The mother of a Hamilton County middle-schooler is raising concerns about the century-old Bible in the Schools program, which teaches the Bible in Chattanooga-area public schools as literature, as being antisemitic after a local teacher allegedly taught her daughter “how to torture a Jew.”
Juniper Russo, the mother of an eighth-grade student at East Hamilton Middle School, posted to Facebook this week, saying the school’s Bible teacher guided the class in a way that was “blatant Christian proselytizing.”
“I drew a hard line and withdrew my daughter from Bible class when it actually turned hostile on February 2,” Russo wrote on Facebook. “[The teacher] wrote an English transliteration of the Hebrew name of G-d on the whiteboard. This name is traditionally not spoken out loud, and is traditionally only written in the Torah. She then told her students, ‘If you want to know how to torture a Jew, make them say this out loud.’ My daughter felt extremely uncomfortable hearing a teacher instruct her peers on ‘how to torture a Jew’ and told me when she came home from school that she didn’t feel safe in the class.”
In a brief telephone conversation Saturday, Russo said she had reported the incident described on Facebook to the Anti-Defamation League, since it was antisemitic. She declined further comment, saying she agreed to a local TV station’s request that she not speak with other members of the media.
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