Southern Comfort, 275 Years On

Congregation Mickve Israel, which sits off of one of Savannah’s Spanish moss-draped squares, is celebrating its 275th anniversary this weekend.

Congregation Mickve Israel, which sits off of one of Savannah’s Spanish moss-draped squares, is celebrating its 275th anniversary this weekend.

by Carolyn Slutsky
Staff Writer

Savannah, Ga. — On July 11, 1733, 42 Sephardic Jews from Portugal arrived on a ship to start a new life in what would become one of the most graceful cities in the Southern United States. The colony of Georgia had been founded earlier that year, and with a total population of 116 settlers, one third of the population of the new colony was Jewish.

To drive around Savannah today is to engage deeply with religion. Churches abound, dotting both sides of the roadways on the city’s outskirts. The Catholic church where a devout Flannery O’Connor attended school and worship as a child stares down from one of the city’s 24 Spanish moss-draped squares. A sign outside one large church reads, “God Loves Knee

Mail,” an exhortation to leave behind the empty ways of technology, and pray.

But in the center of the city sits Savannah’s Congregation Mickve Israel, an imposing Gothic building constructed in the mid-1870s and long the home of the third oldest Jewish congregation in the country.

This weekend, the Reform synagogue celebrates its 275th anniversary. It will hold an array of events honoring the community’s long history, welcoming back 100 descendents of the congregation’s founders, reading from the original 1733 Torah and enjoying speeches and performances by personalities including actor Mandy Patinkin and President Bush’s former press secretary, Ari Fleischer, a student of Rabbi Arnold Belzer, the synagogue’s rabbi for nearly 20 years.

“Every 25 years is a generation and we feel it’s important that the congregation celebrate and commemorate important events in its history,” says Rabbi Belzer, who is originally from Westchester County. “Telling our story is a very Jewish thing, it’s what we do.”

Where smaller Southern Jewish communities have struggled or folded and Atlanta, a young but growing city now home to more than 100,000 Jews and poised to have a quarter of a million by 2020, Savannah occupies a stable middle ground. Many of its young professionals have left for Atlanta and other Sunbelt and northern cities for jobs, and at the same time it is attracting young retirees who are moving to the area in significant numbers and getting involved in all aspects of civic and Jewish life.

Savannah, Jewish and non, is drenched in history. The first boatload of Jews were not supposed to be invited to stay in the colony, but when an outbreak of disease struck the early settlers a Jewish doctor, Samuel Nunez, was able to cure the sickness. James Oglethorpe, the leader of the British settlers who had arrived early in 1733, granted land to the heads of the Jewish families, many of whom stayed for generations.

The first Sephardic Jewish settlers were joined by German and Eastern European Jews, and the Sephardim soon migrated to other Southern ports and cities like Charleston. During the Civil War, Rabbi Belzer describes that Jews were just as Southern as any Southerner, with 17 percent of Savannah’s Jews owning slaves as compared with 14 percent of the general population. They fought for the Confederacy, and everyone harbored a penchant for duels.

“Duel, shmuel,” quips Rabbi Belzer, at his desk in his corner office adjacent to the synagogue’s museum, which houses historical letters and artifacts, of how he’d have liked to see differences handled, bringing a Yiddish flair to an old-South convention. “Let’s have a sandwich, work it out.”

“Our congregation is traditional in clinging to history, but newcomers are [highly involved] in planning the 275th. They come to love the history and embrace it as their own,” says Rabbi Belzer.

Adam Solender, executive director of the Savannah Jewish Federation, points to Savannah’s long history — “if you haven’t been here 14 generations, you haven’t been here at all” — and characterizes Savannah as, “a small Jewish community that acts like a large one.”

“I don’t think you can separate [Southern and Jewish pride],” he says of his newly adopted city (he hails from Long Island). “Still waters run deep and they are definitely proud of being Southern Jews. They maintain the life where other places couldn’t.”

He says there are between 2,800 and 3,400 Jews in Savannah and points to the high per capita giving to federation, the heavy involvement of Jews in civic organizations and the fact that numerous families belong to all three of the Reform, Conservative and Orthodox congregations as a way of supporting the community as a whole. The Orthodox Synagogue, Congregation Bnai Brith Jacob, with close to 600 families, is about double the size of the Reform congregation.

“[It’s] not all Schwartzes and Cohens, but that doesn’t define Judaism and identity,” says Solender, adding that many Cohens in the south are black, descendents of Jewish slaveholders. “You just don’t have the same cues when you’re in the North.”

