Showing posts with label North Carolina. Show all posts
Showing posts with label North Carolina. Show all posts

24 August 2010

North Carolina: Shtetls and camps, Aug. 25

The daughter of Holocaust survivors - who has been researching her family history and looking for surviving relatives for more than 50 years - traveled to ancestral villages in Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and Germany.

Deborah Long will speak about her research trip on Wednesday, August 25. The dessert-and-discussion event, from 7.30-9.30pm, will be in a private home and is for the Durham-Chapel Hill Jewish Federation.

Long will recount her shocking 2009 unearthing of family artifacts that compelled her to visit ancestral villages in Slovakia, Poland and Hungary, and also to northern Germany to understand her parents' Holocaust history.

The presentation includes her methodology, her trip through shtetls and concentration camps and joyful discovery upon returning home.

A professional educator, Long has written more than 20 books, including a memoir about growing up as a child of survivors.

Those who donate $118 or more to the Durham-Chapel Hill Jewish Federation will receive a free copy of her book.

For more information, send an email or click here.

22 August 2010

Geneabloggers: 18 new geneablogs this week

Geneabloggers.com now includes 1,243 geneablogs, with the addition of 18 new ones discovered this week by Thomas MacEntee.

Many focus on individual family history, although the list also includes New Zealand, genealogy education, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas and African-American.

Here is the name, link and type for each. Click here for Thomas' take on each one.

American Pomeroy Historic Genealogical Association
Individual family history, surname

Durham-Orange Genealogical Society
Genealogical society, North Carolina

Familypast Blog
Individual family history

For Your Family Story
Genealogy education (newbie-focused)

Genealogic Abounds
Genealogy education, individual family history

Genealogy Clues By The Ancestry Detector
Genealogy education

Genealogy New Zealand

New Zealand genealogy

Johnston Genes
Individual family history

MyBlood blog
Genealogy vendor

NEK Ramblings
Individual family history

Nodwell Genealogy Project
Individual family history

Quilt Stories by Sherry Ann
African-American genealogy, crafts, individual family history, Texas genealogy

Relating Our Past
Genealogy education, Tennessee genealogy

The Family Griot
African-American genealogy, individual family history

The Misadventures of a Genealogist
Individual family history

The William A. Earp Family of Lincoln Co., Oklahoma
Individual family history, Oklahoma genealogy

Timespanner
New Zealand genealogy

Read Thomas' complete post here.

20 June 2010

North Carolina: 'Down Home' Jewish life

North Carolina has a long history of Jewish life, much the same as in other states, as immigrants arrived to create better lives.

The first Jew in what is today North Carolina was metallurgist Joachim Gans of Prague, who arrived at Roanoke Island in 1585 with Sir Walter Raleigh's second expedition. A year later, Gans returned to England.

The North Carolina Museum of History's exhibit (through March 7, 2011) - "Down Home: Jewish Life in North Carolina," is the first celebration of this minority culture. Along with the exhibit and a book, a television documentary recently aired and a special school curriculum (for 4th and 8th grades) was developed.

The project, in conjunction with the Jewish Heritage Foundation of North Carolina, took about six years to complete, including oral and written histories research, as well as extensive records from the 1840s-1880s. In the project's companion book, author Leonard Rogoff writes: "The challenge for native and immigrant Jews alike was to become southerners while remaining Jews."

Two recent stories, in the News Observer and the Herald Sun, provide details of the project, exhibit and book.

"It was not always assumed North Carolina had a Jewish history or that it was significant," said Leonard Rogoff, exhibit curator and the author of a companion book published by UNC Press. "But we found it, and it dates back to 1585."
Jewish immigrants settled in ports, such as Wilmington - the first and largest Jewish community and the state's first synagogue. Jews served in the Confederate army. In the late 1870s, there were Jews from Poland, Bavaria, Prussia and the Netherlands as well as the native-born, living in Durham. Some 300 Jews were listed in the 1870 census.

In the late 1800s, Eastern European Jews were directed to the South by a Baltimore dry goods warehouse owner whose agents met immigrant Jews at the docks to offer them peddling. Many settled in North Carolina and graduated from wagons to permanent shops. Such chains as Family Dollar and Pic 'n Pay Shoes began in this way. Other families - Cones of Greensboro, Blumenthals of Charlotte - built factories and plants for a variety of items.

The museum exhibit is intended to teach non-Jews about their Jewish neighbors, and includes prayer books, kipas and a shofar (ram's horn). There's also a 1950s Jewish kitchen with a refrigerator and a pot of matzo ball soup on the stove, and visitors can braid challah or write down their own memories and family recipes.

Things weren't always so easy. The prestigious Duke University had a 3% Jewish quota in the 1930s-40s, and school organizations were divided along religious lines. Fast forward to 1988 and 1994, when two North Carolina Jews won Nobel science prizes.

