In the brand-new Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience, amid the photographs and maps and interactive exhibits, is a simple, understated object that embodies the purpose of the institution at 818 Howard Ave.

That object is a multicolored crazy quilt — that’s the genuine name of the pattern — that the Jewish Ladies’ Sewing Circle of Canton, Mississippi, assembled in 1885. According to local lore, the finished product, which measures 76-by-72 inches, was raffled off to raise money for the city’s Temple B’nai Israel.

To Anna E. Tucker, the museum’s curator, the quilt is more than just wildly colored bedding made from fabric each woman brought to the quilting sessions. The museum doesn’t have the women’s names, and no one knows about the background of the quilt fragments, but, Tucker said, that’s not the point.

“The power of the quilt is in the agency of the women sewing together their own individual identities into a larger community,” she said. “Each square is decorated with names, symbols and fabrics that hold a special meaning for the woman who quilted it. They then stitched together those identities into a community quilt, pulling together disparate threads to create a cohesive whole.

“Nearly 150 years later, the symbols are now mysteries stitched into the fabric, like a diary written in another language, but the power of coming together to create something new — a quilt, a community crafted by these women — still resonates.”

Quilt

This Victorian 'crazy' quilt, made by the Jewish Ladies’ Sewing Circle in Canton, Mississippi, was likely raffled off in support of Canton’s Temple B’nai Israel. The congregation opened its doors in 1879 following setbacks from the yellow fever epidemics of the 1870s. Donated by Isabel Wile Goldman in memory of Bertha Loeb.

It is, Tucker said, an apt symbol of the goal of the museum, which is scheduled to open May 27. In its 13,000 square feet, the museum aims to do nothing less than use its holdings to trace the evolution of Jewish life in 13 states — Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, North and South Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee and Kentucky — starting in 1585, when Joachim Gans, believed to be the first practicing Jew in North America, landed on Roanoke Island.

Gathering threads

According to the 2020 edition of the American Jewish Year Book, about 1.24 million Jews — the museum’s primary audience — live in those states.

“The museum itself is pulling together threads of meaning and memory,” Tucker said, “inviting visitors to look closely to see the individual as well as stepping back to examine the whole.”

The quilt is one of about 4,000 exhibits that will be on display in the 13,000-square-foot museum, which occupies all of the ground floor and part of the second floor of a gray brick building that used to be a Goodyear tire depot. Getting everything ready for its opening cost about $5.5 million, said Kenneth Hoffman, the museum’s executive director.

His job is a natural fit, said Hoffman, who was, most recently, education director at the National World War II Museum in a 25-year museum career that also has included posts at the New Orleans Museum of Art and the Louisiana State Museum.

“I grew up in the South,” he said. “I’m Jewish; I was at Tulane University in graduate school (where) I studied Southern Jewish history.”

Early days at Jacobs camp

The building near Lee Circle is the museum’s second home. It started in 1986 in Utica, Mississippi, about 35 miles southwest of Jackson, at the Henry S. Jacobs Camp for Jewish children.

The camp started receiving items such as menorahs, photographs and Torahs because small-town temples were closing as people moved away, and people didn’t know what to do with objects that had played vital roles in their spiritual lives.

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The Flowers Brothers Store in Lexington, Miss., is shown here, circa the 1900s. From the Flowers Family Collection.

“The camp became a repository,” he said, so the decision was made to set up a museum where campers and their families could learn about their history and religion.

Macy B. Hart, the camp’s director, was the moving spirit behind the museum’s creation.

“I built this as a sanctuary, a shrine to synagogues that were defunct,” he said. “It’s all about the American story. This is our segment of it. This is our part of the fabric of the community we live in.”

But by 2012, Hart said, the camp didn’t want the museum, so its artifacts went into storage in Jackson while a committee started to decide where the museum should go.

