Katrina Wasn't God's Disaster

Civic duty is not something Rabbi Uri Topolosky takes lightly: he recently left his post as associate rabbi at the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale in New York to rebuild Jewish life in New Orleans. When the devastating hurricane hit two years ago this week, most synagogues were flooded, but Congregation Beth Israel in New Orleans was completely destroyed. After the devastation of the storm, Topolosky’s predecessor moved with his family to New Jersey, leaving Beth Israel in need of a new spiritual leader. The 29-year-old rabbi relocated with his wife, Dahlia, and sons Elyon, 3, and Itai, 1, to stimulate the New Orleans Jewish community’s rebirth and reinvention.

To mark Katrina's two-year anniversary, Beliefnet recently spoke with Rabbi Topolsky about the spiritual effects of the devastating storm and how communities of faith are coming together to rebuild what they once lost.



Why did you, a young rabbi with a job in New York, suddenly decide to move to New Orleans?

There are a lot of different components that really drew [my family] here. First of all, the opportunity to be a part of a small Jewish community where everything you do really can have a profound impact on the make-up of the Jewish community--what it looks like, how it feels--that was very exciting.

The other piece was we really did feel a sense of civic duty to come to New Orleans after Katrina. It was very powerful to come to a place that has experienced so much devastation, to a city where everyone is still living in the trauma of Katrina, and to just do our own small part in helping rebuild.

One of the unique things about coming to a place like New Orleans is that it's not just about building up your shul, your synagogue, your community. It's about helping to rebuild an entire city. That is so exciting. New Orleans is just an incredibly exciting place right now in America because there's so much attention on it and, frankly, a lot of it is negative. But, attention and energy is attention and energy, and it can be redirected and re-channeled for positive.

What do you see more of in the aftermath of Katrina: people asking, "How could a good God let this happen," or people saying, "This crisis brought me closer to God?"

What we see right now is a city that is still living in the trauma of the storm, but has moved away from existential issues, and has gone to looking at ourselves--people, the engineering corps, the government--and saying, "Where should we have been more responsible?" and "How can we be more responsible moving forward?"

I'm sure people went through [a period of asking] "How could God have done that," and I'm sure some people are still going through that. But, what we've experienced on the whole is that there's a piece of God inside all of us, and that means that we have the responsibility to take care of our communities. Hurricane Katrina did not destroy this city. It was the levees that did not hold. And some would argue that, well, maybe no levee can ever hold here, and that might be possible. But, this is a human disaster. This is a human issue. And I think people have gone through the stages to recognize it, that what happened here was a human disaster, a human error and, therefore, there is a human response. If it's a designed, divine disaster, we don't know what the response can be. But, this was really a human disaster, and that means we're in control of how we respond to it.

Have you seen any signs of spiritual recovery?

There's a lot of spiritual recovery going on in every synagogue, in every church, and wherever else you want to look. Our shul was the only Orthodox synagogue to be destroyed by Katrina. Many synagogues took in water, but we lost everything. And our building is still sitting there, sort of a relic, a shell of what was, and it's incredibly intense to walk through there.

The other side of the coin is that we have been gifted three Torah scrolls [from communities in California and New Jersey], and more to come.

Continued on page 2: 'We should see each other and watch each other'... »