THANKSGIVING:

At a virtual memorial hosted by B'nai Jacob, representatives from the four victims' communities will eulogize them. Local politicians and activists will speak about how relationships between Greenville's different groups have gotten stronger in the past year.

For Mullin and her congregation, the memorial is the culmination of a year-long effort to become more involved in the broader Greenville ecosystem. It's an agenda that has deepened B'nai Jacob's ties to its non-Jewish neighbors, improved its previously non-existent relationships with the city's Satmar community and given a once-ailing synagogue a new feeling of purpose and vitality.

"The terrible-ness of this incident, it gave us a renewed sense of mission," Mullin said. "What does it mean to be a Jewish community? What does 'community' even really mean?"

Just a year ago, such an event would have seemed impossible.

On the morning of Dec. 10, 2019, two shooters killed a Jersey City police officer, Detective Joseph Seals, in the city's Bayview Cemetery. They then drove to the JC Kosher Supermarket, a hub of the city's nascent Hasidic community, known as Satmar after the name of their ancestral village in Hungary. There, the shooters killed two Hasidic Jews, Mindy Ferencz and Moshe Deutsch, and Douglas Miguel Rodriguez, an Ecuadorian immigrant who worked at the supermarket.

The shooters were affiliated with an antisemitic offshoot of the Hebrew Israelites, a diffuse and largely peaceful movement which asserts that Black people are descended from the Biblical Israelites.

The aftermath of the tragedy showed Mullin two things. She learned that reaching out to the Satmars, the community that had been attacked, wouldn't necessarily be easy just because she is also Jewish.

She also saw that the violence had exposed longstanding rifts between longtime Greenville residents and the Hasidic Jewish families who had moved there over the past several years.

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