After 20 years together, Philip Edward Judson and James David Maloney of East Hampton were married at the Graceland Chapel in Las Vegas on Oct. 4.

Mr. Judson’s parents, JoAnne and Richard Judson, live in Chicago. Mr. Maloney’s parents, Carlene and Joseph Maloney, live in Auburn, Me. 

Mr. Judson earned a degree in fashion merchandizing from the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan and is in real estate sales at Halstead Properties. Mr. Maloney is a deputy director at the International Monetary Fund. He holds a bachelor’s degree in marketing from Bentley University. 

The couple met in a bar in Boston, when Mr. Maloney was living there and Mr. Judson was visiting from Manhattan. They are planning a celebration with family and friends at a future date.

The East Hampton Village Board grappled last Thursday with how to implement a proposed restriction on the use of gas-powered leaf blowers, and approved a draft of a law prohibiting storeowners from keeping their doors open when a cooling system is operating. Also, members agreed that a proposed law requiring septic system upgrades should be revised and clarified as to how it will be enforced.

One aspect of the proposed ban on gas-powered leaf blowers — the fact that no properties in the village, not even golf courses, would be exempt from the ban — provoked a testy exchange between Arthur Graham, a trustee, and the mayor. When Mr. Graham said that golf courses should be exempt, the mayor accused him of trying to protect the interests of the Maidstone Club. “You are a vested member of the Maidstone Club. I would ask that you recuse yourself,” Mayor Paul F. Rickenbach Jr. said. “You cannot serve two masters. It’s called transparency and ethics.” Mr. Graham rolled his eyes, but did not respond.

When board members first discussed the ban, they agreed that it would not take effect for three years, in order to give smaller landscaping companies time to phase in the costs of transitioning to battery-powered equipment.

Linda Riley, the village attorney, informed the board that such a delay was not feasible. “I couldn’t find any place that a law was phased in three years out,” she said. “A whole other board could be in place in three years. I understand the motivation, but legally I find it troublesome.”

Mayor Rickenbach suggested a six-month delay instead, but the other board members said that short a time would create an undue burden on small-business owners.

To help the board achieve consensus on a suitable phase-in period and other aspects of the law, the mayor decided that an informal advisory committee should be formed, consisting of local landscaping companies both large and small; the Ladies Village Improvement Society, the Village Preservation Society, and the Garden Club of East Hampton. He instructed Becky Molinaro Hansen, the village administrator, to organize a meeting of the advisers. 

As to the new septic system law, the board had decided on Sept. 6 to confine it to residential properties. The draft presented last week would require the installation and maintenance of low-nitrogen sanitary systems for all new residences, and for existing ones that expand their gross floor area by 25 percent or increase their number of bedrooms. 

The draft also states that a board-appointed “sanitation inspector” would be responsible for the law’s administration and enforcement, but Ken Collum, a village code enforcement officer, raised concerns about its practicality. The new sanitary systems require ongoing maintenance, he said, so how would the village be able to keep track of whether they were functioning properly? 

“Kenny raises good questions,” said Billy Hajek, the village planner and a member of East Hampton Town’s water  quality technical advisory committee. Mr. Hajek said the law should take into account that the county’s Department of Health Services not only issues the permits for the installation of the advanced septic systems, but also has a procedure in place for overseeing their maintenance. “When somebody obtains an approval from the county, they enter into an agreement with the installer,” he told the board. “The installer monitors the system, and they’re certified by the county to do it. I don’t know that the village needs to monitor it after it goes into the ground.”

Ms. Riley said she would redraft the law. The board will discuss the revisions at its next meeting. 

The intent of the proposed law that would prohibit storeowners from keeping their doors open while the store is air-conditioned is to reduce energy consumption and environmentally harmful emissions. Under the law, a store’s exterior door would be allowed open only when people enter and exit, or for deliveries. Every board member agreed that having an air-conditioned space’s doors open was wasteful, but Rose Brown and Mr. Graham said the legislation was a bit of government overreach, and Ms. Brown predicted that enforcing it would prove tricky. There will be a public hearing on the law on Nov. 16.