Marion Mendel moves easily across her well-appointed, pastel apartment on Bull Street in downtown Savannah. At 91, she is Savannah’s second oldest Jewish resident, but looking at her you would never know it. She drives herself to the gym three times a week, and speaks lucidly about her famous ancestors, surrounding herself with their silver, their documents, furniture and memories. On her coffee table where other southern ladies might keep quaint coasters or family photographs is the hat worn by her ancestor during the Revolutionary War.

Mendel is a direct descendent of Benjamin Sheftall, one of the original Savannah Jewish settlers, and his son Mordecai Sheftall, the Revolutionary War’s highest-ranking Jewish officer. As a girl, she regrets not having paid closer attention to her father’s tales of his storied relatives, but today she surrounds herself with their artifacts and often repeats the highlights of their lives.

“I feel I have an obligation, more than a claim on history,” she says. “My ancestors didn’t have enough get-up-and-go to get up and go.”

Now, she says, “I’m on the horns of a dilemma,” her silky accent slipping through. A lifelong Savannah resident, save a stint at Smith College in Northampton, Mass., Mendel is now faced with what to do with the family heirlooms – and historical treasures – that populate her apartment and life.

Her view of Jewish life in Savannah is as casual as her attire and genteel manner.

“Of course there’s always anti-Semitism, you know it’s there, but it hasn’t been a problem,” she says. “I think it’s because we’ve always been here so we’re not Johnny-come-latelys.”

Jewish life has always been deeply bound up in secular Savannah life. Kaye Kole, a native of the city, founded the Savannah Jewish Archives in 1995 as a way to preserve some of the documents, photographs and the material culture that makes up Savannah’s Jewish history.

The archives are housed at the Georgia Historical Society, which points to just how integrated Jewish history is with Savannah’s overall narrative.

“Jews were very fortunate in Savannah because they were accepted,” says Kole, a genealogist who researches and writes books on individual families. “The trustees [of the colony] did not want them to settle here because they were afraid other people wouldn’t want to come, but by the time Oglethorpe got the letter, the Jews were already integrated into the community.”

“The history of Southern Jews ... is tied up with the whole history of America,” says Eli Evans, author of “The Provincials: A Personal History of Jews in the South. “As time went on Savannah became like many other southern communities settled by Sephardim who disappeared into assimilation.”

Larry Brook, editor/publisher of the Deep South Jewish Voice, which covers Jewish life in 13 Southern states, says that Southern Jewish life is thriving, though in many cases differently than in past generations.

Woodville, Miss., he says, was called “Little Jerusalem” 120 years ago because of the proportion of Jews there; by the 1920s, that community was pretty much gone. In Selma, Ala., in the early 1900s it was said you could roll a bowling ball down main street on Rosh HaShanah and not hit anyone for all the Jewish businesses. Today, Selma has a gorgeous synagogue building, but only holds services a few times a year because there are a few dozen elderly Jews left. Congregations in Clarksville, Miss., and Demopolis, Ala., have had to close their doors because of Jewish migration to cities with more opportunities.

One of those cities is Atlanta, which Brook describes as a “magnet” and “the economic engine of the South.” If the number of Jews does indeed reach 250,000 in the next 12 years, a figure cited by federation officials, Atlanta will be the fourth largest Jewish community in the country.

“The Southern Jewish experience is a unique thing,” says Brook speaking broadly about the confluence of Southern and Jewish pride. “If we move to New York City we can kind of blend in and have a Jewish existence; here that’s not the case. You have to actively work at being Jewish. In many circumstances you can be the only Jew someone’s ever met.”

Brook also says people have a misconception that the South is teeming with anti-Semites, “and a lot of concern from people who think we’re spending our days having to hide from the guys running around in bed sheets.”

In reality, Brook finds no threat from the Ku Klux Klan and a close relationship with many Evangelical Christians, who are grateful to the Jews for having given them “their Messiah and their Bible.”

“The center of American Jewish life isn’t in any one place,” says B.H. Levy, a lawyer, Savannah native and Marion Mendel’s son, though “some Northerners might disagree.”

Though his children have left Savannah — his son to take a medical residency in Tucson, Ariz., and his daughter a job at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, he is thrilled with his family history, and happy to have spent his life in his hometown.

“It’s an accident of birth, it’s nothing that I did but I just fell into this,” he says. “I guess that’s one reason why I feel so married to Savannah, it gives me a sense of place, a center of gravity, that’s for sure.”

E-mail: carolyn@jewishweek.org

Westchester Jewish Conference

Westchester’s Jewish Community Relations Organization