oct. 12, 1958. Many think the bombing was prompted by Rabbi Jacob Rothschild’s outspoken views on racial equality. No one was hurt, but the effects of the bombing were resounding, particularly in Atlanta, which called itself”The City Too Busy to Hate.””Unlike the horrible bombing you had in Birmingham, no one was hurt,”Greene said.”It was horrifying more in its intent and horrifying to the whole city of Atlanta that had thought itself immune to the violence.” George Bright, a ringleader of the white supremacist National States’ Rights Party, was tried twice for the Temple bombing. The first trial ended in a hung jury. The second ended in acquittal.

Greene gained unprecedented access to Bright and those around him through a simple twist of faith: Her husband, Don Samuel, took a job with the law firm started by Reuben Garland, who decades earlier had defended Bright on the bombing charges. “We lived in Rome, Ga., before coming to Atlanta, and when my husband was hired at Garland & Garland, we rushed into our tiny synagogue in Rome to tell our friends of this great job he got,”Greene recalled.”They were very cool and unresponsive, and we thought they were just sad to see us go. Weeks later, we told an older gentleman about the job offer, and he said, `Oh, so Garland’s hiring Jews now.’ “The men accused of the bombing talked to me because of this connection to Garland,”Greene added.”These were men who were involved in that world and were able to explain to me why they thought it was necessary to bomb a synagogue. From their point of view, it’s because the Jews were behind civil rights.” And those anti-Semitic feelings linger. When Wallace Allen, another suspect in the bombing, asked Greene if she was Jewish and she said,”Yes,”he hung up the phone and wouldn’t talk to her any further.

Though”The Temple Bombing”covers much ground and includes thousands of hours of research done in Georgia, Alabama and surrounding states (including delving through the extensive collection-almost 18,000 pieces-of Rothschild’s correspondence at Emory University), Greene didn’t accomplish all she set out to do. “I thought maybe I could solve it,”she said of the bombing.”I would like to be able to say who did it.” Greene is on an extensive book tour, spending a good deal of time away from her husband and four children. She says the hatred she explores in”The Temple Bombing”still exists, and she has worried from time to time about her safety and that of her family. “I dealt with it by being completely honest and by reproducing faithfully what I was told, no matter what the source,”Greene said.”I hope the people that held the viewpoints I didn’t agree with would feel I was fair with their viewpoints.” What most affected Greene about her work on”The Temple Bombing”was Rothschild’s bravery in speaking out for what he believed. “I didn’t realize what a frightening grip the right-wing violence had on public discourse,”she said.”All the bombs and violence frightened the decent people, and I don’t think I realized what courage it took to stand up for civil rights. In some ways, it’s enviable. It seems to me that in the ’50s in the South was a time when we could stand for something.”

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