After Katrina: The City
Jewish New Orleans: A Much-Too-Short History
Jewish Community: Hit Hard But Thriving
Pictures of the Service Project Site, St. Bernard Parish, and Lower Ninth Ward
Videos
Interesting Articles, Documents, and Speeches

The French Quarter. Music clubs. Streetcars. Curvy wrought-iron balconies. All of them give New Orleans its unique flavor, but anyone who’s been there knows that what’s most seductive about this city is its vibe--a culture, an attitude, and a way of life found nowhere else. If it’s your first time in New Orleans, prepare to be surprised. If you’ve been here already…well, you know the treat that’s in store. 

First, you should approach New Orleans as a city of neighborhoods, each one suffused by history and its own charm. It’s a great place to just walk around and soak in the atmosphere, stopping at the lush parks, quirky bars, music clubs and trendy boutiques you’ll see along the way. Head to Magazine Street for great cafes and shops. Visit the French Quarter (or Vieux Carée) during the day (and at night, if you can brave the crowds) for its narrow streets, hidden courtyards and the 19th-century French-Spanish architecture that’s come to signify the city’s romantic look.

But New Orleans is not just a bunch of preservationists focused on the past—there are plenty of contemporary artists, musicians and daring restaurateurs. Head to the Warehouse District to sample the city’s more forward-looking galleries and restaurants. Also, coinciding with your visit is Prospect.1 New Orleans, billed as the largest biennial exhibition of international contemporary art ever in the United States. It opens Nov. 1. Make sure to catch the cool giant Ark for New Orleans (yes, as in Noah) designed by artist Mark Bradford. Twenty-two feet high and 64 feet long, it’s constructed of plywood barricade fencing salvaged from local construction sites, and its siding is plastered with weathered posters.  

After Katrina: The City

When you visit New Orleans, you’ll see that even three years later, and even though many of the city’s major attractions have recovered, signs of Hurricane Katrina’s devastation remain. It’s not surprising, considering the scope of Katrina. By the end of August 2006, eighty percent of the city was flooded, with some parts under 15 feet of water. The poor and elderly were hit hardest, many left homeless for months or years. And of course, thousands of New Orleans residents decided to settle elsewhere.

Many parts of the city have rebounded, but visit the hardest-hit places, such as the Lower Ninth Ward, and you’ll see swaths of devastation. Said one writer on a recent visit: “The houses on dozens of blocks near the floodwalls were gone almost entirely, with weeds taller than people growing in what were once separate lots. Only the odd driveway and staircase remained to show that someone had once lived there.”

Further darkening the recovery, violent crime is soaring. But for all its continued challenges, three years later New Orleans is on the mend, having regained much of its population and jobs. Some neighborhoods that were emptied of residents have come back, though often without all the people they had before. Many houses have been repaired, schools are open and the infamous FEMA trailers have departed.

There’s a “sense of being part of history that living in New Orleans now brings,” said a writer for Jewish Living magazine. “For not only the physical infrastructure of New Orleans is being rebuilt but all its major institutions – education, health care, government – are being reinvented from the ground up, providing room for forward thinking and innovation.”

Above all, New Orleans residents have given the rest of us an enduring example of resilience, hard work, and just plain human kindness. 

Jewish New Orleans: A Much-Too-Short History

The New Orleans Jewish community, which celebrates its 250th anniversary this year, has always been as colorful and freewheeling as the city itself. After the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, most of the Jews who settled in New Orleans came from the Alsace region of France; they were attracted to the city because most of its residents still spoke French and followed the Napoleonic Code, not English common law.  

New Orleans was a frontier town that rewarded people who were not bound by tradition, in business or in life. It was something of a meritocracy, where people were judged by their business skills and smarts.  For these reasons, Jews were very successful in politics—Judah Benjamin, later the Secretary of State of the Confederacy, was the first Jewish Senator, and there was a Jewish lieutenant governor and attorney general in the 1850s.

The early Jewish community in New Orleans was not very religious. Most of the men who emigrated came alone or with other men, marrying Catholic women and raising their children as Catholics. The Jewish community might have become an interesting relic, doomed by intermarriage and assimilation, had not Judah Touro come to town.  The son of the cantor at the oldest American synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island, Touro arrived in 1806, just as the economic boom was taking off. A shrewd investor, he came to own much of what is today’s downtown.

Judah Touro attended services at Christ Church and his closest friends were Gentile, but he became quite close to a man named Gerson Kursheedt, who had a strong Jewish identity. Kursheedt convinced Touro to give money to found a new synagogue, and that was the start of his Jewish philanthropy. America’s first philanthropist, he gave away the then-astronomical sum of $483,000 to synagogues, schools and benevolent societies in 19 cities. In New Orleans, he supported two synagogues and founded Touro Infirmary, which was the first hospital in the city to reopen after Katrina.

In the second half of the 19th century, the Reform movement, which had begun in Germany, took hold in New Orleans, and both original synagogues became Reform. But the city did not see the flood of more traditional, Eastern European Jews who poured into other American cities in the late 1800s. That’s because in this period, New Orleans was rocked both by yellow fever epidemics and several financial reversals. Still, New Orleans has always had strong Conservative and Orthodox synagogues.  

Though the Jewish community has never represented more than 1 percent of the metropolitan area population, it has played a very important role in the city. A full one-third of the recipients of the Loving Cup, an award given by the newspaper each year to recognize the city’s most civic-minded citizen, have been Jewish.  Jews founded the art museum; the city park; Newman School, an academically elite private school; Dillard University, the first black university; and one of the first television stations.

