In the southeastern coastal Texas town of Victoria, what started as a unfortunate incident with politically charged undertones has resulted in an outpouring of support for a small community.
This past Saturday, soon after President Donald Trump’s executive order temporarily barring residents of seven Muslim countries from entering Cratosslot the U.S., Victoria’s only mosque burned down. After being robbed a week before, the mosque went up in flames in the middle of the night. The center’s president, Shahid Hashmi, said he woke up in the middle of the night to check online surveillance and found the doors were unlocked, per the Associated Press.
While the cause of the fire is still being investigated and could take months, per the Victoria Advocate, the response to the incident has been swift. A GoFundMe page set up to raise funds to rebuild the mosque has collected more than $1 million in four days. The Muslim community, which numbers around 100 people, per Forward.com, already has a new place to worship: the local synagogue.
“Jewish community members walked into my home and gave me a key to the synagogue,” Hashmi said soon after the fire.
“We were very happy to do this,” Melvin Lack, treasurer of Congregation B’Nai Israel in Victoria, told USA Today. “You feel what’s happening in the community and everyone reacts.”
“We have probably 25 to 30 Jewish people in Victoria, and they probably have 100 Muslims. We got a lot of building for a small amount of Jews,” he told The Independent.
The mosque and the synagogue are separated by just over a mile.
Per the Victoria Advocate, other community members have turned out to support their neighbors, with more than 400 people gathering for a prayer service the Sunday after the fire.
And while the mosque did not have insurance before the fire, the Advocate reports that the community’s leadership hopes to rebuild even bigger than before.
“This shows there are a lot more good people in the world than bad people,” mosque leader Osama Hassan told the Advocate. “The people of Victoria help us to rebuild this place again. Just all of us, we would never be able to rebuild it. It's impossible for our small community.”
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