One year ago, on August 5th, 2012, a gunman walked into the Sikh Temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, and opened fire, killing six people. This past Monday marked the fourth day of the memorial commemoration, which started with a 48-hour non-stop recitation of the Sikh holy book, the “Guru Granth Sahib.” On Saturday, community members held a memorial 6K run/walk, and a candlelight vigil, “Uplift and Heal” is planned for next Monday evening.
The Sikh temple tragedy was one of several mass shootings in 2012, including one that took the lives of 20 children and six adults at Connecticut's Sandy Hook Elementary school, and another at a theater in Aurora, Colorado, where 12 were killed and 58 injured.
The Sikh Temple’s president, Satwant Singh Kaleka, was one of the victims who lost his life that day in Oak Creek. His son, Pardeep Kaleka, was on his way to the temple on the morning of the shooting. He was stopped a mile away by a police roadblock, and police informed him about the shooting. Afterwards, Kaleka began looking for a way to turn his personal loss into something positive. He found an unlikely ally in Arno Michaelis, a former white supremacist. The two formed Serve 2 Unite, working to build networks of diverse interfaith youth leaders to help at-risk communities.
“There are people in this world hanging on by a thread, and the more threads we can give them, the better our society is going to be,” said Pardeep about Serve 2 Unite’s mission. “There is a commonality [among violent offenders] of a loss of a sense of humanity, of those threads, so I tell religious leaders: make it easier for people to believe in God.”
You can learn more at serve2unite.org.