In other business, the board agreed to establish a pilot program that will test whether removing garbage cans from the beach would reduce the amount of trash people leave behind. Trash cans would instead be placed at an adjacent parking lot. The program, which was suggested by the East Hampton Town Trustees, will be tried out next summer at a village beach yet to be determined. 

Mayor Rickenbach said that similar tests conducted by the State Department of Transportation and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority did not result in a reduction of garbage, but he remained optimistic. “It’s a complicated subject, but we’ll work in concert with the town trustees and come up with a location and a time frame, and hopefully achieve some positive results,” he said.

Before the meeting ended, Scott Fithian, Superintendent of Public Works, informed the board that the M.T.A., which has been working on the retaining walls of the village’s railroad trestles in preparation for raising the trestles early next year, has requested permission to close down Accabonac Road on Saturdays in order to complete the work, which has been delayed by weather conditions. The mayor agreed, but insisted that the M.T.A. provide adequate signage as well as flag wavers so that drivers are properly alerted to the road closings.

A year ago, the tiny Fowler house on Springs-Fireplace Road appeared ready to fall into ruin, despite having been declared a local landmark by East Hampton Town. Now restored, the 19th-century house stands ready to assume its rightful place in the telling of the story of the Montauketts and their way of life after they were pushed off their ancestral lands.

The simple saltbox, owned by the town, is thought to be the last surviving Montaukett dwelling from the 19th century. The question that remains is whether the house was built for George Lewis Fowler and his wife, Sarah Melissa Horton, at its existing site in East Hampton’s Freetown neighborhood or moved there from Indian Field in Montauk.

While that question may linger, when members of Friends of the Fowler House, Town Supervisor Peter Van Scoyoc, and a few others crowded into the house for a tour earlier this month, they had the future in their sights as they acknowledged the hard work that brought the project to fruition and considered what comes next for the historic property. 

Fowler, a Montaukett who died in 1930, was deeded the Freetown property by the developer Arthur Benson in about 1885 in exchange for his residential rights at Indian Field. Fowler worked in East Hampton Village as a gondolier and gardener for the painter Thomas Moran and was also the gardener for Dr. Edward Osborne next door and for Gustav and Hannah Buek’s Home, Sweet Home on James Lane. 

“He kept some of the best gardens in the whole village,” said Robert Hefner, a historic preservation consultant hired by the town to draw up plans for the restoration. Fowler’s own property reflected that, and the committee hopes “to recreate the flower gardens with primitive and ornamental grasses, tiger lilies, lilac and honeysuckle, a grape arbor, and the exotic dahlias the family had on site,” Jim Devine, a member of the Fowler house committee, wrote in an email. Mr. Devine grew up in the house next door. 

The restoration was made possible by the late Ben and Bonnie Krupinski, whose promise of labor to complete the work was fulfilled by Ray Harden and Stratton Schellinger when they took over Ben Krupinski Builder after the Krupinskis died in a plane crash in June. 

If Mr. Krupinski hadn’t sent his crew there to brace up the back roof frame, which was entirely rotten, and put a tarp over it, the Fowler house would not have made it through the winter, Mr. Hefner said. 

Without the Krupinskis “we might still be spinning our wheels,” said Mr. Devine, adding that their deaths “shocked us and for a while took the wind out of our sails.”

The town provided the materials and had Mr. Hefner oversee the cleanup and restoration, allowing him to examine the structure along the way.

“It had been changed quite a lot since George Fowler lived there,” Mr. Hefner said, and it had been unoccupied for at least 20 years. Fowler’s grandson, Leonard Horton, was the last to live there, in the 1980s. “The house is incredible because it’s so simple.” It has three rooms downstairs, two up, and a small porch. 

When the floor had been ripped up and the building was nothing but a shell, Allison McGovern of V.H.B. Engineering, an archaeologist hired by the town, had a chance to explore between the floor joists. Her chief interest, she said, was in what “kinds of material culture we could find” that might help describe what everyday life was like for the house’s occupants. Dr. McGovern did her dissertation on the homes of Indian Field and has a deep interest in the subject. She is also working on an ongoing oral history project, “Mapping Memories of Freetown,” which dovetails nicely with the work she did at the Fowler house. The scope of her investigation there was limited, but her discoveries were exciting. 

