c. 1998 Religion News Service

NATCHEZ, Miss. _ It’s 7:30 p.m., and Marty Nathanson glances at his watch to determine if the timing is right to begin Sabbath services at Temple B’Nai Israel, home to the oldest Jewish congregation in Mississippi.

Eight congregants _ a crowd for a Friday night _ have wandered into the massive sanctuary, but Nathanson waits another minute on the slim chance a late arrival or two will join the weekly gathering of prayers and blessings.

Seeing none, the silver-haired Nathanson, lay leader for nearly a quarter-century, calls congregant Gerry Stern to the pulpit for the traditional lighting of the Sabbath candles.

Thirty minutes later the service is over, and Nathanson, 86, switches off the lights in what he calls the crown jewel of Mississippi Jewish culture, with its stained-glass windows and ark of Italian marble. Nathanson figures it won’t be long before the lights of historic B’Nai Israel are switched off for the last time and the building is handed over to the Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience in nearby Utica.

It is a day Nathanson, a New York native who has called Natchez home since 1946, is not sure he wants to be around for. While comforted by plans to turn the landmark into a museum, he says its final days as a house of worship will be a somber chapter in Natchez history.

“At one time, this place was filled for the High Holy Days,” said Nathanson, a former Wall Street lawyer who took over as lay leader after the death of the last rabbi in 1976. “All 350 seats were assigned to someone. Now we have 18 members. If we get five or six people on a Friday night, that’s a crowd.”

The story of Natchez Jews is replicated in other towns and cities in the Mississippi River region of the Deep South, where once-thriving Jewish communities dating to the late 1800s are on the brink of death, if they haven’t expired already.

Their arrival and eventual exodus are highlighted in an exhibit mounted in Jackson, Miss., sponsored by the Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience. The exhibit, “Alsace to America: Discovering a Southern Jewish Heritage,” is on view through the end of August. The exhibit features optional driving tours along the Jewish cultural corridors of Louisiana and Mississippi. Many towns along the routes have their own exhibits on Jewish history.

Fleeing religious oppression, many Jews who came to America settled in the South, bringing with them the symbols of their faith _ prayer books, Seder plates, menorahs and the like.

The items, including a Kiddush cup that dates to 1677 and a Torah scroll hand-carried on one of the many voyages to America, are among dozens of artifacts included in the exhibit.

The exhibition spotlights towns such as Donaldsonville, La., where the synagogue that once served 70 families is now an Ace Hardware Store and the historic Jewish-owned Lemann Department Store is a museum.

In Natchez, the Standard Club, center of social activity for Jews, has been restored as a local watering hole. Upriver in Port Gibson, the old Frishman’s store now houses a quilt-making operation. And in Livonia, La., waitresses serve shrimp and crabs in the building that once housed the Jewish-owned Dreyfus Store.

In some towns, all that remains are cemeteries with Hebrew-inscribed headstones bearing such names as Rosenthal, Marx, Adler and Stern.

“Right now I kind of feel like an endangered species,” said longtime Vicksburg resident Betty Sue Kline, who has watched membership at Temple Anshe Chassed dwindle from several hundred in the 1950s and ’60s to about 35 today.

In the works for two years, the Jackson exhibit traces the arrival of French Jews in Mississippi and Louisiana a century ago and is testament to the major economic and cultural role they played in the rural South.

Jews fleeing the social and religious persecution that had plagued them in Europe discovered opportunity, freedom and acceptance along the Mississippi River between Memphis, Tenn., and New Orleans.

Jews from the Alsace-Lorraine region of France and Germany were especially attracted to the area’s French culture and lure of economic prosperity. Over time, they made their livings as peddlers, then as merchants, cotton buyers and cotton planters.

The arrival of the boll weevil in the 1910s triggered the gradual decline of the cotton-based economy and for second- and third-generation Jews a shift from the rural South to more cosmopolitan cities such as Atlanta and New Orleans.

As part of the exhibit, visitors are invited to take self-guided driving tours along the Jewish cultural corridors. One tour leads north from Jackson to towns such as Cleveland, Clarksdale and Greenville, where the Stein family built its discount clothing store into the national chain Stein Mart.

The other tour takes travelers south from Jackson to New Orleans, with stops in such towns as Port Gibson and Woodville, once called “Little Jerusalem” because of the influx and influence of Jews there.

In Port Gibson, the old Temple Gemiluth Chassed stands as one of the few reminders of Jewish life in this once-bustling supply and banking town.

Listed in the National Register of Historic Places, the Moorish-style building with its Byzantine-Moorish dome and arched doorway was set to be razed for a gas station parking lot 12 years ago when historic preservationists Bill and Martha Lum bought it and saved it from destruction.

“I never dreamed it would be us who would save the building,” said Martha Lum, who is not Jewish. “It was going to be bulldozed. We couldn’t let that happen. It was part of our town’s heritage, which we didn’t want to lose, as well as being such a beautiful building.”

Today, the temple’s eternal light and other artifacts are housed at the Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience.

Since its inception a decade ago, the museum has strived to keep the Southern Jewish story alive through its collection of photographs, memorabilia and religious objects of synagogues whose doors have closed.

Museum director Macy Hart says restoring cemeteries is also high on his priority list because the grave markers are often the only hints of a town’s Jewish past.

“There are abandoned Jewish cemeteries around the South that no one is taking care of,” Hart said. “And we want to preserve them.”

DEA END BRONSTON