The Rabbi whose congregation sits next door to the St. Louis home of Mark and Patricia McCloskey is calling the couple bullies.
“They are bullies,” Rabbi Susan Talve of St. Louis’ Jewish Central Reform Congregation said. “The fact that they’re speaking at the [Republican National] convention is a win for bullies.”
Talve says the couple constantly sows division. She points to an incident in 2013 when the synagogue put up beehives on the grounds to produce honey for Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year).
One morning they found all the bees dead and the hives destroyed.
Mark McCloskey left a note claiming responsibility.
His reason was that the hives were along a fence that sat between the synogogue and the McCloskey home. That fence sits six inches inside the McCloskey’s property line, so the hives were on his property.
“He could have picked up the phone and said, ‘Hey, those beehives are on my property,’ and we would have happily moved them,” Talve says.
She adds the children in the synagogue cried when they found out about the hives. “We were going to have our own apples and honey for Rosh Hashanah!” she said.
The McCloskey’s made news earlier this year when they pointed guns at Black Lives Matter protesters who trespassed into their gated community, something Talve also takes issue with.
The protesters were peaceful, Talve says. She said she knows this because many members of her synagogue marched with them and she works closely with many of the local BLM activists, according to Forward.com.