November 19, 2024

This fall, the Episcopal City Mission is offering “A Stolen Beam,” a series of meetings addressing reparations in Christian and Jewish faith traditions. Led by facilitators Steven Bonsey, former Canon Pastor at the Cathedral Church of St. Paul, Boston,  and Constance Holmes, the meetings will end in mid-December 2024 and we’ll report on our participation and what we learned from the series in this column.

The course was originally developed by members of the Reparations Committee of the Jewish Community of Amherst, MA. They explain the influence of the Stolen Beam debate on their efforts:

*The name “Stolen Beam” is a reference to a Talmudic debate about the right thing to do when we discover that the house in which we live was built with stolen materials, “a stolen beam.” One rabbi argues that the entire house must be torn down and the beam returned. Another argues that it makes no sense to destroy the home, yet some form of acknowledgment and compensation is owed to the owners of the beam.”

The city of Amherst has been working on a reparations plan since 2021. The final report of the African Heritage Reparations Assembly (AHRA) was issued in September 2023. For more on the activities that led to the presentation of the report, see “Reparations Revisited: Where Are We Now in Amherst?”

–Mary Beth Clack, Mary Blocher, Cindy Coldren, Pat Krol, Liz Levin
–Published in This Week @Emmanuel Church November 19, 2024