This is a true story.
For most folks, it didn’t seem to matter much that their new chief of police was a Jew. In a town split between Catholics and Protestants, it was almost like Belfast, where being a Jew meant you were neutral when it came to their spats.
And so, in the summer of 1979, my father, Efraim O’Sullivan, a former senior cop in the New Orleans Police Department, held the distinction of becoming the first and so far only Jewish police chief in the entire state of Mississippi.
Ocean Springs sat on a small bluff across the bay from Biloxi and overlooked the Gulf of Mexico. The little town’s sheltered harbor was home to shrimp boats and small yachts, pelicans and catfish. When folks asked him about his name and complained they couldn’t say it, he’d ask them: “How do you like your eggs in the morning?
“Ah fry’em,” they’d say.
“Well then, that’s my name,” he’d quip.
The American South, as they say, isn’t a direction like north, east, or west. It’s a state of mind. It is the most maligned and mused upon of American regions.
The term conjures a variety of images. Magnolias, front porch swings, and sweet tea for some; football, stock cars, and fried chicken for others; lynchings, burning crosses, and civil rights marches for still others.
When musical digital watches first came out, Efraim got one. It played “Dixie.” He’d call me when I was at college up at Louisiana State University and play his watch into the phone.
“Hey chief,” I’d say. “One day the Ku Klux Klan or the Black Panthers are going to catch up with you.”
Efraim and my mom, Dina, built a house right off the bayou on the north side of town. It was a Creole cottage design with a wide front portico and hurricane shutters with an oval gravel drive from the street.
And when the time came to move in, Efraim mentioned to a few folks that he was going to put up a mezuzah on his doorpost. Perhaps it was a mistake to invite Mayor Connor over for the little ceremony.
“Why, we’re all going to make a point to be there when you christen your little home,” the mayor said, slapping him on the back. “We don’t want anybody accusing us of being anti-symmetrical, you know.”
Word spread within hours.
“The police chief’s hanging some kind of lucky Jew charm on his house!”
“D’ya hear? Dey’s hanging a Jew! At da police chief’s house.”
There was no way around it. Putting together the words: “Jew,” “police,” and “hanging” was bound to draw a crowd in this state.
The Ocean Spring Record, a weekly rag that one could often find stained by shrimp and fish lying open to the sun on the many short piers jutting from the beach into the Gulf, was filled largely with photos of the local high school sports teams and a gossip column about upstart debutantes. Now the editor and writer, Wayne Weidie, saw a sensational story brewing.
He had heard about the lucky charm ceremony from Pee Wee, the dogcatcher, who had learned about it from the maid when he was asked to come over to the mayor’s house to shoot a stray dog.
As soon as O’Sullivan heard Weidie’s voice on the telephone, he got that sense that it was going to be one of those days.
“No, it’s not a lucky charm,” said the chief. “It’s sort of ritual tradition that we…” He stumbled, for he saw he was just not getting his message across. “Why don’t you come over yourself to see what it’s all about,” he added regrettably.
Something had to be done. He had been in this town long enough to know what a Mississippi curiosity was. There was no telling where it would lead. Front-page stories? Halloween tales? People driving by in the night to get a glimpse of the strange and disappointing thing?
No, he thought, he needed to put a stop to it all before it came to that. He decided to open it up for the whole town to come. It was the only way out.
“But I don’t know any special prayers for putting up a mezuzah,” whined Rabbi Joseph Lifshitz on the phone to the chief. “It’s not a thing you normally do in public anyhow.”
O’Sullivan had telephoned Lifshitz, the rabbi stationed at Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, to help him in this hour of need.
The bachelor Lifshitz, who had not long ago changed his name from Lipschitz, had only recently been assigned to Biloxi. He had chosen a military career because it turned out he wasn’t a man who liked speaking before large congregations.
“Will there be many people there? The rabbi squeaked.
“Who knows?” pleaded the chief. “But look, I just can’t nail it up without a prayer or something, can I? I need you to say some kind of prayer. I’m not asking for the Stations of the Cross, for Chrissake, just something. Make it up.”
O’Sullivan sent over one of his patrol cars to pick up the rabbi. Lifshitz soon found himself sitting nervously in the back seat, most likely grateful for the wire screen separating him from the two tobacco-chewing cops with oversized pistols. They’d stopped on the bridge back to Ocean Springs, which had opened to let a fleet of wooden-hulled shrimp boats home from the Gulf, their nets hanging from the masts on either side as they passed under the drawbridge.
