Mazel tov amid the magnolias: Museum of Southern Jewish Experience opens
“Shalom. Make yourself at home.”
The slogan, affixed to the windows at the newly opened Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience in New Orleans, is the perfect tagline, according to executive director Kenneth Hoffman. “Shalom,” the Jewish greeting, is paired with “make yourself at home,” which is all about Southern hospitality, he said.
That speaks both to the heart of Southern Jewish identity and the museum’s mission.
“We want people to feel at home,” Hoffman said. “We’re talking about everyday people. We really want to tell their story, and we want visitors of all backgrounds to see something of themselves in our experience.”
The Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience is unique because it focuses on a niche population and geography, covering 13 Southern states and more than 300 years of history.
Though there are other museums in the U.S. dedicated to the Holocaust and Jewish culture, this is the only one dedicated to telling the specific story of how and why Jews came to the South — their struggles, perseverance and triumphs.
“You don’t have to be Southern, and you don’t have to be Jewish,” Hoffman said. “Everyone has been a stranger in a strange land at some point of their lives — or their ancestors were. This is about how you navigate a landscape, the decisions you make about what you’ll give up to fit in, what you’ll hold onto to maintain your identity and everything in between.”
And if you are Jewish, or Southern, or both, the museum will have a special significance.
“It’s the answer to the statement, ‘I didn’t know there were Jews in the South,’ ” Hoffman said. “It’s also a window on American history.”
Plus, it’s only a short plane ride or quick road trip away from Houston.
“It’s close, and it’s New Orleans,” Hoffman said with a smile. “Come for the food, the museum, and maybe the Saints are playing.”
A beautiful metaphor
Hoffman majored in history at Tulane University, where he returned to write his master’s thesis on the early immigrant Jewish settlement in Port Gibson, Miss. He later became the director of education at the Louisiana State Museum and the National WWII Museum, a popular destination only a few blocks from his current post.
As a child, Hoffman attended Henry S. Jacobs Camp in Utica, Miss. — the original location for the Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience — first as a camper, then as a counselor.
“It was a lovely place for campers to learn about their history, but it was inaccessible to the general public,” Hoffman said.
In 2012, the space at the camp was repurposed, and the artifacts in the museum moved into storage.
Now, the artifacts have a home.
During a tour of the museum in late July, Hoffman explained that when most people think of the South, a certain image pops up, usually one of anti-Semitism and hostility against Jews in the Bible Belt.
“All those things come to mind, and all of those things existed,” he said. “But what also existed was a unique set of circumstances.”
Those conditions are brought under the microscope at the museum. They combine to tell a story of immigration, possibility and the creation of community, Hoffman said.
He walked me to a wall that highlights early Jewish settlers to the region, dating to 1585 when the first known Jewish colonist arrived in Roanoke, Va. In a nearby case, a trunk carried in 1905 by an immigrant to Galveston is on display.
Hoffman pointed to a largerthan-life photograph of Rabbi Henry Cohen. The beloved rabbi organized the Galveston Movement, which brought Eastern European Jewish immigrants to the island.
One of Hoffman’s favorite artifacts in the collection is the Victorian “crazy” quilt made by a Jewish Ladies’ Sewing Circle in Canton, Miss., in 1885. It was raffled to support the building of the town’s Temple B’nai Israel.
“It’s a beautiful piece of textile history, but it’s also a metaphor,” Hoffman said. “When people come together and work hard, put in their effort and creativity, something beautiful happens.”
At the end of the exhibit space, visitors are invited to make their own digital quilt patch, which can be emailed to them. The virtual patches are joined on a larger screen with those created by other museum goers.
“The metaphor stands,” Hoffman said. “The more people who participate, the more beautiful it gets.”
Untold stories
A couple of days before my visit, I phoned founding board member Russell “Rusty” Palmer to talk about his own childhood in Selma, Ala.
Now a resident of San Antonio, he explained that many Jewish residents of small towns in the South leave for college and don’t come back.
“I was an example of what happened in small towns; Jews moved away,” Palmer said. “Those towns lost a lot, people who ran businesses, people who contributed to the community, both intellectually and socially.”
He can trace his family back to when Selma was founded, and also told me about his wife, Suzanne’s, roots in Laredo.
“Jews built a lot of these towns in the South,” Palmer said. “Jews escaped persecution in other countries and saw an opportunity here.”
Their personal histories were in danger of being lost, especially as Jewish communities moved away from small towns and their synagogues closed, he explained.
“A lot of towns were trying to figure out what to do with their temples, torahs and histories,” Palmer said.
