World Religions News

MEMPHIS, Tenn. (AP) — Standing in the spot where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his final speech at the Mason Temple in Memphis, Church of God in Christ leaders said Monday that a $1.2 million federal grant will be used to modernize the treasured piece of the Civil Rights Movement.

Located near the former Lorraine Motel, where King was fatally shot on the evening of April 4, 1968, Mason Temple is the site of King’s stirring sermon known as the “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” address. Fighting an illness, King made the speech as a storm blew outside the church the night before he was assassinated.

Presiding Bishop J. Drew Sheard, who was joined at a news conference by U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen and Memphis Mayor Paul Young, called the church a place “where faith has always met history, and where the ordinary has always produced the extraordinary.”

“It is the living witness of a movement that changed the entire world,” Sheard said. “As long as the Church of God in Christ exists, we will honor that witness.”

Bishop Melton Timmons, superintendent of national properties for the religious organization, said the funding will be used to upgrade the church’s sound system and other technology. Timmons said the church’s foundation will be inspected, and structural improvements also are planned for the remodeling effort.

The Mason Temple was completed in 1945 following the destruction of the original church by fire. Today, the church serves as the world headquarters for the Church of God in Christ.

Cohen and Young, both Democrats, worked together to help secure the federal funding, which is part of a nearly $18 million package for Memphis projects included in the annual congressional appropriations process.

The package also includes $3.1 million for the restoration of historic Clayborn Temple, the staging area for the 1968 sanitation workers strike that brought King to Memphis. It was heavily damaged by a fire investigators say was intentionally set in April 2025.

In the “Mountaintop” speech, King, 39, gave an impassioned account of his life experiences and seemed to foretell his own death.

“I’ve seen the Promised Land. … I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land,” King said.

In a 2018 Associated Press story about the 50th anniversary of King’s assassination, witnesses described how King captivated the audience in the packed church during a thunderstorm.

“It’s a tin roof, so that’s banging. There’s rafters up there above us, and the rafters are blowing with the wind and hitting each other and hitting the walls from the fierceness of the wind and the rain,” said the Rev. James Lawson, a prominent civil rights activist.

When he finished, King slumped into a chair. To Mike Cody, one of King’s lawyers, he looked like a “toy that had the air taken out of it.”

“Ministers, men were crying,” the Rev. Jesse Jackson told the AP in the 2018 story.

The Mason Temple was also the site of a January 2023 memorial service for Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man who died after he was brutally beaten by Memphis police officers after he fled from a traffic stop.

TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — Last year saw the highest level of deadly violence against Jews around the world in over three decades, with 20 people killed in antisemitic attacks, according to an annual study released by Tel Aviv University on Monday.

The violence, including a deadly attack at a Hanukkah celebration in Australia, continued a spike that began following the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attack and Israel’s subsequent war in Gaza, the report’s authors said.

“The data raise concern that a high level of antisemitic incidents is becoming a normalized reality,” said Uriya Shavit, the report’s chief editor.

Deadly antisemitic attacks were recorded on three continents. Fifteen people were killed at the holiday event at Sydney’s Bondi Beach in December. There were additional deaths in two antisemitic attacks in the U.S. in Washington, D.C., and Colorado; and in Britain, two people were killed at a Manchester synagogue on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar.

Each year, Tel Aviv University’s Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry and the Irwin Cotler Institute for Democracy, Human Rights and Justice releases the report about antisemitism ahead of Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day.

The day marks a national memorial for the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust, which begins Monday evening.

The new report also tracked an increase in antisemitic attacks that resulted in physical harm, including beatings and stone throwing.

It found that 2025 was the deadliest year for antisemitic attacks since 1994, when the bombing of a Jewish community center in Argentina killed 85 people and wounded more than 300. An Argentine court has blamed Iran and its Hezbollah proxy for the attack.

According to the report, there was a moderate increase in the overall number of antisemitic incidents last year compared with 2024, but that total represents a huge jump from 2022, before the war in Gaza. The report tracks incidents that range from physical attacks and vandalism to verbal threats and harassment on social media.

“The peak in the number of incidents was recorded in the immediate aftermath of the Oct. 7 attack, after which we began to see a downward trend — but unfortunately, that trend did not continue in 2025,” Shavit said.

In the United Kingdom, there were 3,700 antisemitic incidents in 2025, up from 3,556 in 2024. In Canada, the number of incidents grew from 6,219 in 2024 to 6,800 in 2025, a number more than three times higher than in 2022.

The report found that even after the Gaza ceasefire took effect last October, antisemitic incidents continued to rise from the same period during the previous year. In Australia, there were 588 antisemitic incidents between October and December 2025, up from 492 during the same period in 2024. There were a total of 472 antisemitic incidents across Australia during all of 2022.

Most physical attacks were carried out by people acting on their own, which is why it is so difficult to try to prevent them, according to Carl Yonker, the study’s director of research. He noted that most attacks were carried out by extremist white Christians devoted to white supremacy or radical Muslims, and often the attackers were unemployed and struggling financially.

The statistics are based on reports from police, national authorities and local Jewish communities.

“I will not teach or love or show you anything perfectly, but I will let you see me, and I will always hold sacred the gift of seeing you—truly, deeply, seeing you.” ~Brené Brown

The first time my kids saw me truly cry was Christmas of 2021. My oldest was sixteen, and my youngest was twelve.

