Jews in the Bible Belt: New museum documents Jewish history in the South
"This is a lesson on the American experience... and what happens when strangers come to a strange land."
By JERUSALEM POST STAFFChevra Thilim Synagogue, Claiborne Avenue, New Orleans. (photo credit: WIKIMEDIA COMMONS/KAREN APRICOT)
New Orleans can now boast a museum dedicated to Jews' immigration to and settlement in the American South, in their rare fusion of culture and religion, AP reported.Currently under construction, the team behind the reboot is hopeful it will reopen within the first three months of 2021, after construction was delayed due to the coronavirus pandemic. The museum is a "reboot" of an older one dedicated to the same purpose in Mississippi in 1986. At the time, it was to preserve what life was like for a small community of Jews in Utica, a small town in the southern state. That museum closed in 2012.The Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience will feature over 7,000 artifacts, as well as exhibits of both a lighter and heavier nature, from food fusions – when "potato latkes and matzo ball soup were met with Southern grits and gumbo," according to AP – to the place of Jews in historical slave ownership, antisemitism and race relations.One of the interactive exhibits is of a patchwork quilt sewn together by a few Jewish women in 1885 in the town of Canton, Mississippi, AP reported. They did it to raise money for their local synagogue. In full circle, visitors will be able to digitally create their own patch square and add it to a collective quilt.The history that the museum covers spans more than 13 US states over 300 years. This is what makes it different from the previous "iteration" of the museum: It's not just dedicated to one town, but rather to the legacy, history and unique traditions of all the Jewish South.Or, as the museum's chairman Jay Tanenbaum said, "This is a lesson on the American experience... [This is] what happens when strangers come to a strange land."
