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In the weeks that followed, several Billings residents-inspired by the Coalition for Human Rights-took action against racism. When skinheads showed up at services of the African Methodist Episcopal Wayman Chapel, small groups of white Christians appeared in response. They sat with the congregation until the skinheads stopped coming. In October an interracial couple awoke one morning to find crude words and a swastika spray-painted on their house. Three days later, volunteers from the local painters union repaired the damage.

But with the arrival of the holiday season, the hate incidents turned violent. In late November a beer bottle was thrown through the window of a Jewish home. And then, on the night of December 2, the Schnitzer home was attacked.

As Tammie spoke with the police officer who'd arrived at her home, she swung between fear and outrage. "This isn't just mischief," she said. He agreed and advised her to take down the Chanukah decorations and avoid leaving the children with a babysitter.

Lying in bed that night, sleepless, Tammie thought how ironic it was that the attack on her home had occurred because of Chanukah-a holiday commemorating the Jews' fight thousands of years ago to worship God in their own way. "I wondered what kind of struggle we were going to be in for, and how we could stop it before it became worse," she says.

The next day, Friday, Tammie spoke with a reporter from The Billings Gazette. She told him how troubled she was by the officer's advice. "Maybe it's not wise to keep these symbols up," she said. "But how do you explain that to a child?"

On Saturday morning Margaret [MacDonald] read Tammie's quote in the paper. She tried to imagine telling her daughter, Siri, then 6, that they could not have a Christmas tree, or explaining to Charlie, then 3, that they had to take a wreath off the door because it wasn't safe.

Margaret phoned her pastor, Keith Torney. "What would you think if we had the children draw menorahs in Sunday school?" she asked. "If we mimeographed as many pictures of the menorah as we could? If we told people to put them up in their windows?"

Reverend Torney had read the paper that morning too. "Yes," he said. "And yes again." He spent the rest of the day on the phone, enlisting other churches. That week hundreds of menorahs appeared in the windows of Christian homes in Billings. "It wasn't an easy decision," says Margaret. "With two young children, I had to think hard about it myself. We put our menorah in a living room window, and made sure nobody sat in front of it."

One of the first to put up a menorah was Becky Thomas, a Catholic mother of two who lives near the Schnitzers. "It's easy to go around saying you support some good cause, but this was different. It was putting ourselves in danger," she says. "I told my husband, ‘Now we know how the Schnitzers feel."'

Some, nervous about jeopardizing their families, checked first with Wayne Inman, the chief of police at the time. "Yes, there's a risk," he told callers. "But there's a greater risk in not doing it."

On December 7, The Billings Gazette published a full-page picture of a menorah to cut out and tape up. Local businesses also distributed photocopies of menorahs, and one put a message on a billboard, proclaiming. "Not in Our Town! No Hate, No Violence. Peace on Earth."

As the Jewish symbol sprouted in Christian windows, the haters lashed out. Glass panes on the doors of the Evangelical United Methodist Church, graced with two menorahs, were smashed. Someone fired shots into a Catholic school that had joined the crusade. Six cars parked in front of homes that displayed menorahs had their windows kicked out; the homeowners received phone calls that told them to "Go look at your car, Jew-lover."

Yet suddenly, for every menorah that was there before, ten new ones appeared. Hundreds of menorahs grew to be thousands. It's estimated that as many as 6,000 homes in Billings had menorahs on display. "All along, our coalition had been saying an attack on one of us is an attack on all of us," says Margaret MacDonald "And God bless them, the people of this town understood." . . . .

The people of Billings kept their menorahs up until the New Year. As lnman says, "The haters could attack a couple of Jewish homes. They could make a second wave of attacks on Christian homes and churches But they could not target thousands of menorahs."

Confronted by a united town, the Ku Klux Klan and skinheads backed off. The acts of vandalism stopped, the hate literature disappeared, and the anonymous calls ended. But with no witnesses and no strong leads, the police were never able to make any arrests, a fact that leaves the community extremely uneasy. . .

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