They had just opened their presents. It should have been a warm, joyful morning. Instead, I turned away toward the foyer near the entry of the house, my back to them, as tears threatened to spill over. My mom—whose emotional chaos had disrupted a …

(RNS) — I was 10 years old when I first learned about the Holocaust. My family gathered in our den to watch a television documentary, “Let My People Go,” a history of the Jewish people. It featured footage from the ghettos and death camps. My family watched in silence, until my mother broke the silence by saying: “And now you know why we will never own a German car.”

That was my first lesson on the depth of evil. But some months later, there was a second lesson, on the heights of goodness. 

I had a friend whom I will call Ira. An old woman, Anya, lived in his house and spoke little or no English. I assumed she was my friend’s grandmother. “No,” he corrected me, “she’s the lady who hid my mother in a closet during the war. My mother was so grateful to her that she brought her to the United States with her.”

Right after Ira became bar mitzvah, his family made aliyah (moved to Israel), and we lost touch.

Ten years later, I went to Israel for the first time. Within days of my arrival, I called my old friend’s family and we became reacquainted. Within the first few minutes of our phone conversation, I jumped to the topic that had been on my mind for years. “And the old Polish woman? Whatever became of her?” I asked.

“When we decided to make aliyah,” Ira’s mother told me, “we offered to buy Anya a house in New York and to support her for the rest of her life. But she said to us, ‘Where else could I live? Who else could I live with? You’re my family.’ And so we brought her with us to Tel Aviv.”

Somehow, I knew the answer to the next question even before I asked it.

“Is she still alive? She was already so old … ”

“No, she died just a few years ago.”


“Where did you bury her?” I asked.


“Here in Israel. Where else?” I could hear her weeping through the phone.


I have never forgotten that old woman, because her life was a one-woman refutation of the myth that all Jewish history was unrelenting darkness, a dark pageant of those who sought to kill us and often succeeded.

It was in that spirit, and as my way of marking Yom Hashoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) — which this year takes place from Monday evening (April 13) to nightfall Tuesday — that I watched the movie “One Life.” Starring Anthony Hopkins, it tells the story of Sir Nicholas Winton. In 1938, the British stockbroker happened to be in Prague when he realized the enormity of what was unfolding before his eyes.

Winton raised money to fund the transports of Jewish children, organizing what were called trains of hope to move children to British foster families before World War II began. He saved the lives of 669 Jewish children.

For years, Winton lived quietly, keeping his secret. Years later, his wife found a scrapbook in which he had documented his activities. The film depicts the famous televised reunion in which he met many of those he had saved.

Through it all, he was humble, self-effacing, never bragging about the outsized impact he had on so many lives and on world history. He died in 2015, at the biblical age of 106 years old. Those 669 Jewish children have produced more than 6,000 descendants.

I think of these stories of righteous non-Jews (Christians and Muslims) who saved Jewish lives during the Holocaust. Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust remembrance center, recognizes over 28,000 such stories through trees planted for the heroes. 

But not everyone who saved Jewish lives was righteous. 

A few years ago, a friend told me about how her mother survived the war. The woman had grown up in a small Polish village, where the mayor was a notorious antisemite. All the Jews had gone into hiding in the village. 

The German troops came into town, and an officer came into the mayor’s office demanding a list of all the Jews. The mayor shrugged his shoulders and told them: “There are no Jews here. They all left several weeks ago.”

The officer departed; the danger was averted. Hours later, several Jews came into the mayor’s office, and they asked him: “You hate us. Why did you refuse to give us up to the Nazis?”

The mayor replied, “I might hate you, but I am not a murderer.”

That mayor was not alone. Zofia Kossak-Szczucka was from a prominent Polish family and a member of a nationalistic, antisemitic Catholic organization. Nevertheless, she helped found the Zegota, which saved between 40,000 and 50,000 Jewish adults and 2,500 Jewish children.

She wrote: “Our feelings towards Jews have not changed. We continue to deem them political, economic and ideological enemies of Poland.” And yet: “In the face of murder it is wrong to remain passive … this protest is demanded of us by God, who does not allow us to kill.”

Just as evil is a mystery, so, too, is goodness. 

What does this mean to us today?

There is a classic horror movie cliché. At the end of the movie, you think that the monster — Jason, Freddy, Michael Myers — is dead. The credits roll. Then the arm shoots up from the grave.

The arm of the antisemitic monster is shooting up from the grave.

These times do not call on non-Jews to hide their Jewish friends. Thank God. But these times do call upon non-Jews to be allies. 

How?

First, when there is news of antisemitism, reach out to the Jews in your life. Even a simple text, “I saw this in the news and I am thinking of you,” is appreciated.

Second, when there are acts of antisemitism in your community, speak out. Post about it on social media. Write letters to your local newspaper. 

Third, if you are a congregant of a religious institution, ask your clergyperson to denounce acts of Jew-hatred from the pulpit and to pray for your Jewish friends and neighbors.

Fourth, when you see hatred online, push back — vociferously. 

You don’t need to be heroic like Nicholas Winton, Oskar Schindler and other rescuers of Jews. Rather, in the words of Hillel: “In a place where there are no decent people, strive to be a decent person.” And nowadays, that is almost enough.