One of the cops picked up the microphone, and soon word was out on the police radio across southern Mississippi: “Should be at de chief’s house ’bout 10 minutes with that Jew rabbi, yeah.” It was clear the cops could not quite recall the last time they had a rabbi in the back seat of their patrol car. And it was clear Lifshitz was thinking the same thing.
Trying to be friendly, one of the policemen offered some SKOL chewing tobacco to the rabbi.
“Wanna pinch, rabbi?” he said, holding up a round cardboard cup of the moist, mud-like wad to the wire screen. Lifshitz shook his head no.
“Will there be many people?” the rabbi squeaked.
“Well, de city council, dey canceled their meeting tonight, so all dem councilmen’ll be der, that’s fo sure,” said patrolman Bill Gautreaux in his Cajun accent.
A sigh rose from the back seat.
“And court be put off till Thursday, yeah, so Judge RE “Chubby” Wilson be der, too, I guarantee.”
Lifshitz still had no idea what he was going to say. Maybe the “Sheheheyanu” would suffice, but that blessing for gratefulness at reaching a certain point in life was far too short.
By the late afternoon, just a few hours after he had asked the mayor to join him, people began milling around the O’Sullivans’ new home. The city aldermen came bearing potted plants, spice racks, and other housewarming gifts. The owner of the Master Grill on Highway 90 gave Papa and Mama one of those “bottomless” coffee mugs that entitled one to free coffee refills. All he wanted was an early glimpse of the Jew charm.
Icabod (“IW”) Bendy, the old black man who worked at the junkyard, also showed up. The 76-year-old always said he had felt a kinship to the Hebrew people. He even had a Hebrew name.
The patrol car drove slowly down the street, and a hush fell over the crowd of close to a hundred or so guests, neighbors, press, and curiosity seekers that had gathered.
One of the cops opened the door. He let go a long stream of brown tobacco spit into the ditch.
Skinny Rabbi Lifshitz meekly emerged. An eerie silence overcame the whole crowd as they stared at the Jew boy. It was probably the first time anyone there had actually seen a real, live rabbi, and a Jewish one at that!
The crowd parted to let him through, as he made his way past the photographers, the kids on bikes, and the dogs to the front porch. Climbing the steps, he saw the chief on the stoop and whispered, “Oy vey, they offered me a pinch of tobacco.”
Efraim was anxious to get on with it and ignored the comment. “You got the prayer?”
“Sure, but...”
“Let’s get on with it.”
Everyone had crowded around the front porch, which was four steps up from the gravel drive. Some were on the porch. The police radio cackled as the cops in their cowboy hats looked on behind their mirrored aviator sunglasses. The rabbi read a quick prayer in Hebrew and shut the book.
“That’s it?” the chief whispered out of the side of his mouth.
The rabbi shrugged his shoulders with an annoyed look.
“Come on,” the chief pleaded.
Rabbi Lifshitz nodded.
The chief knew he had to add to the ceremony. He thought for a moment and then started reciting:
“Ma nishtana halaila hazeh mikol haleylot!” he said in Hebrew with all the panache he could muster. “Shebechol haleylot anu ochlim hametz u-matzah!”
It was too much. The crowd had been patient long enough. They wanted to see it. The prayer for attaching a mezuzah is really only 12 words long and basically says there is only one God and we are commanded to put this thing on our doors. What the chief had been reciting afterward was one of the four questions traditionally recited by Jews during the holiday of Passover. He had been prepared to go through all of the four questions but decided he had satisfied the crowd.
The rabbi continued.
'I do proclaim this house sacred'
“With this mezuzah I do proclaim this house sacred,” Lifshitz said. Sensing he was on a roll, he added: “May it watch over its inhabitants and protect them from ill health, poverty, despair...”
“Dayenu!” whispered a smiling O’Sullivan, Hebrew slang for enough already.
The chief then took out the mezuzah. An audible “Awe” rose from the crowd. Ever the Sunday school teacher, he held it above his head so that everyone could see. He quickly hammered it to the doorpost with two nails. The rabbi entered the house. O’Sullivan nodded to two of his patrol officers, and they moved over toward the porch to block any attempts to rush it.
“I want to thank everyone for coming and welcoming me to Ocean Springs. Y’all feel free to drop by anytime now, ya’hear,” he said.
The food table was on the bayou side of the house, off the back deck, and soon the invited guests were back there, jabbering away. But everyone took a chance to get a look at the lucky Jew charm the chief’s got on his house. The crowd was satisfied.
“He ain’t so bad,” someone said, and they all made their neighborly way home, feeling as if they had been witness to a once-in-a-lifetime event.
It was probably one of the most unusual public hangings in the state of Mississippi that day.■