Jews also played a leading role in the civil rights movement in New Orleans; the first African American to speak to an integrated audience, Ralph Bunche, spoke at a synagogue, and local rabbis were fervent advocates of equal rights.  

In the post-Katrina recovery, the Jewish community is again leading the way; its strategic planning effort and initiatives to welcome newcomers were featured recently in a front-page article in the local newspaper.  No doubt the Jewish community will continue to play a major role in New Orleans life in the next 250 years.  

Jewish Community: Hit Hard But Thriving

When Hurricane Katrina swept through in 2005, the Jewish community of New Orleans took a pounding. Eighty percent of homes were destroyed, along with seventy percent of businesses. One synagogue was demolished, and several were damaged. And perhaps most distressing, the community lost a third of its population—the Katrina Diaspora—as some 3,000 people decided to permanently live elsewhere.

At the same time, the community has made an amazing recovery—and has helped lead the larger city in its recovery. And although it’s smaller than before, local leaders say the community today is stronger than it’s ever been, that people have come together to preserve and rebuild.

New Orleans Jews range from Chabad to the unaffiliated – belonging to four Reform, one Conservative, two Orthodox, and two Chabad synagogues. But the community mixes well. Beth Israel, the flooded Modern Orthodox synagogue, now davens weekly in the chapel of the Reform Congregation Gates of Prayer. Rabbis across the spectrum work together on community-wide programs. For instance, a Conservative, Reform, Modern Orthodox, and Chabad synagogue co-sponsored a scholar-in-residence weekend last spring featuring Rabbi Joseph Telushkin. Members of every synagogue, as well as unaffiliated Jews (a minority in New Orleans ), sit on the Federation board as well.

Though every synagogue has lost members, synagogue attendance remains strong. Living with the knowledge that one’s entire world can be turned upside down in a day makes religion even more important. Coming together with friends who have experienced the same losses has more meaning, and praying in a synagogue that you helped played a part in reopening is sweet.

In the past Annual Campaign, the Jewish community opened their wallets to an extraordinary degree. With the donor base reduced by a third, they contributed $2.7 million--nearly the highest total ever raised.

In many ways the Jewish community is infused with the ambience and culture of New Orleans. Church and state are not separated all that clearly in New Orleans , which of course creates some problems – prayers to Jesus said at the start of government meetings comes to mind. But this mixing of church and state has positive effects as well. New Orleanians value religion and religious expression and are quick to give respect to all those for whom religion is important. The Jewish and Christian faith communities work closely on many civic issues, Loyola University co-sponsors a large interfaith seder, and many church groups learn more about Israel by viewing the room-sized land map of the Jewish state that is owned by the Federation.

Over the past decade the Jewish community has itself become more committed to Jewish observance and study. Reflecting national trends, the New Orleans Reform temples have incorporated more Hebrew and rituals into their worship services, and every synagogue has a full program of adult Jewish education. The Federation sponsors the New Orleans Jewish Day School and the Florence Melton Adult Mini-School. It also sponsors a savings program for Israel trips for teens.

And guess what? Mardi Gras is not just for Catholics anymore. Although the first King of Carnival in the 1870s was Jewish, until recently Mardi Gras krewes, which stage each parade, were closed to Jews. Now, however, many Jewish professionals and business people are krewe members, throwing tsotches to cheering throngs.

There are even two Jewish krewes who march or rather, horah, through the French Quarter to kick off the Mardi Gras season. These Krewes have a more serious side as well. Many of their members are not affiliated with the Jewish community, and the Krewes serve as their avenue into the community, sponsoring holiday celebrations and Shabbat dinners throughout the year.

In one important way, the Jewish community is an anomaly in New Orleans. While New Orleans sometimes seems more like a Caribbean island than an American city – focused more on partying than on work and certainly not a slave to efficiency – the Jewish community is quite well organized. For a community of its size there are a plethora of organizations, and they go about their business in a decidedly professional way. Nowhere was this clearer than in the two years since Katrina, when the Jewish recovery effort was a model for the city in its efficient use of resources and ability to get things done.

A theologian once defined spirituality as living in the more. Given that, living in New Orleans today is a very spiritual experience. Fixing up your home, helping others salvage their belongings, eating out in a restaurant, even buying tchotchkes in the French Market…all that makes a difference. Dozens of idealistic young Jews are flocking to New Orleans to make that difference, enlivening the Jewish community in the process.

Pictures of the Service Project Site, St. Bernard Parish, and Lower Ninth Ward

Videos
ABC News: Jewish Federation Helps Rebuild (March 16, 2009)
YouTube: Video of St. Bernard Parish (October 02, 2006)

Articles, Documents, and Speeches
Jerusalem Post: Jewish leadership event in New Orleans lends a hand to Katrina recovery (March 16, 2009)
NOLA.com: Spring break a reminder that volunteers still streaming to New Orleans to help rebuild (March 14, 2009)
Lousiana's Living Traditions: Gefilte Fish in the Land of the Kingfish - Jewish Life in Louisiana (March 6, 2009)
Times-Picayune: Article on UJC NOLA Service Project (February 26, 2009)
USA Today: Adventure Calls Workers to New Orleans (July 23, 2008)
Business Week: New Orleans: A Startup Laboratory (August 27, 2007)
2007 JFK Profile in Courage Award Acceptance Speech by Doris Voitier, St. Bernard Parish School Superintendent (May 21, 2007)
History of Hurricane Katrina New Orleans Fact Sheet
2005 NOLA Disaster Timeline and Key Players