March 2010, Jewish Stories

Stories to the Rescue GAIL REIMER & JAYNE GUBERMAN

SHMA.COM

When Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast on the morning of August 29, 2005, it brought in its wake physical destruction on an unimaginable scale and a massive dislocation of residents of all races and socioeconomic levels. Ten thousand members of the New Orleans Jewish community joined an exodus unprecedented in American history. Overnight, the population of the Jewish community in nearby Baton Rouge literally doubled, as more than 1,000 Jewish New Orleanians took refuge there. Other Jewish communities across the south and throughout the nation also responded swiftly and generously, providing funds, shelter, and direct relief for those displaced by the storm, and mobilizing resources for rebuilding.

The experiences of the Jewish community, however, quickly became invisible. As national media attention focused almost exclusively on the devastated Lower Ninth Ward and the desperate stories of the most impoverished residents of New Orleans, scant attention was paid to the trauma of “privileged” individuals — including most of the New Orleans Jewish community — who had access to financial and communal resources. With public outrage mounting at the woefully inadequate local, national, and federal response to the catastrophe, the story of the efficient and successful Jewish communal response to the crisis seemed likely to be lost.

Documenting the Jewish stories of individuals and the community became an invaluable, if low-profile, piece of the Jewish relief and recovery efforts post-Katrina. Between August 2006 and December 2007, the Jewish Women’s Archive, in partnership with the Goldring/ Woldenberg Institute of Southern Jewish Life, recorded in-depth interviews with 85 Jewish narrators whose lives had been upended by the storm: young people and elders, women and men, lay leaders and clergy, synagogue stalwarts and secular Jews with few ties to organized Jewish life, third-generation Louisianans and relative newcomers, those who gave help and those who needed it.

After the immediate crisis passed and
“Katrina fatigue” set in, Jews were among the
many New Orleanians who worried about
being forgotten. “Katrina’s Jewish Voices” an
online project, thus came as a relief to those
who had survived the storm, providing a
chance to bear witness to what they had en-
dured and to the grief and losses they were still
experiencing. For many, narrating their per-
sonal stories to sympathetic listeners and know-
ing that their experiences would become part
of a larger communal narrative were pro-
foundly healing. Along with hammers and
nails, stories became an essential component of
the recovery; telling their stories helped people
to construct meaning from their experiences.

For others, the Holocaust was a crucial reminder of Jewish resilience, a reason to have hope and to rebuild.

Embedded in the narrators’ stories were echoes of older Jewish stories. Narrators consistently referenced the defining events and themes of Jewish history and imagination as touchstones for their own ordeal. Not surprisingly, the story referenced most frequently was that of the Holocaust. For some, it provided a meaningful framework for understanding the fragility of even the most prosperous and seemingly secure lives.

“It’s a really equal opportunity shocker for everybody,” reflected Judge Miriam Walzer, who as a young child saw the Nazi rise to power in Germany, “The phones don’t work, the radios don’t work, you don’t have money, you don’t have identification, you don’t have anything to wear, you don’t have a house, your doctors are gone, your friends are gone, the city is in chaos. And you’ve gone through it once before, because when the war was over, my hometown looked like the city now does. And people would leave little notes: ‘We have gone here.’ Then you would go there. And that would be destroyed. You looked for people all over. I still remember that. Bridges destroyed. Things just sticking out, things smoldering. When I was a child.”*

For others, the Holocaust was a crucial reminder of Jewish resilience, a reason to have hope and to rebuild. When Deena Gerber, director of the Jewish Family Service of Greater New Orleans, told her story, she recalled that when “feeling really sorry for myself, I said, ‘People who are not so genetically different from me went through the Holocaust, and they sur-

* All quotations are from the “Katrina’s Jewish Voices” transcripts and oral historian’s field notes. For more information, go to jwa.org.

Gail T. Reimer is executive director of the Jewish Women’s Archive.

Jayne K. Guberman, director of oral history at the Jewish Women’s Archive from 1998–2009, was project director of Katrina’s Jewish Voices, and is currently an independent oral historian.