Roz Pelles, a black woman, and her husband Don, who is Jewish, both have stories of discrimination. Together, they spoke of their personal struggles and activism at the Black Jewish Freedom Seder on Thursday.
About 100 students and faculty members of different backgrounds gathered at Hardin Hall to celebrate a traditional Jewish dinner. The seventh annual event was organized by For Members Only and Northwestern’s Fiedler Hillel Center to promote the parallels between black and Jewish struggles, said Ayanna Berry, a member of FMO and one of the seder’s organizers.
“I think one of our main objectives is to bring together two communities who don’t normally interact to see what common threads that we have and see future partnerships that can arise out of it,” the McCormick junior said.
There were a number of black and Jewish students there, but some students attended for different reasons.
Weinberg junior Andrew Marshall said he attended to be part of the event.
“Being that I’m not black or Jewish, it might seem ironic that I’m here,” he said. “I just like the whole idea of bringing together a lot of people to discuss relevant things.”
Weinberg junior Elena Pinsky and Weinberg sophomore Adam Yalowitz led the group through a traditional seder mixed with modern aspects. They encouraged participation by having students and faculty take turns reading parts of the service or quotes from black and Jewish activists and singing African-American songs.
“The way that they’ve integrated the Jewish text with the more modern text is really interesting,” said Rebecca Berg, a Weinberg freshman. “It shows that we can really come together to talk about these issues.”
The event featured keynote speeches from the married couple, who have worked as civil rights activists.
“I became a civil rights activist my freshman year in high school because I was an ordinary kid in an extraordinary time,” Roz Pelles said. “I grew up in the South, where every part of my life was segregated by race.”
The couple took turns explaining how they became activists and their involvement in the 1979 Greensboro Massacre, an anti-Ku Klux Klan rally that went awry when five of the protestors were killed by Klan and American Nazi Party members.
“We felt (the Klan) needed to be exposed,” Don Pelles said. “There were plans to have a march and a conference in Greensboro, North Carolina to generate anti-Klan support, but neither event occurred.”
Don Pelles said he noticed something amiss when there were no police at the protest.
“This caravan of cars came through and it was the Klan,” he said. “People started yelling and shouting, but at the end of the caravan was a car which stopped. People got out of the car, opened the trunk very calmly, got out high powered rifles and shotguns and started shooting.”
After sharing her stories, Roz Pelles concluded by encouraging the audience to build communities on campus and stay vigilant.
“I’ve come to understand the need to build principle alliances,” she said. “There needs to be a deep respect to what people bring, there needs to be an understanding and acknowledgement of differences, and there needs to be a willingness to sometimes lead and sometimes follow.”