A number of those artifacts were donated to the original collection at Henry S. Jacobs Camp, which gave rise to the Institute for Southern Jewish Living, where Palmer served on the board of trustees. Years after the camp closed its museum location, Palmer received a call asking if he’d be interested in resurrecting the shuttered museum.
He jumped at the opportunity.
“We decided not to re-create what existed before; we wanted to present it in a different way,” he said. “We wanted a museum that would educate, entertain and be modern.”
And with the hundreds of years of history, and a vast Southern region of the U.S., there was a lot of ground to cover.
“There’s a lot to tell,” Palmer said. “People don’t know these stories. And if we don’t tell them now, they’ll be gone. I think it’s important to know and remember.”
New destination in New Orleans
The Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience is nestled in the Warehouse District of New Orleans, a neighborhood similar to Houston’s Museum District, which features a number of organizations within easy walking distance. The National WWII Museum, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art and the Contemporary Arts Center are nearby.
I visited both, then grabbed lunch at Pêche Seafood Grill, an upscale spot for the catch of the day. There are a number of restaurants and art galleries in the area that would merit a full day’s visit. I returned the following day to try Carmo, billed as a tropical cafe, which serves sandwiches, salads and traditional Caribbean and South American food on the menu — and accommodates vegan, vegetarian and gluten-free diets.
Ace Hotel, only a couple of blocks away, features a large lobby and posh bar for happy hour or a cup of coffee.
After lunch, I returned to the museum to meet with curator Anna Tucker. Her first task upon moving to New Orleans in 2019 was moving the 4,000 pieces from storage in Mississippi to their new space in Louisiana. Then she began meeting with scholars and community members.
“To build a museum like this, you have to have so many perspectives,” she said.
Instead of creating displays that follow a timeline, Tucker wanted to organize the exhibits based on themes. There are three main galleries downstairs in the permanent exhibit; upstairs is for special exhibitions.
The first permanent gallery is dedicated to the foundation of Southern Jewish culture, tracing the first settlements.
“We wanted to display artifacts that would create sparks of recognition for people, like a prayer book or shabbat candles,” Tucker said. “They hold so much memory. They have such an important role in our history.”
Another exhibit tells of Jews and slavery. And a corner of the museum focuses on exclusion and inclusion of Jews in Southern society, showing Jewish mayors as well as acts of antiSemitism.
Interactive spaces ensure a hands-on experience. In the first gallery, for instance, sits a small trunk next to a case of wooden blocks. On each block is printed an item, representing both family heirlooms and objects necessary for making a new life, including money and an English dictionary. The experience is intended to help visitors understand the difficult decisions early immigrants had to make when leaving their homes and relatives behind.
An ongoing experience
The museum’s second gallery is dedicated to current Jewish life, complete with a torah, shofar and 50 replicas of stained-glass windows from Southern synagogues. The third gallery downstairs showcases more recent events, including Jewish participation in the civil rights movement and other activism. There are also oral histories, photos and documents of World War II survivors who settled in the South.
Tucker showed me several Houston connections in the museum’s collection, including a plaque honoring Ray Karchmer Daily, the first Jewish woman to graduate from a medical school in Texas. She later became the first female president of what was then Memorial Hospital. Tucker pointed to a photo of Houston residents
Ellen Penner and Helen Dow at the 1987 March for Soviet Jewry in D.C., as well as photos from the Houston Chronicle archives. I took in an image of a demonstration in Meyerland and one of a vigil in front of the Jewish Community Center.
An exhibit showcases Jewish celebrities from popular culture, including Star Trek’s Brent Spiner, born in Houston, and Texas musician Kinky Freidman.
Near the museum’s exit, visitors will find a wall of questions, asking, “What is your Southern Jewish experience?” and, “If you’re not Southern or Jewish, did anything you see today feel familiar?” Visitors write their responses and pin them with magnets to the boards.
“We keep their notes in our archives,” Tucker told me. “That’s one way everyone who walks through the museum can become a part of it, too.”
Tucker hopes visits will spark questions and that guests will become inspired to further delve into their family histories and personal identities.
“This is a space where you can pause and reflect,” she said. “It’s a living museum. We’re here not just to speak, we’re here to listen.”
After all, the museum is not solely dedicated to history. It’s about experience — and that is ongoing. The museum will continue to evolve. The soft opening on May 27 will be followed by an opening celebration in early October.
“What’s exciting is that there’s almost no end to the conversations and topics that come out of this,” she said. And, she adds, “I definitely think it’s worth a trip.”