High Holidays take a backseat to basic safety for Jewish communities

(JTA) — It’s been days since Hurricane Helene struck her community, and the CEO of Jewish Greenville still doesn’t know who is OK and who still needs help.

“It’s very much a crisis situation for many people here,” Courtney Tessler told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, about the Jewish community she serves in South Carolina’s upstate region. 

“Our focus right now is just confirming the safety and identifying the immediate needs,” she said. “Without power and without Internet, and with spotty cell service, it’s been tough to do that.”

Tessler’s community was in better shape than many in the storm’s path. The Jewish community in hard-hit Asheville, North Carolina, remains largely cut off from communication, with the timeline for restored electricity and running water stretching in some places until after Yom Kippur nearly two weeks from now. The local Jewish Family Services canceled its planned delivery of Rosh Hashanah meals owing to unsafe road conditions but reopened its offices Monday as a donations center. 

Helene charted a path of destruction north from the Florida Gulf late last week, doing particular damage to Asheville but also lashing nearby cities including Greenville. Entire cities have flooded; roads have been rendered impassable; utilities failures are widespread; and the death toll topped 121 across six states on Monday, a number expected to rise. Hundreds of thousands of people may not have access to running water for days.

Also not helping matters: Widespread Verizon cell-phone outages the company reported Monday, affecting not just the regions hit by Helene but also other parts of the country.

For the thousands of Jews in the storm’s path, Helene and its “biblical devastation” also hit days before Rosh Hashanah, one of the holiest days of the calendar. It’s an added stressor that, for some, is now taking a backseat to personal safety.

“As much as I would like to say High Holidays are the priority, for a lot of these people it’s being able to get access to hot water or a shower,” Tessler said of the region she serves, where days of rain prior to Helene meant that centuries-old trees in the region were uprooted by the storms and caused massive damage. 

Her federation serves between 4,000 and 5,000 Jews spread across 11 counties, making the simple act of trying to verify their safety when communication lines are cut a daunting task. South Carolina is also prioritizing getting businesses back on the grid before residential neighborhoods, meaning that Greenville’s synagogues are currently without power — and may not be up and running by Wednesday evening, the start of Rosh Hashanah.

“It is still up in the air, and we may not know until Tuesday if services will go on on Wednesday,” Tessler said, adding that some pockets of the area aren’t expecting to regain power until Oct. 14 — after Yom Kippur. In communication sent this week, she wished her hard-hit community a happy Rosh Hashanah.

Synagogues in other hard-hit regions also shuttered in the face of the storm, the fiercest inland storm in recent U.S. history and part of a trend of intensification that scientists associate with climate change. Several synagogues in eastern Tennessee and northwest Georgia reported power outages and canceled services over Shabbat on Friday and Saturday.

But as bad as the situation is in those areas, it’s far worse in Asheville and its environs. Entire neighborhoods and small towns in western North Carolina — a region of around 3,400 Jews, according to a 2010 demographic survey commissioned by the regional federation — have been washed away by Helene. Most Jewish communal leaders in Asheville remained unreachable Monday.

The website of the city’s Jewish community center displayed the same message on Monday that it had since Thursday: “Due to roadway flooding and forecasted continued rain with a possibility of tornado warnings, ALL JCC programming, Aquatics included, will be closed tomorrow Friday, September 27. We hope everyone stays safe.”

Asheville’s Jewish community includes a handful of congregations, a Jewish Community Center and a Chabad house; a handful of lay-led synagogues dot the surrounding area. The region’s Jewish population has grown in recent years.

While the synagogues are located some distance from the Swannanoa and French Broad rivers, which swelled far beyond their banks during the storm, a current flood map on Monday suggested that at least one, Temple Beth Israel, remained within the boundaries of the flooding. The synagogue typically holds Tashlich, the Rosh Hashanah ceremony in which Jews away cast symbols of their sins, at a stream on its property.

Local Jewish organizations, including Jewish Family Services of Western North Carolina and Chabad of Asheville, were mobilizing online in their efforts to provide food, water and other basic needs to the region’s Jews. 

“We are heartbroken for Western North Carolina and all those impacted by the devastation, but we will get through this together,” JFS wrote on Facebook Sunday. “Please continue to stay safe.” 

Chabad of Asheville posted photos of hot meals and water bottles its rabbi planned to deliver to Jews across the region, asking followers to share details about elderly family members to check up on.

A few hundred Jewish college students also attend school in western North Carolina, most of them at the University of North Carolina-Asheville and Appalachian State University, in Boone. Those schools closed their campuses this week. 

A staffer at North Carolina Hillel who oversees Jewish life on those campuses in an advisory capacity told JTA those students “had been looking forward to celebrating Rosh Hashanah in their communities,” but were now pivoting to seeking out volunteer opportunities.

“It has been inspiring to see students using our Hillel group chats to find places they can volunteer, share resources with one another, and offer each other support; our Hillel students are amazing and, like every Jewish community, shine when things look the darkest,” Ginny Vellani, director of NC Hillel Link, wrote in an email Monday. 

Jewish communities from nearby and farther afield are stepping up to organize relief efforts. Temple Beth El in Charlotte, 120 miles east and largely unaffected by the storm beyond sporadic power outages, had begun to organize a fundraiser for Asheville’s Jews. The temple’s senior leadership was not yet able to share details about its concrete relief efforts Monday. 

Farther-flung Jewish groups have launched fundraisers for Helene relief, including the Greensboro Jewish Federation further to the east in North Carolina and the Greater Miami Jewish Federation, which has also grappled with catastrophic weather attributed to warming seas and worsening storms.

The High Holidays have always fallen around peak hurricane season, which is growing longer and more volatile. Two years ago, small Jewish communities along Florida’s west coast were battered by their own “biblical” storm just before Rosh Hashanah. 

The affected Jewish communal leaders are also in touch with each other, with Tessler telling JTA she has spoken with Asheville’s JFS — although “we just don’t know enough at this point” about the extent of the storm’s impact on the city’s Jewish community.

Yet hopes of celebrating a sweet new year in the region haven’t entirely dimmed. Vellani is planning to drive a truck full of supplies, including challah, honey cakes, apples and honey, to Boone on Tuesday. There, she says, students will hand out the holiday goods to Jewish community members using the area’s synagogue, Temple of the High Country, as a distribution spot.

“We hope to bring holiday joy, even in the midst of this incredibly difficult time,” she said.