Providence Mayor Brett Smiley stood, somber, next to the city’s police chief on Thursday night as he announced a shocking end to the dayslong manhunt that followed a mass shooting at Brown University, where a gunman killed two students and injured nine more. The suspect had fled to Massachusetts, where he allegedly killed an MIT professor, and then killed himself in a storage unit in New Hampshire. 

The next morning, on Friday, Smiley sat in his dark City Hall office before dawn, describing the surreal saga in an interview with a local NBC affiliate.

“Everything about this situation is tragic, but at least we now know there is a definitive end to it,” Smiley said, sitting in front of a Hanukkah menorah. “Now we can start the healing process as a community.” 

As the Rhode Island capital city, home to some 190,000 people, has found itself a fixture in the national news, Smiley has also found himself in the spotlight. The 46-year-old Democrat didn’t lead the investigation — that was up to law enforcement, who he commended on Thursday for their hard work. He sees a different role for himself that will continue long after the sudden end to this crisis. 

“I think my job in the days to come is to help our community heal, to process the trauma that they’ve been through,” Smiley said at a vigil last Sunday. A long-planned communal holiday gathering, meant to be a Hanukkah celebration and a Christmas tree lighting, had turned into a place for people to grieve together.

“As a Jewish mayor on the first night of Hanukkah … [which celebrates] a story which involves one day’s worth of oil lasting eight nights, it is I think very timely and appropriate that we light the first Hanukkah candle tonight to bring a little bit of light into our community that could desperately need it at this time,” Smiley told ABC News last week.

The mayor leaned on his own faith in the days afterward. Aside from taking part in the menorah lighting, he stopped by his synagogue, Temple Beth-El, and spoke several times last week to Rabbi Sarah Mack. 

“He’s a lovely, wonderful person with deeply rooted morals and values, and he has found his Jewish faith to be incredibly meaningful to him,” Mack told Jewish Insider on Thursday. “I think he would say the same thing.” (Smiley’s office did not respond to a request for comment.)

The two got to know each other well over the last two years, after Smiley decided to explore Judaism. One of his grandfathers was Jewish, but Smiley had grown up in a Protestant family and largely left his faith behind as a teenager. Then, in 2023, he approached Mack about converting to Judaism. Smiley was sworn in as mayor earlier that year, and the difficult policy choices he had to make began to weigh on him.

“Some of these decisions are heavy, and so having a stronger foundation and a community where I can lean into a little bit more, a sense of what’s right, what’s just and how to do better and be better, was something that I was craving,” Smiley told The Boston Globe in late 2024. “Over the last couple of years, I found myself really looking and yearning for a little more spiritual and moral guidance, and a community that felt right to me and that felt like it was my place.” 

Smiley went in the mikveh, the Jewish ritual bath, to mark the completion of his conversion in August 2024. At the time, he had not yet announced publicly that he had converted to Judaism. But people in the community began to guess when he appeared at tashlich, a service on Rosh Hashanah where Jews symbolically cast off their sins by throwing bread into a body of water. 

“I think I underestimated how newsworthy this was,” he told the Globe. But Smiley is not the first Jewish mayor of Providence, nor is he even the first gay Jewish Providence mayor. That distinction goes to David Cicilline, a former member of Congress who served as Providence mayor from 2003 to 2011. (Smiley worked in Cicilline’s mayoral office.)

Becoming a Jew after the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks in Israel, and amid rising antisemitism in the United States, was not without challenges. 

“I think what the rabbi said to me was, now, more than ever, do we need Jews who are willing to speak out about their values, and there’s a community waiting for you,” Smiley said. 

Even before his conversion was complete, and before anyone knew he was considering it, Smiley was beginning to speak on national stages about the importance of fighting antisemitism. He attended the Combat Antisemitism Movement’s Mayors Summit in Fort Lauderdale in 2023, and since then he has become active in the organization. He now leads its mayors advisory board and received an award at CAM’s annual conference in New Orleans earlier this month. 

“From my relationship with him professionally, what I have seen is that his connection to Judaism adds a deeper sensitivity to how antisemitism shows up in real life: the double standards, the coded language, the intimidation, and the way Jewish residents can be made to feel unsafe, isolated or singled out,” Lisa Katz, CAM’s chief government affairs officer, told JI. “He’s motivated by a very local, very practical instinct that if a community is being targeted, City Hall has an obligation to respond with clarity and consistency.” 

Smiley has had to navigate antisemitism since his conversion, and he is facing a far-left Democratic challenger in next year’s primary who has gone after Smiley for his involvement with CAM and his work fighting antisemitism. 

In May, the night before Smiley left for a trip to Israel, protesters showed up at his house chanting “free Palestine” and “Smiley, how many babies have you killed today?” 

“In addition to making me angry, it feels antisemitic to me,” Smiley said in an interview this year. “I mean, the Jewish mayor is going to Israel and you protest his house? Politicians may take trips all the time. I’ve taken trips before. I didn’t get protested on any of those other trips. So, that’s very difficult.” 

He had first traveled to Israel nearly a decade ago, when he worked for then-Gov. Gina Raimondo. This year’s trip, with the Jewish Alliance of Greater Rhode Island, the main Jewish communal organization in the state, was Smiley’s first since converting. 

“It was personally meaningful spiritually, to be able to bring in Shabbat at the Kotel for the first time as a Jew. That was really special,” Smiley said.

He has often been spotted wearing the yellow hostage ribbon over the past two years, even when discussing unrelated issues. Smiley has said repeatedly that his job as mayor has nothing to do with foreign policy — that’s the argument he made when members of the Providence City Council decided earlier this year to fly a Palestinian flag in the council chambers, an action he called “divisive.” But fighting antisemitism, Smiley has said, is an area where he can make a difference locally.

“What I hope is, for leaders like me, who do not have a vote in Congress, who don’t have a role in federal or foreign affairs, there is other stuff that we are responsible for,” Smiley said this year. “And that is why I’ve been so engaged in the antisemitism work, because this kind of 30,000 foot global conversation is affecting the lives of members of my community in America, having nothing to do with votes over arms sales.” 

Next on Smiley’s Jewish bucket list is a bar mitzvah, something he is studying for now in a class for adults. He is learning Hebrew, too, with flash cards.

“There will definitely be a party, and there has been already ample discussion about that in class,” Smiley told the Globe. “We haven’t picked a theme yet, but everyone’s very excited about it. There’s gonna be a DJ. We’re gonna find a venue. It’s a whole thing.”