Among them were lots of marbles. “That was the most remarkable thing that I have ever encountered,” she said. “There were more than a dozen,” far more than she had found at any of the sites she had explored previously. In a cubbyhole beneath the narrow staircase there were racing forms, again “evidence of leisure activity.” She also found the foot of a porcelain doll, pieces of a broken tea set, glass and ceramic beads, broken pieces of bottle glass and tableware glass, a slate pencil, and lots of buttons. 

“Sew-through buttons, fabric-covered buttons, shell buttons, vulcanized rubber buttons.” Which point not only to household use, she believes, but to other “sewing activities taking place at the site.” 

“The artifacts give you a better sense of family life,” she said, and, using census data from the time, “we can start to connect the names of people [who lived there] to the artifacts.” 

Freetown was settled by former slaves, and eventually was home to many laborers who worked at the estates of the wealthy in East Hampton Village. Mr. Hefner has said that the Fowler house “puts Main Street and Freetown together.”

“Our goal in telling the story of the house, and the people who lived in it, will be to revivify the history of the Montaukett people as an essential factor in East Hampton’s history through this family’s story,” Mr. Devine said.

“It belonged to tribal people,” said Robert Pharaoh of Sag Harbor, who has been working for years to regain the tribal status that was stripped from the Montauketts in 1910 and is also workingto get nonprofit status for Friends of the Fowler House. “Enough of our history has been lost, dug up, and just displaced. . . . This is one structure that is probably the last of its kind.”

Mr. Pharaoh is convinced that the house was indeed moved from Montauk. 

Mr. Hefner, on the other hand, has found documentation and other indications that point to the house’s being built for Fowler in East Hampton. “There’s no evidence that the frame had ever been taken apart and put back together again.” 

“It’s a typical 1885 frame,” he said, and is identical in construction methods and materials to the Thomas Moran studio. “You don’t find that earlier.”

Benson had purchased nearly all of Montauk in 1879 and offered deeds to Freetown plots to induce Montauketts to leave their lands at Indian Field. Some houses, like those of Fowler’s sister, Maria Fowler (who married King David Lewis Pharaoh), were taken apart at Indian Field and moved from Montauk. The rest were burned. 

“As soon as Benson bought the land, he went to work on a campaign to remove the Montauketts,” Dr. McGovern said. 

Suing Benson’s heirs in an attempt to regain ancestral lands in 1909, the Montauketts claimed the deeds were obtained by “fraud and undue influence.” They lost the case and their long battle to regain tribal status has so far been unsuccessful.

“I’m critical of the documentary history,” Dr. McGovern said last week. “There’s always been this family history of the Fowler house being one of the houses that was moved,” she said. Ruling that out “silences that other Native American history about that site. . . . Why wouldn’t we trust those memories and family histories of the people directly connected to this site, as opposed to a document that was written by a developer who dispossesses the Fowlers from their land?”

She contends that there are lots of pieces of the structure that are “significantly older than 1885.” 

“Anomalous structures and indicators point to some of the materials having been part of at least one other structure in Montauk,” Mr. Devine said. “It’s possible — and to me likely — that some of the materials from a previous house in Indian Field were used in the construction of the new house.” For instance, a beam with the initials of David Lewis Pharaoh carved in it. King David Lewis Pharaoh lived from 1838 to 1878, dying before the house existed in Freetown.

“So it seems we have a continuing mystery,” Mr. Devine wrote.

But mysteries are a big part of history, and the efforts to unravel them very often lead to new discoveries.

“The archaeology tells us a lot about the ongoing lifeways at the site,” Dr. McGovern said. Now members of Friends of the Fowler House will consider how to interpret and present that information. 

The group had been in discussion with Mr. Krupinski about returning a small chapel now at East Hampton Point to the Fowler property, and members are hopeful that might still happen. The chapel “is known for having been the site of Stephen Talkhouse’s funeral,” Mr. Devine wrote. They are also pondering the idea of a small building that could provide exhibit space and information about the history of the Montauketts.