Harry Golden - a former stockbroker and humorist - moved to Charlotte in 1941 and began publishing "The Carolina Israelite," which served as a pulpit for civil rights advocacy.
He is probably best known for his "Vertical Negro Plan," in which he recommended eliminating chairs to solve the problem of segregation. (Southern whites didn't mind standing with blacks, but they didn't want to sit down alongside them.)
The Herald Sun story quotes Leonard Rogoff, author of the book and exhibit curator, as saying the project has two missions: "To tell who we are. To tell how we are."

Visitors can see a seder table, an early immigrant's peddler cart. They are also asked questions to think about:

"Why do Jews need to study? Isn't belief enough?" and "If I'm a JewishAmerican, am I different than other Americans?" and "Why is it said where there are two Jews, there will be three questions?"
The first section - Keeping the Faith - asks a question that non-Jews might have:

"Is Judaism an ethnicity, a culture or a religion?" "Yes, yes and yes."
It also provides information on prominent families:

One area displaying merchants' information and photographs from over the years includes a familiar name in Durham: E.J. "Mutt" Evans, a 1928 graduate of UNC and the mayor of Durham from 1951 to 1963. His store, Evans United Department Store, was the only store on Main Street with an integrated lunch counter before integration. When a local judge told him that the state prohibited blacks and whites from sitting together in public, Evans took out the tools and raised the countertop to elbow height.
Detailed in the second article is the role of Jews in the tobacco industry. In 1881, Moses Gladstein in New York brought more than 100 workers to tobacco king Buck Duke's factory, where they were supervised by Joseph Siegel. Duke's competition, W.T. Blackwell, hired Joseph's brother David to bring workers to his factory. Although the Duke workers left following problems, Gladstein stayed. His brother, Louis, opened a men's clothing store which remained open until the 1970s.

The "Down Home" project took about six years to complete, including oral and written histories research, as well as extensive records from the 1840s-1880s.

"The challenge for native and immigrant Jews alike," writes Rogoff in the book, "was to become southerners while remaining Jews."

The book - "Down Home: Jewish Life in North Carolina" - is $35 (UNC Press). For more, read the two newspaper articles (links above), and visit the Jewish Heritage Foundation of North Carolina.

06 June 2009

Ordained: First African-American woman rabbi

The face of American Judaism and that of future Jewish genealogical research is changing, and a New York Times story about the first African-American woman's rabbinical ordination demonstrates this.

According to the Institute for Jewish and Community Research in San Francisco, some 20% of Jews in the US - about 1.2 million people - come from non-European racial and ethnic origins. This includes African-Americans and Latinos.

Brandeis University American Jewish history professor Dr. Jonathan Sarna says that “Not long ago, even people in the Jewish community believed that you could tell Jews by how they looked. In just one generation we have moved to a vastly more pluralistic Jewish community in the U.S.”

These statistics and the story are interesting.

It focuses on the rabbinical ordination of Alyssa Stanton, 45, who has become the first African-American woman to be ordained by a mainstream Jewish seminary, the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Ohio.

She will become the rabbi of Congregation Bayt Shalom in Greenville, North Carolina, which is affiliated with both the Reform and Conservative movements. A small congregation - the only one in town - it tries to be inclusive. There are a few African-Americans among its 60 member families.

Stanton's religious road began in a Pentecostal family, and took her to experiences with Catholicism, Baptists, Eastern religions and Messianic Christians.

As she prepared for her ordination, Ms. Stanton said she did not want to be reminded of the ceremony’s historic importance.

“I feel awe and a healthy dose of fear about being the first,” she said. “I try to keep it simple. I am a Jew, and I will die a Jew.”
A Cleveland, Ohio native who has lived in Denver and Fort Collins, Colorado, she also studied in Israel.

The story also touches on the fact that when Reform and Conservative rabbinical branches began ordaining female rabbis, many blacks and Jews believed it was impossible to be both black and Jewish.

According to the story, some observers drew parallels between her joining the rabbinate and November’s presidential result.

“It is of incredible importance to note that her ordination coincides with the election of Barack Obama,” said Rabbi David Ellenson, president of Hebrew Union College, who will ordain Ms. Stanton at the college’s Cincinnati campus on Saturday. “It offers a ray of hope that the world can become a better place.”
Read the complete story at the link above.

25 October 2008

New Blog: Jewish Art Monuments

Samuel Gruber writes the Jewish Art Monuments blog.

Sam is a cultural heritage consultant involved in a wide variety of documentation, research, preservation, planning, publication, exhibition and education projects. Trained as a medievalist, architectural historian and archaeologist, his expertise for two decades is in Jewish art, architecture and historic sites.

I'm happy to announce that he will be contributing his expertise to the Jewish Graveyard Rabbit. And, if you think the name is familiar, he's the brother of expert Jewish travel writer Ruth Ellen Gruber; they often work together.

Here's how Sam describes his blog:

This blog provides news and opinion articles about Jewish art, architecture and historic sties - especially those where something new is happening. Developed in connection with news gathering for the International Survey of Jewish Monuments website (www.isjm.org), this blog highlights some of the most interesting Jewish sites around the world, and the most pressing issues affecting them.


