HAMDEN – The owner of an elaborate Halloween display meant to entertain visitors and raise money for charity says he won’t take down the decorations despite complaints by the NAACP and town leaders that the holiday decoration evokes Jim Crow-era lynchings and Nazi concentration camps — but he reached out to a neighboring synagogue, Temple Beth, and the rabbi reached back.
Eric Andrewsen’s display at his Whitney Avenue home, which he calls “The Asylum for the Criminally Insane,” includes mannequin guards in two watchtowers, a fence and barbed wire, and a gallows with four human and four ghost victims.
Mayor Lauren Garrett called it “a visual trigger for survivors, descendants, and anyone who carries the weight of these atrocities in their family history,” in an Oct. 16 letter to Andrewsen.
He disagrees.
“That’s not the intent at all… there’s nothing on the lawn that shows that I’m directly attacking any group or person,” Andrewsen told WTNH Channel 8. “I’m not the type of person to just slap a ghost out in the front yard. Doing something like this, having that special house that you knew something was going to happen [with], it just makes it much more intense.”
A ‘consensitive’ response
A conservative synagogue with 400 members, Temple Beth and Andrewsen have been good neighbors for many years – and will probably continue to be, said Benjamin Scolnic, a rabbi and spiritual leader at the synagogue for 43 years. Scolnic called the controversy “a lesson in unintended consequences, unfortunate and regrettable, but a learning experience.”
“I don’t think he was prepared for the reaction he got. I had a very full conversation with him, and so did a lot of other people, including my minister friend across the street, and he just won’t budge,” Scolnic told CT Examiner on Friday.
With the controversy erupting during the same week as a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid that detained eight people, Legislative Council President Dominique Baez said during Wednesday’s council meeting that she found herself worried about the town’s future.
“We have witnessed violence and crime and hate towards our communities of color, anti-Semitic imagery,” Baez said. “We have resurrected language, offensive language that we left behind decades ago, and I want to trust that Hamden’s going to do better.”
No one spoke in favor of the display.
Council member Sarah Gallagher said the intended benefactors of the display, the Police Activities League, told her that they would not accept donations from Andrewsen. Andrewsen should be billed for any police assigned to provide security at the display, Gallagher said.
But the display, particularly with one of its hanged victim’s striped shirt, has also drawn “consensitive” responses from across the community to Scolnic’s congregants, Scolnic said.
Scolnic gave an example: “People are saying to me, ‘Well, you know, it reminds us of concentration camps and things like that,’ and I’m more concerned about that it reminds me of the lynching” of African-Americans.
“Different communities are being sensitive to the other communities within the general community, and there’s something sort of wonderful about that,” Scolnic added. “We’re living in a time of hatred and divisiveness, and the way that the community is feeling for each other and being sensitive to other sensitivities is pretty gratifying.”
‘He just didn’t mean it’
Scolnic expressed sympathy for Andrewsen, even though the Halloween displays aren’t particularly agreeable to his taste.
“As a rabbi, I do more than my share of funerals, and when I see houses that have tombstones that say RIP with names on them, I don’t go for this,” Scolnic said. “I just buried somebody this week, and making a joke out of ‘Rest In Peace’ on your front lawn is a little much for me.”
The rabbi was impressed that Andrewsen approached him after a prayer service on Oct. 18 to discuss the matter personally. Their conversation was lengthy.
“I said to him, point blank, I said, ‘Do you now see what I see?’ And he said yes,” Scolnic said. “I do not think it was intentionally hateful, I do not think it was malicious. He just didn’t mean it.”
“He’s a good guy,” he added, “and I know that Nov. 1st he’ll still be our neighbor.”