Protesters gathered at the windmill on Long Wharf in Sag Harbor on Thursday afternoon in support of Robert Mueller, the special counsel named by the Department of Justice to investigate Russia's involvement in the 2016 federal election. Mr. Mueller's status was thrown into question when President Trump fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

The rally, one of 500 nationwide promoted by the activist group MoveOn, drew an estimated 50 or 60 people, many of whom held signs reading "No One's Above the Law." It was organized here by Wendy Wachtel of North Haven, who had been hoping to take a political breather after canvassing to bring out voters for the midterm elections.

"I just felt it was too important," Ms. Wachtel said. "I was exhausted and ready to lie down and watch bad TV, and then this happened and I was like, 'Oh, no, no, no!' "

Nick Gazzolo, the president of the Sag Harbor Partnership, who was among the protesters, said, "I don't think the president, no matter who they are or from what party, should be able to control investigations into their activities." He was referring to President Trump's firing Mr. Sessions last week and subsequently appointing an ally to replace him.

Edwina von Gal, founder of the Perfect Earth Project, explained why she was at the rally. "You just wouldn't want to feel like you didn't make an effort — I think I share that with everyone here."

The lawsuit filed by Jerry Larsen, a former East Hampton Village police chief, against Mayor Paul F. Rickenbach Jr., Richard Lawler, a village trustee, and the village in general was dismissed by a federal judge on Sept. 24 on the basis of the statute of limitations.

The suit, initiated in August of last year, claimed the mayor, who is a retired East Hampton Village police officer, and Mr. Lawler abused their positions and violated the village’s ethics code by prohibiting Mr. Larsen from taking outside security work in the village, while they were engaged in businesses that provided similar services. 

The suit alleged that in 2009 the mayor and the board directed the then-police chief to divest ownership in his security company, Protec, to refrain from doing business within the village and hiring any village employees, and to shut down the blood and alcohol-testing division of his company. The suit claimed that as a direct result, between 2009 and 2010, Protec’s gross profit decreased approximately 76 percent. Mr. Larsen was seeking damages and attorney’s fees.

On Nov. 1 of last year, Anne Leahey filed a motion to dismiss the case on behalf of Mayor Rickenbach, Mr. Lawler, and the village, arguing that New York’s three-year statute of limitations on a claim of personal injury had run out.

Judge Joseph Bianco of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York ultimately agreed with her, saying that since the alleged actions took place in 2009, Mr. Larsen would have had to file the lawsuit by 2012. He noted that “the plaintiff did not file the lawsuit until almost five years later.”

Judge Bianco provided Mr. Larsen with an opportunity to demonstrate why the statute of limitations should not apply, but on Oct. 15, James Wicks, Mr. Larsen’s attorney, informed the judge that an amended complaint would not be filed. 

“The court’s ruling addressed only the procedural issue of timing, and did not decide the case on the underlying merits,” Mr. Wicks said via email on Friday. His client decided not to to take the matter further, he said, after weighing the costs and determining that one of his goals, bringing “transparency to the practices within the village government,” had been achieved.  

On Monday, Becky Molinaro Hansen, the village administrator, provided a statement from the mayor and the village board on the case, which said Mr. Larsen had failed to establish his case on the merits. In the statement, Mayor Rickenbach said the village “steadfastly stands by its policies and procedures.” He referred to Mr. Larsen as a “disgruntled and litigious former employee,” and said he hoped “Mr. Larsen will finally discontinue his spiteful actions against the village.”

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the establishment of Armistice Day, which evolved into Veterans Day. Armistice Day remembered the anniversary of the peace treaty with Germany that ended World War I on Nov. 11, 1918. It’s hard to think of a more appropriate item for this week than John Calvin Hadder’s compilation on East Hampton in World War I.

J. Calvin Hadder, as he was known, was born in Berlin, Md. He lived from 1895 to 1964 and came to East Hampton in 1916 with the railroad as a clerk and operator. He served as a radio instructor for the Navy in Cambridge, Mass., during World War I after completing training in New York, Pelham Bay in the Bronx, and Hoboken, N.J.

