At one point, Nussbaum stayed at the home of Alvin Binder, a Jewish attorney in Jackson known for assisting the FBI in investigating the KKK, recalled Lisa Binder, 71, his daughter. She remembers her father keeping a gun under his desk for protection.

It was a scary time, but there are ways in which this moment is scarier, Binder said. Antisemitic ideas move through anonymous message boards and hard-to-trace platforms.

“What are we doing about that?” she said. “It’s almost more difficult to track down, or I would imagine it is. We knew who the heads of the KKK were at the time; it wasn’t like it was a secret.”

Myers, the second vice president of Beth Israel, said that even before she knew the fire was arson, she was determined to hold Hebrew school the next morning. She grabbed Hebrew books out of the burned building. She picked up a braided Havdalah candle so the children could start Sunday school as they always did, with prayers marking the end of Shabbat and the beginning of a new week. And she took pictures, thinking of the history that needed to be preserved.

Myers, who moved from Connecticut to Mississippi almost 20 years ago, has long worked with museums and educational institutions, including the Goldring/Woldenberg Institute of Southern Jewish Life, which was also housed at Beth Israel and is now displaced.

While she was working at Mississippi’s history and civil rights museums, Myers taught about the 1967 KKK bombing. Now, she was looking into the faces of children and showing them pictures from that time. She asked, “What did they do next?”

One offered that Beth Israel still had a congregation: “We kept going.”

“‘OK,’ I said,” Myers recalled. “Well, what are we going to do next?”

The children imagined what they would want in the rebuilt space, Myers said. Colorful books. A cotton candy machine. A mural of past rabbis.

One young girl had another idea: “Just be more Jewish than ever.”