Aliyah-bamans Soon To Pack Bags

Not as nutty as it seems: Appeal for Jewish transplants to peanut-rich Dothan, Ala., is catching on.

Not as nutty as it seems: Appeal for Jewish transplants to peanut-rich Dothan, Ala., is catching on.

by Carolyn Slutsky

Fifty grand for Jews willing to move to Dothan, Ala., the so-called peanut capital of the world, sounded like a joke. But since placing ads in local Jewish papers across the country and hoping for a modest response, the group making the offer has been inundated with takers.
Robert Goldsmith, executive director of Blumberg Family Jewish Community Services, a family foundation of longtime Dothan Jewish residents, says that since the Associated Press picked up the story earlier this month the Web site (www.bfjcs.org) has gotten 250,000 hits and he has personally fielded hundreds of phone calls from all across the United States and as far away as Turkey, China and South Africa.
About 150 Americans have filled out applications, and Goldsmith says the BFJCS is

poised to extend offers to 20 viable families who will be identified in the next few weeks.
“We’re not buying Jews to move here,” stresses Goldsmith, whose Northern accent (he’s from Baltimore) gives him away as a Dothan transplant. He adds that a strict vetting process is in place to ensure that potential families for the relocation project are already involved in their Jewish communities, have personal and rabbinic references and are generally upstanding people.
“Like so many small towns in the South, we have a rich Jewish history, yet so many have withered or locked their doors altogether,” says Goldsmith of Jewish life in the Bible Belt.
“We want to have kids banging around running into each other in religious school, and to reinvigorate the place,” he says of the program’s ultimate goal.
At one point in the 1950s and ‘60s, Dothan had 120 Jewish families; today only about 50 remain. Goldsmith’s wife, Rabbi Lynne Goldsmith, leads Temple Emanu-El, Dothan’s Reform congregation and is the only full-time female rabbi in the state of Alabama.
Goldsmith says that Dothan, located 20 miles from Fort Rucker, the Army aviation center, is not for every Jew. Though about half the peanuts harvested annually in the United States are grown within a hundred-mile radius of Dothan, there are no kosher butchers in the city of 58,000 located 200 miles from Atlanta. There are also no yeshivas, and the Reform synagogue is the only one, so the group has had to respectfully decline relocation requests from Orthodox families, many of whom were from the New York metro area.
The newest Jewish families of Dothan should be identified and packing to move within the next few weeks. If they hurry they will arrive in time for the National Peanut Festival, held in Dothan from Oct. 31-Nov. 9.

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