With just a few hundred people in the community, it was never particularly easy being Jewish in Mississippi's capital city, but members of Beth Israel Congregation took a special pride in keeping their traditions alive in the heart of the Deep South.
An arson fire over the weekend that badly damaged the historic synagogue's library and administrative offices made it much harder and harkened back to an era more than a half-century earlier when the Ku Klux Klan bombed the Jackson, Mississippi, synagogue because of its rabbi's support for civil rights.