With his wife, Ethel Lillian Gates Hadder, he conducted interviews with other veterans and members of the community to create this volume, which he published on Nov. 3, 1921, soon after the war. In it, Hadder attempted to list all of the town’s veterans, recording even those who served with the Red Cross or local Coast Guard stations. He also wrote a comprehensive history of the town’s experiences during the war, including such details as inventories of the number of bandages wrapped by volunteers here.

The volume begins with an honor roll recognizing those who served, and continues with biographies of veterans like Robert Hudson and Clifford Edwards. These profiles include women and some summer residents, like Everit Herter and Arthur Turnbull Hill. Often, letters from commanding officers or direct quotes from the veterans themselves are included. Not everyone who served has a biography, but the comprehensive look this history brings to the town’s experiences during the war is very helpful.

Hadder’s work was given to the East Hampton Town clerk’s office, which lent the volume to the Long Island Collection for digitization, allowing us to make it searchable by keyword online. The image here is the manuscript’s cover page. The entire 185-page volume is viewable online, by way of the East Hampton Library’s Digital Long Island Collection.

—

Andrea Meyer is a librarian and archivist in the East Hampton Library’s Long Island Collection.

The book is called “We Band of Angels,” by Elizabeth Norman, and as Patricia DelGiorno begins to read aloud from it, she pauses, then apologizes when her voice catches. 

The passage Ms. DelGiorno has chosen to share is about the Army and Navy nurses who persevered under heavy fire at a United States military hospital in Bataan, the Philippines, during World War II. She came upon the book during an extensive study of women who served as wartime nurses and pilots, codebreakers and spies. Even now, despite her acquaintance with the subject, Ms. DelGiorno said she remains amazed by their oft-forgotten bravery, their unwavering commitment, and their strength.

“These women volunteered to serve on the front lines, and they suffered through everything the men in World War II suffered,” said Ms. DelGiorno, who has woven her studies, historical photographs, and film clips into such presentations as “Nurses at the Front in World War II,” which she gave yesterday at the Rogers Memorial Library in Southampton in advance of Veterans Day on Sunday.

“On Dec. 8, 1941, the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Japanese attacked the Philippines too, and these nurses and field hospitals were totally unprepared for that. The hospitals were overflowing. There were so many injured they had to put some of the men on the jungle floor, and that’s where they treated them. They eventually got word in Bataan that the peninsula was lost, and these nurses were ordered to leave for Corregidor,” she recounted during a phone interview. 

“They were later captured by the Japanese and interned for the remainder of the war, into 1945. But when these nurses were interviewed about it later in life, it wasn’t their own fears that haunted them — it was having to leave these thousands of men on the floor of the jungle, bleeding, unarmed. They didn’t want to leave.”

For her Southampton presentation, Ms. DelGiorno wove the story of the Bataan nurses into a three-part talk that also included accounts of women who served at the Battle of the Bulge from December 1944 through January 1945, and at Anzio Beach in Italy, which came to be known as the “Half Acre of Hell” because the fighting there in ’44 was so fierce. In the film clips, some of the women speak about being prisoners of war and their postwar homecomings.

For Ms. DelGiorno, yesterday’s talk was the latest in a series of research efforts begun after she retired as a hospital executive and decided to pursue a master’s degree in English literature at Stony Brook University. 

She has always been interested in women’s issues, she said, and was searching for a thesis topic when she happened to hear of a book about female agents in Special Operations Executive, created by Prime Minister Winston Churchill in 1940.

“Even though this particular book was a novel, it was based on real events, and so I bought the book and I was fascinated,” Ms. DelGiorno said. “Then I bought everything in the bibliography and read that, too. For my research, I went to England and visited the National Archives in the Imperial War Museum. Eventually, I did my thesis. But when it was over, I realized I kind of hated to leave these women.”

So she didn’t. Instead, during the summers of 2013 and 2014, she traveled from her Mattituck home to study more about women in World War II at Cambridge and Oxford Universities. In the years since, Ms. DelGiorno moved on to presentations about World War II-era female aviators, and also spoke with some real-life Rosie the Riveters, women who worked in factories when the men went off to war. She eventually became fascinated by tales of the 59,000 women who served in the Army and Navy as nurses — more than 30,000 of them as volunteers at the front — in part because World War II marked the first time women had served in combat so far behind enemy lines.

