Jones hosts Jewish exhibit

Documents detailing New Orleans’ Jewish history are on display at Jones Hall through early January.

Tulane’s Louisiana Research Collection is holding an exhibit on the Jewish heritage of New Orleans through the first week of January.

The manuscripts department and the Louisiana collection department combined this semester to form the Louisiana Research Collection, which is holding the exhibit.

“I wanted to put up an exhibition because one of our main strengths in the Louisiana Research Collection is collections related to local Jewish organizations and synagogues,” manuscripts processor Eira Tasney said.

Louisiana Research Collection Head Leon Cahill Miller said that both community members and students have visited the exhibit.

“This exhibit is meant to do two things: to let them know what we have here that they might not otherwise have thought about, and also to appeal to the local Jewish community,” Miller said.

Miller said that the Louisiana Research Collection serves as the official archives for most local temples.
“We specialize in documenting the Jewish heritage of the area,” Miller said. “New Orleans traditionally has had one of the largest Jewish populations in the South, and it’s one of the oldest Jewish communities in the country.”

Tasney said she pulled archives from the library’s major Jewish collections, which include records from the Touro Synagogue and Temple Sinai.

“I went through each collection and found the most interesting things out of it and basically just put them in the exhibition,” Tasney said.

Tulane’s manuscript department is the largest New Orleans research archive in the world and the second largest Louisiana research archive, Miller said. The archives include all of the letters Jefferson Davis wrote after he became president of the Confederacy and Robert E. Lee’s letters from Gettysburg.

“We’re a huge department,” Miller said. “We’re heavily used by researchers from around the world. You can’t write a new book about the Civil War without coming here. You can’t write a new book about almost any aspect of Louisiana without coming here.”

Miller said that though the Louisiana Research Collection is famous around the world, it is not as well-known on campus.

“Often, undergrads are intimidated to come to a special collections department,” Miller said. “But we’re an undergraduate school, so we’re here to serve undergraduates more than anyone else.”

Director of Jewish Studies Brian Horowitz said that students in a Jewish studies introduction class attended the exhibit.

“They were surprised to find out that Tulane and St. Charles [Avenue] have been the center for hundreds of years for the Jewish community,” Horowitz said.

Horowitz said that he also attended the exhibit.

“It only scratches the surface of the extensive holdings that the university has,” Horowitz said. “There’s a lot more for scholars to discover.”