The Temple Bombing

At 3:37 on Sunday morning, October 12, 1958, a bundle of dynamite blew out the side wall of the Temple, Atlanta's oldest and grandest synagogue. The South was in the grip of a vast backlash against the Supreme Court's order to desegregate the schools; a "Confederate underground" of White Citizens Councils, Ku Klux Klan Klaverns, and armed cadres of neo-Nazis plotted to "retake" America. When a liberal rabbi from Pittsburgh, Jacob Rothschild, took the helm of the Temple and began to speak out on civil rights, his congregants begged him to be careful.

Melissa Fay Greene is an award-winning author and journalist whose writing has appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Atlantic Monthly, the Chicago Tribune, and Newsweek. She is also the author of Last Man Out: The Story of the Springhill Mine Disaster and the forthcoming There Is No Me Without You (Bloomsbury Press). She lives in Atlanta, Georgia.