“At Anzio, these nurses were under three months of constant hell and bombardment and strafing, but they refused to leave their patients,” she said. “A number of them were killed. At one point they were trapped for three months. I have film clips of women who served there, and it really gives you a sense of what it was like. They faced starvation. Internment. P.T.S.D., though they didn’t call it that then.”

“At the Battle of the Bulge, it was the same situation. They worked in tent hospitals, and even though they had the red cross on the tops of the tents, the Germans strafed them anyway. They worked under horrific conditions, worked on the operating room table, as anesthetists, as bedside nurses. And again, they didn’t leave. They just showed such sacrifice and strength.”

Ms. DelGiorno’s talks have been very well received. She is frequently asked to speak at libraries and other venues on the East End, and has taught a six-week lifelong-learning class at Peconic Landing in Greenport.

“It’s been a labor of love,” she said. 

Her next project may be a session with an Englishwoman who worked at Bletchley Park, the top-secret wartime site for British cryptanalysts that was depicted in the 2014 movie “The Imitation Game.”

“It’s become a passion of mine,” 

she said.

Strategies for protecting the health of the East End’s drinking water supply, among them replacing outdated septic systems, reducing the use of pesticides, and increasing land preservation, were presented Tuesday, at a forum hosted by the Accabonac Protection Committee, by officials from the Suffolk County Water Authority, the Suffolk Department of Health Services, the United States Geographical Survey, and the Group for the East End.

Because nitrogen from traditional systems such as septic tanks and cesspools has been tied to groundwater pollution, Bob DeLuca, president of the Group for the East End, described the need to replace those systems as “the biggest problem Islandwide for the next generation.” He urged more widespread installation of advanced-treatment septic systems, which reduce the amount of nitrogen, and more funding for rebates and grants to pay for them. Ultimately, he said, a centralized sanitation system would make the most environmental sense and be the most cost-effective. 

Amy Juchatz, a toxicologist with the Department of Health Services, said that in general, the quality of drinking water in Suffolk County was high, but that residents needed to remain vigilant. She recommended that private wells be tested every two years for levels of bacteria, pesticides, metals, and other contaminants. The public water supply, she said, is regularly tested for those substances by both the county’s Water Authority and the Health Department, which collects monthly samples. 

Christopher Schubert, a supervisory hydrologist at the U.S. Geological Survey, provided an overview of the Long Island aquifer system and discussed some of the stresses on it, including overdevelopment. Virtually all of the drinking water in the aquifer comes from replenishment via precipitation, he said, and the quality of the soil that precipitation comes in contact with has a direct effect on the health of the groundwater.

During his presentation, Ty Fuller, the lead hydrogeologist for the county water authority, addressed water conservation. Annually, an average residential customer on the East End uses just under 130,000 gallons of public water, he said, but the residential users who consume the most use as much as 22 million gallons per year. Seventy percent of that consumption, he said, occurs between May and September, and much of it goes to irrigate lawns. The water authority maintains more than 586 wells and 237 well fields, but such high demand, he said, can endanger the supply for far more crucial uses such as firefighting.

The Parrish Art Museum has changed up its permanent collection galleries and is in a mood to celebrate this weekend. Its new exhibition, “Every Picture Tells a Story,” opens to the public on Sunday with a free community day at the museum from noon to 3 p.m.

Not only will individuals and families have a chance to see the new show, there will be performances, workshops, activities, and refreshments.

Shane Weeks, a member of the Shinnecock Indian Nation, will begin the proceedings with a traditional welcoming song. Also performing will be the Bridgehampton School’s Tewa Marimba Ensemble. Family art-making activities will be led by Madolin Archer, Grisel Baltazar, Denise Silva Dennis, and Erin Simmons in the theater. In the galleries, Jen Senft will lead a writing workshop for adults. Sandwich and cookie platters will be some of the treats for those who need sustenance for their walks through the galleries.

The museum will open at 10 a.m. on Sunday and close at 5 p.m., allowing those wishing for a quieter environment to see the new show. Admission will be free all day.

