New exhibit on the Jewish experience in Louisiana


The Southern Jewish Historical Society met in Jones Hall earlier this month. In honor of the meeting, the Louisiana Research Collection (LaRC) created an exhibit highlighting its holdings pertaining to the Jewish experience in Louisiana. The exhibit will be up through December and I’d like to invite everyone to drop by and see it.

Documenting the Louisiana Jewish experience is a special mission of LaRC. We serve as the official archives for most of the local temples, congregations, and synagogues. We also preserve the records of many area Jewish social welfare organizations, such as the Jewish Federation, the Jewish Children’s Home, and the Communal Hebrew School.

For the exhibit, Eira Tansey selected more than one hundred items from a wide range of our holdings. Among the materials on display are nineteenth-century marriage records in Hebrew from Touro Synagogue, a program from when Dr. Ralph Bunche spoke at Temple Sinai in 1949 in one of the city’s first integrated lectures, mimeographed class handouts from the Hebrew Communal School, dissertations about the state’s Jewish community from the University Archives, and a few of the seminal published works about the New Orleans Jewish community from the Louisiana book collection. The materials reflect more than one hundred and forty years of Jewish society.

The exhibit will be up through December. It’s in the Special Collections Gallery on the second floor of Jones Hall. We hope you’ll be able to stop by.


Written by Lee Miller.


(Image of marriage document from the Touro Synagogue collection, Manuscripts Collection 224, Louisiana Research Collection, Tulane University Libraries. Image may not be reproduced without permission.)


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

MLK weekend

LaRC on WWL TV

Dr. Butler's treasured papers