Exhibit to display contributions of Jews in Florida

When members of Congregation Ohev Shalom in Maitland began planning their centennial celebration, it soon became clear that the story they wanted to tell was bigger than just one synagogue.

It’s a tale of Jewish citrus farmers, artists, educators, soldiers, merchants, philanthropists, civil-rights leaders and professionals in real estate, media, defense, technology and hospitality who have shaped Central Florida for 150 years.

Now, at the start of the Jewish High Holidays — which began Wednesday night with Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year 5778 — organizers are putting the final touches on three years of work.

Their exhibit, “Kehillah: A History of Jewish Life in Orlando,” opens in November at the Orange County Regional History Center.

“Kehillah” means “community” in Hebrew, and the title is apt. The show was assembled with the help of a task force of five dozen people from congregations, organizations and agencies in Orange, Seminole, Lake and Osceola counties.

“This is all about beginnings and continuity,” said Sara Stern, chairwoman of the Congregation Ohev Shalom centennial steering committee. “That ties in with the exhibit as well as our celebration.”

The show isn’t just for Jews, said curator Marcia Zerivitz, who hopes it will inspire other groups to document their history, too, and share it with the public.

“Anti-Semitism is at a peak now,” said Zerivitz, founding executive director of the Jewish Museum of Florida at Florida International University in Miami Beach. “My feeling is there’s a greater tolerance of people when you understand. People fear what they don’t understand.”

The exhibit will explore some of that darker territory.

Among the 450 photos and 75 objects on display will be a property deed from 1939 forbidding people who were not of the “Aryan group of the white Caucasian race” — that included Jews — from buying property in Lancaster Park, a neighborhood north of Boone High School.

A picture of a Ku Klux Klan rally in front of the Jewish Community Center of Greater Orlando in 1995 also will be shown.

But “Kehillah” will focus more on the struggles, triumphs and contributions Jews made to the region.

Among the collection are a video map of Jewishowned stores decade by decade; a fur-trimmed outfit worn by philanthropist Harriett Lake, known for her love of clothes; a picture of a religious service in 1974 at the old Orlando Naval Training Center led by the late Rabbi Rudolph Adler of Congregation Ohev Shalom; and an 1883 Sanford Journal article about a ritual circumcision, known as a bris.

Oral histories were used to create the captions and other text.

“Kehillah” also will highlight the accomplishments of local Jews, such as Marshall Warren Nirenberg, a University of Florida graduate and Orlando resident who shared the 1968 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine with two other scientists for their work to decipher the genetic code.

Those featured include Joe Hara, a former president of Tupperware Co. International; Holocaust survivor and Give Kids the World founder Henry Landwirth; and Jacob Raphael Cohen, who helped draft the Orlando Town Charter in 1875 — before Orlando was a city — and was the first elected alderman.

“We really tried to cast a wide net of Jewish participation of life in Central Florida,” said Roz Fuchs, an Orlando native who is chairwoman of the project and a past president of the Jewish Federation of Greater Orlando.

In a nod to Congregation Ohev Shalom’s anniversary and its historical significance, the exhibit will display a model of the first synagogue it built and a stained-glass window from the original building. The first Jewish services in Orlando were held in 1915 in Moses Levy’s orange grove on what is now Edgewater Drive.

Later, the congregation bought a former SeventhDay Adventist church at Central and Terry streets in downtown Orlando. The synagogue they built in 1926, at Eola Drive and Church Street, was torn down and now is home to the aptly named Sanctuary condominiums.

Zerivitz said she’s eager for the exhibit to open — it will run from Nov. 12 until Feb. 20 — so visitors can learn about local Jewish history and Jews can have a sense of pride in what they see.

“I get excited that more people will know the history,” she said.