On Saturday night, a benefit cocktail party will offer a preview of the galleries with cocktails, hors d’oeuvres, music, and 30 artists featured in the Parrish collection. A champagne toast at 5 p.m. for those purchasing tickets at $500 and above will include remarks by David Salle. His paintings based on Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel frescoes were recently given to the museum and are featured in the new exhibition. (An article about the exhibition appears in today’s Arts section.) Regular tickets are $200 and $150 for members.

A crowd estimated at over 600, including leaders and congregants of just about every synagogue and church on the South Fork, filled the Jewish Center of the Hamptons last Thursday night for a vigil memorializing the 11 victims of the Oct. 27 shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. When the center’s sanctuary could hold not another soul, the latecomers spilled into a downstairs social hall to hear the service through an audio feed.

Rabbis Joshua Franklin of the Jewish Center and Daniel Geffen of Sag Harbor’s Temple Adas Israel jointly organized and led the memorial service. Rabbi Franklin, speaking of anti-Semitism, wondered whether it were once again, as in the days of the Ku Klux Klan, “the new normal.” “No,” he said firmly, while noting that in 2017, anti-Semitic acts in the United States rose by a startling 57 percent. But “Look around this room,” he told the throng. “Jews and people of other faiths, coming together in support of one another.” 

That, Rabbi Franklin said, “is our new normal.”

Rabbi Geffen spoke of fear. “Surely,” he said, “many of us tonight are scared . . . and in our most fearful moments, a voice inside cries out to us to hide, to put up bigger walls, to surround ourselves with sword and shield and to view our neighbors and strangers alike with suspicion and apprehension.” But, he said, “fear . . . did not keep us home tonight and it cannot be allowed to keep us from returning to our synagogues, our churches, mosques, temples, and schools. What is needed tonight and tomorrow and the day after is love, compassion, understanding, and ultimately, action. . . . We must concern ourselves with combating both the ways and the means by which hatred is spread.”

Rabbi-Cantor Debra Stein of the center led the East Hampton Presbyterian Church chorus in prayerful songs of hope, togetherness, and love. East Hampton Village Mayor Paul F. Rickenbach Jr. offered sympathy and assistance wherever possible. “East Hampton Village stands in solidarity with the Jewish community,” he said.

 Village Police Chief Michael Tracey read the names of the six Pittsburgh policemen injured in the shooting and a prayer for the safety of law enforcement officers everywhere. Other public officials at the service included State Assemblyman Fred Thiele, the supervisor of Southampton Town, Jay Schneiderman, and Perry Gershon, the Democratic candidate for Congress in the First District, who is a member of Temple Adas Israel.

A few miles away at Town Hall, after noting the vigil at the Jewish Center taking place concurrently with the East Hampton Town Board meeting, Supervisor Peter Van Scoyoc spoke movingly about the mass shooting before the night’s business began. 

“We must stand in solidarity against all forms of hatred,” the supervisor said. “It is our moral obligation and basic civic duty as citizens and human beings to uphold the founding principles of our democracy, ensuring that all people are treated with dignity and respect, regardless of religious beliefs, ethnicity, or sexual orientation.” 

“We must find ways,” he continued, “to close the widening divide between us, show greater tolerance, and increase our depth of understanding of one another, even though we may be different or disagree.” 

Councilman Jeff Bragman then spoke. “This attack hit home for me more closely because it was an attack on my people,” he told his colleagues and those in the audience. “But in a larger way, I know we understand it was an attack on all of us as one American people.” He asked permission to be excused from the proceedings so that he could attend the vigil. 

“We would all like to be there,” Mr. Van Scoyoc told him, “and will be there in spirit. Thank you for going and representing us as well.” 

At the Jewish Center, 11 church leaders, representing the East Hampton Clericus, lit candles, one for each victim, as the names and ages of those killed were read aloud. Toward the end, everyone in attendance switched on a small electric candle and held them as the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, was recited. 

Afterward, many people stood in the pews without moving, hugging and comforting one another. It took a long time before the synagogue emptied out.

With Reporting by  Christopher Walsh