SOUTHERN JEWS ACT TO RESCUE A PAST

• Published in: The New York times
• Main Authors: Alabama., ROY HOFFMAN, Roy Hoffman, who wrote ''Almost Family'' (Dial, 1983), a novel about a Jewish family and a black family in Alabama, is working on a novel about a Russian-Jewish immigrant in late 19th century
• Format: Newspaper Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York, N.Y New York Times Company 12.11.1986
• Edition: Late Edition (East Coast)
• Subjects: Evans, Eli; Hoffman, Roy; Jewish people; Schmier, Louis; SOUTHERN STATES (US)
• ISSN: 0362-4331

Peter Haas, a rabbi and professor of religious studies at Vanderbilt University, suggests the impulse is tied to the ''roots'' phenomenon - a third-generation America's yearning to know whence it came. Leo Turitz, a retired rabbi from Meridian, Miss., and co-author with his wife, Evelyn, of ''The Jews in Early Mississippi,'' (University Press of Mississippi, 1983), reminds us ''the old are dying out and the young are moving away.'' ''Getting hold of this material is a race against time,'' says Louis Schmier, a history professor at Valdosta State College in Valdosta, Ga., at work on a history of Valdosta's Jews. Not every scholar of Southern Jewry was cradled in cotton. Louis Schmier grew up on Manhattan's Orchard Street and so, as he puts it, is ''the only Jew in the South not related to everyone else.'' Twenty-two years ago, he suffered from ''the New York syndrome'' - the belief that only a sprinkling of Jews lived ''down there'' in what seemed like ''the wilds of Borneo.'' In 1975, he and three others founded the Southern Jewish Historical Society - a group whose vitality can be measured by its scope. At the society's 10th annual meeting in Memphis last fall, the theme, ''Lox and Grits: A Jewish Sense of Place in the South,'' encompassed Joseph Cohen, director of Tulane University's Jewish Studies Program, reading from his memoir about growing up in Tennessee; a slide presentation by Carolyn Lemaster of Little Rock, Ark., ''Jewish Life in Razorback Country''; the showing of ''West of Hester Street,'' Allen and Cynthia Mondell's film about Jewish immigration at Galveston, Tex. 1907-1914, and Janice Rothschild Blumberg, the society's president, discussing her portrait of her late husband and his involvement in the Civil Rights Movement, ''One Voice: Rabbi Jacob M. Rothschild and the Troubled South'' (Mercer University Press, 1985). The weekend even featured Jewish musicians performing not only klezmer music, but also Southern blues and jazz.