H EADLINES
Southern Jewish History on Display in New Orleans
NATIONAL JONAH GOLDMAN KAY | JTA
NEW ORLEANS — Janis
Rabin’s family emigrated from
Poland, eventually settling in
Bogalusa, Louisiana. For years,
she and her relatives had kept
memories and stories of their
family’s Jewish experience
to themselves or shared them
casually with friends.

So when Rabin entered this
city’s Museum of the Southern
Jewish Experience the day it
opened to the public, she was
moved by seeing her family’s
history represented more formally.

“I look at the museum, and it
is such a beautiful representation
of what it means to have your
roots, your identity validated,”
she said.

Like Rabin, many of the
visitors on the museum’s
opening day May 27 were
Southern Jews themselves, eager
to fi nd evidence of their family
lore or share artifacts with an
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JUNE 17, 2021
unusual collection designed to
bring relics of Southern Jewish
life out of the region’s closets
and attics.

Unlike Jews in the North,
who largely congregated in
urban centers, Jews who settled
in the South spread out across
the region’s small towns and
cities. Th e museum features
large Jewish communities in
New Orleans and Atlanta along-
side lesser-known, but equally
vibrant, places like Dumas,
Arkansas, which had several
Jewish mayors in the late 19th
and early 20th centuries. It also
highlights the fact that Southern
Jews oft en found careers as
traveling salesmen, moving
from one town to another.

In the center of the museum’s
fi rst room stands a peddler’s cart
fi lled with the wares they might
have sold. Th e piece connected
with many of the visitors, who
related it back to their own
family’s origins.

“My relatives were merchants
and shop owners,” said Martin
Covert, whose family came to
New Orleans in the late 1800s.

“Th e parts where they talked
about commerce ... really
resonated with me.”
Th at’s exactly the point, said
Anna Tucker, the museum’s
curator. Th e South is a massive
region and each community had
a unique experience. So rather
than set a singular narrative,
Tucker used familiar objects to
tell a specifi c story.

“If you didn’t know the story
behind them, a lot of the artifacts
here would just look like an
everyday object,” Tucker said.

“But once you start listening
to the conversations around it,
then you’re like, ‘wow, this is so
much more.’”
Th e Museum of the Southern
Jewish Experience is the product
of more than three decades of
concerted work to preserve the
heritage of Southern Jewry.

When Macy Hart started
collecting artifacts from small
Jewish communities in the
South in 1986, it was out of
JEWISH EXPONENT
necessity. As Jews in
the South gravitated
toward cities, these rural
communities were at
risk of being forgotten.

As a last-ditch eff ort,
community leaders
would ask Hart to take
their ritual objects
and Judaica. Th ere are
also more unorthodox
items in the collection,
An exhibit at the Museum of the Southern
including a prosthetic Jewish
Experience in New Orleans focuses on
leg that once belonged the large number of Jewish Southerners who
traveling merchants. The museum
to a Russian Jewish became
opened to the public in late May.

Courtesy of the Museum of the
immigrant who settled
Southern Jewish Experience
in Lake Providence,
Louisiana. For years, the collection was of a group of people sitting in a
displayed at a small museum at fi eld. Th e photo, she said, was
the Reform movement’s Jacobs taken by Paul Arst, a Mississippi
Camp in Utica, Mississippi — a Jewish man who was fi ghting
town of fewer than 1,000 people, with the Allies in Germany.

a 45-minute drive southwest Th e people in the photograph
of Jackson. Aft er the museum were Jews who, until the troops
closed in 2012, the 4,000 items arrived, had been abandoned
in the collection were put into in a cattle car aft er their Nazi
storage. But people continued guards fl ed.

“Th is photo has never been
to donate artifacts even as the
seen before because it was
collection languished out of sight.

tucked in a family scrapbook,”
In 2017, a group of prominent
Tucker said.

Jewish lay leaders launched a $10
Indeed, during the opening,
million fundraising campaign
Tucker was casually approached
to move the collection to New
by several
visitors who wanted
Orleans, home to some 10,000
Jews, and give it a new, perma- to share their own family’s
nent home. Th e museum’s three heirlooms or off er stories about
galleries now occupy part of a photographs in the exhibit.

While many of the visitors
nondescript downtown building.

at the opening had personal
It’s a small space, approximately
connections to the stories in
9,000 square feet, though the
the exhibition,
the goal of the
museum has plans to expand as
Museum of
the Southern
Jewish its collection grows.

Experience is
to be
an educa-
Most of the recent additions
have come from donations tional resource for both Jews and
by community members who non-Jews. Jay Tanenbaum, the
rescued them from closets and chair of the museum’s board,
attics in their families’ homes. said he expects about 30,000
With so many items to exhibit, guests annually, most of whom
the museum plans to rotate the will not be Jewish. As part of the
displays every few months, so it permanent exhibition, there is
can show as much of its collec- a section dedicated to Jewish
terms and practices.

tion as possible.

“We want to educate visitors
Th e museum has a form on
its website for people to submit about who we are as Southern
their items, but many of the Jews and how we are part of
donations came through word of the American community,”
mouth. In a section focusing on Tanenbaum said. “At the end of
the Holocaust and World War the day, education is always the
II, Tucker points to a large photo best way to fi ght antisemitism.” ●
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