Bishop Beckwith is quoted in this article by New Jersey Monthly.
The modest stub of a building on Chancellor Avenue has opened its doors to many different people over the years. First came the customers of the Rubin Brothers drugstore, a mainstay for Newark’s Jews during the mid-20th century heyday of the surrounding Weequahic neighborhood. Then, the 1967 riots and I-78 blasted through Newark, and the Jews fled Weequahic for the suburbs. The African-Americans who moved in found bargains at what had become Murry’s Meats, a discount butcher shop. Years later, a small group of faithful Christians resurrected the corner store as the New Life Missionary Baptist Church.
New Life moved out a few years ago. Since 2008, Friday afternoons have replaced Sunday mornings as the busiest time of the week at the well-worn, one-story building. That’s when Muslims stream in for jumah, the obligatory weekly congregational prayer. All that remains of the building’s past is one of the Baptist pews just inside the front door. It is used by those who need to sit to take off their shoes before they go inside to pray—for hope and peace, and on this day last June, perhaps also for assurance that they are no longer being spied on.
Early this year, the congregants learned that a special unit of the New York Police Department, on the lookout for terrorists, had been watching them where they worked, where they shopped, even where they prayed. And that gnaws at them.