Moving the museum

Finding a new home was vital because the museum’s outreach was expanding, and it needed to be in a city that attracted tourists and near universities that would complement the museum’s educational role, said Marcie Cohen Ferris, a professor emeritus of American studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a longtime adviser to the museum.

In 2016, New Orleans was chosen. Gallagher & Associates designed the exhibits, and Cortina Productions designed the interactive material, which includes an electronic quilt where visitors can create their own squares that will be part of a big community quilt, which, Hoffman said, would be “something larger than themselves.”

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Albert Daube, Ardmore, Oklahoma, 1937. Albert’s relatives in Oklahoma sponsored him to move to the United States, enabling him to escape Nazi Germany in 1937. He is pictured here on his relatives’ farm in rural Oklahoma shortly after his arrival. He would later serve overseas in World War II. From the Daube Family Collection. Courtesy of the Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience. 

A pushcart dominates a room, as does the weathered trunk that Rachmel Shapiro, who later changed his first name to Robert, brought with him in 1905 from Russia across Germany to Galveston, Texas, and, eventually, Massachusetts.

“In this one single trunk are all these threads of history,” Tucker said. “This entire journey is encapsulated in this simple trunk.”

Hanging from a ceiling are about 50 stained-glass reproductions of windows from 14 synagogues across the South. There are also bits of trivia, such as the fact that Coca-Cola and Girl Scout Cookies are kosher and that a Jewish family in New Orleans — the Karnofskys — helped a young Louis Armstrong buy his first cornet.

trunk

Fearing conscription into the Russian army and seeking political freedom, Jewish immigrant Rachmiel 'Robert' Shapiro immigrated to the United States in 1905. Shapiro’s transcontinental journey included secretly crossing the Russian border before gaining passage on a ship departing Breman, Germany, and landing in Galveston, Texas. Donated by Carla Klausner.

Not all the information is lighthearted. Racism, which Ferris calls “the founding sin of this region,” is a theme throughout the museum, with sections on such topics as the civil rights movement, lynching and slavery.

No pat answers

One of the more arresting displays is an 1862 bill of sale in which Mary McClure sold a woman known only as Harriet to Clara Wiseberg, who was Jewish, for $1,000 ($26,413 in today’s dollars).

“That’s powerful.” Ferris said, “because it speaks to the agency and the voice that White women had in the American South, as did Jewish women of a particular class.”

Even though slave trading has traditionally been associated with men, “women might have bought and owned slaves to support their domestic household,” she said.

Slavery shaped the Jewish experience. Ferris said, and Jewish businessmen wound up supporting the slave economy.

This might not have been a simple matter of embracing slavery, said Mark Bauman, a member of museum’s historical advisory committee and the Southern Jewish Historical Society.

“They were afraid of the effects on their businesses and their positions in society” if they expressed contrary opinions, he said.

Jacob Cohen, who lived in New Orleans and North Carolina, was hardly silent about his views. A letter he wrote, which is on display at the museum, denounces Rabbi Max Lilienthal, of Cincinnati, for his abolitionist views. Cohen fought for the Confederacy and died in 1862 in the Second Battle of Bull Run.

His screed “shows the diversity of the Jewish community,” Tucker said.

It’s also indicative of the depth and the complexity and the deep history of the Jewish South,” Ferris said. “These different pieces are like a puzzle, or like a quilt.”

And there are no pat answers and no easy solutions, Tucker said.

“One of the primary ways of going about this is that you just keep asking questions,” she said. “It never stops. What’s so exciting is that this museum is a living museum, and that we continue to ask questions. This is an ongoing conversation. Every panel in this museum, every artifact is a comma instead of a period.”

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Museum officials encourage members of the public to consider donating relevant artifacts to the collection. Curators are especially interested in items from early Jewish history (1800s), items related to the stories of women and people of color and any item with a strong connection to a personal story of Southern Jewish life. Find out more about the artifact donation process at www.msje.org/our-collection.

Contact John Pope at pinckelopes@gmail.com.