His blog, he says, "allows me to clear my email and my desk, by passing on to a broader public just some of the interesting and compelling information from projects I am working on, or am following. Feel free to contact me for more information on any of the topics posted, or if you have a project of your own you would like to discuss. Much of this material on this blog I share with the International Survey of Jewish Monuments. ISJM is always looking for volunteers!"

His blog came to my attention with this posting on the Jews of North Carolina, recounting that the Jewish Heritage Foundation of North Carolina (JHFNC) premiered its documentary film "Down Home: Jewish Life in North Carolina" with showings in Greensboro, NC on October 11 and 19, to be followed on February 22, 2009 in Charlotte. The film is the first part of a much larger project (museum exhibit, educational resources and a book).

There's more information in this Greensboro News article.

North Carolina's only Jewish historical group, the JHFNC was established in 1996 and seeks to promote understanding of the Jewish people by educating both Jews and the general public about the history, culture, and religion of the Jewish people and by encouraging appreciation of the beauty of Jewish ritual and practice. It collects and preserves artifacts and records the history of Jewish settlement in North Carolina, presents programs on the state's Jewish experience, and connects state resources.

The exhibit, "Down Home: Jewish Life in North Carolina" will present four centuries of Jewish life and. in 2010, will travel to the state's major history museums.

The article indicates that Sara Lee Saperstein of Greensboro, a JHFNC board member, remembered only a single sentence about Jews in her eighth-grade state history book. As an adult, she learned about metallurgist Joachim Gans of Prague who arrived in 1585 with Sir Walter Raleigh. She hadn't realized that the state's Jewish history went back that far.

JHFNC research historian Leonard Rogoff has sought project support for 10 years. and said “We heard, 'I thought we were going to be forgotten,’ a lot.”

The documentary's audience is not only Jewish, however. Prior to Ellis Island, many immigrants (including Jews) entered through coastal shipping ports, such as Wilmington and Charleston.

“The interesting thing about North Carolina is not only that the story has never been told or presented, but it’s never really been researched,” Rogoff said.

Many early Jews were peddlers who settled where their money ran out. The story begins there but continues with those same families creating successful companies employing thousands of people and how they built their communities, including Brenner Children’s Hospital (Winston-Salem), Levine Children’s Hospital (Charlotte), Moses Cone Hospital (Greensboro) and the Brody School of Medicine (East Carolina University).

In 1949, Benjamin Cone became Greensboro's first Jewish mayor when Jews were only some 500 in the city of 70,000.

A line producer of the film said that in the 19th century, according to Southern historians, many Christians who lived in the stat had a strong affiliation with the Old Testament. “These people coming in were viewed as the 'people of the book’ and they were viewed with fascination. People would come to them and have their babies blessed.”

The flip side: There were also murders, mob attacks and social discrimination.

There's much more; read the complete story at the link above.

05 June 2008

North Carolina: Jewish heritage project

For more than four centuries, there has been a Jewish presence in North Carolina, and an ambitious new undertaking - a multi-media cultural offering - is documenting this history, "Down Home: Jewish Life in North Carolina."

The Jewish Heritage Foundation of North Carolina (JHFNC) has raised $1 million towards producing the project, with only another $250,00 remaining to reach the budget, according to a press release. Public and private funding has included corporate, state and individual family gifts from throughout the state.

Down Home will tell the over 400-year history of Jewish settlement in North Carolina in a multi-media project that will include a traveling museum exhibit, a broadcast quality documentary film, a richly illustrated book published by UNC Press and public school educational programming with a teacher’s guide. The written and oral histories, photographs and artifacts chronicling the story of immigrant Jews and their contributions to the communities in our state will travel in the museum exhibition to North Carolina’s major history museums.

The Down Home film will debut this fall at the Museum of History in Raleigh and will be shown in venues throughout the state in 2009.

According to the JHFNC website:

Fragments of North Carolina’s Jewish history can be found on the shelves of libraries, museums, and archives. But the stories that make this history come alive remain forgotten in attics and closets, and waiting in the memories of community elders. As letters and photographs fade, as parents and grandparents pass away, and as small-town synagogues close and their records disappear, this heritage may be lost forever.

The research material for the project will be the largest body of historical records about North Carolina's Jews. The permanent home for “The North Carolina Jewish Collection” will be at the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. It will be professionally preserved and available to scholars.

The JHFNC is also working with a university libraries consortium from across the state (Duke University, UNC-Asheville, UNC-Chapel Hill, and UNC-Charlotte) that hold Jewish North Carolina collections. A master guide is planned to aid those interested in this subject.

Established in 1996, the JHFNC is the state’s only Jewish historical organization. It collects and preserves artifacts and records North Carolina's Jewish settlement history while conducting programs to examine and portray the state's Jewish experience. Its slogan is "Honoring History. Celebrating Culture. Connecting Communities."

Learn more about the project in a movie trailer for the "Down Home" exhibit here.

Read more here .