News Highlights Hebrew College Alumna Arrested for Civil Disobedience in Minnesota

Hebrew College Rabbinical School alumnus Rabbi Emma Kippley-Ogman, Jewish and interfaith chaplain at Macalester College in St. Paul, was arrested and charged with trespassing last Friday while taking part in an interfaith clergy action to protest inhumane immigration enforcement operations in Minnesota. She wrote about the experience for the Forward:

In the bitter cold, thousands of Minnesotans gathered at that airport. Tens of thousands more marched downtown, and others simply stayed home in the largest work stoppage in this country in many decades, the Day of Truth and Freedom. Nearly one thousand interfaith clergy answered the call to come to Minnesota — as they did for the Civil Rights Movement call to march in Selma in 1965 — to join us in the fight. Standing there among them, on erev shabbes in the cold, I thought about the Torah portion we would read the next morning in shul: parashat Bo, from the Book of Exodus.

In it, the darkness of the ninth plague that befell the Egyptians is described as something that the oppressors — the mitzrim, which I’ll translate as “the ones of narrowed sight” — could actually touch. It was so thick that it kept them isolated from each other, unable to move. In contrast, the dwellings of those seeking liberation were full of light.

I imagined that palpable darkness not as a punishment, but as a reflection of reality. The oppressors were unwilling to see the humanity of their neighbors. But if they had been, they too could have found themselves in dwellings full of light, able to clearly perceive the richness and possibility of living in a multiethnic community.

So too with the federal oppressors here in Minnesota, and those who collude with them. They are so welcome to join us in the light of that recognition. We were there at the airport to invite them in.

Read the whole piece: “I’m a rabbi arrested for protesting ICE in Minneapolis. The Book of Exodus shows us how this ends”