Return to Part II
Day 6 (Wednesday - Greenwood and Oxford, MS):
I really haven't said much so far about the group I was traveling with. There were fifteen of us overall: the young assistant rabbi from our synagogue, Rabbi Stein, plus a woman from the temple staff who was the organizer of the trip, two couples, and nine individual travelers. All told, four men and eleven women. As I mentioned in Part I, I was the youngster of the congregants. There was one woman about my age, Professor Goldstein is I would guess in his 50's, and Rabbi Stein is in her thirties, but all the rest went up and up in age. However, just about everyone was game - not a lot of curmudgeonly old people behavior. And tech savvy, too - when it was suggested that we set up a WhatsApp group to communicate, only one person had trouble joining. I had taken a chance in rooming with Alex, who I had never met before the trip info session, but he turned out to be a lovely guy - a recent transplant from Massachusetts who moved to DC to be near his children/grandchild. He was a New England sports fan - every night he had the TV on so he could watch the Celtics, or the Bruins, or whatever.
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| The generally grey-haired group |
Our first stop of the day was
Congregation Ahavath Rayim in the small city Greenwood, MS. We had by this point seen thriving congregations, struggling congregations, and defunct congregations, but Ahavath Rayim was something else - a congregation which in practical terms no longer existed but which was being kept alive through the efforts of one of the few remaining Jewish families in town, the Goldbergs, who own a local string of shoe stores. Jewish Greenwood's story was one we had by then heard multiple times: a once-thriving town shriveled over time due to the Great Migration of African Americans out of the Jim Crow south, automation of the cotton industry, the Great Depression, and more, and as the overall town shrank, so did its Jewish population. At its peak, out of 8,000 residents there were 300 Jews; now the number of Jews is down to a handful - mostly the extended Goldberg clan. Interestingly, Ahavath Rayim is categorized as an Orthodox synagogue since they use an Orthodox prayer book and rituals; however, it doesn't appear that any of the congregants live an Orthodox (traditionally religiously observant) lifestyle. Not that there really are any congregants. While technically Ahavath Rayim still exists as an active lay-led congregation, services are not regularly held there, and are limited to major holidays like Rosh Hashonah and Yom Kippur. Given the scarcity of synagogues in the area (there are four rabbis in the whole state), the holiday services are apparently well-attended, with attendees coming from all over the region. Earlier this year the synagogue even hosted a bar mitzvah (not surprisingly, of a member of the Goldberg family).
We heard all this history from Gail Goldberg, the current matriarch of the Goldberg family. It was fun just to hear her say Jewish words in her deep Mississippi accent. The Hebrew term for a congregation, "shul", which I pronounce such that it rhymes with "cool", takes on extra syllables in Mississippi. More like "shoooo-uhl". Interestingly, Gail said she had never felt any sense of discrimination of of being the "other". Her kids participated in church basketball programs, and they participated in all the town social events - some of which were church sponsored - they just went elsewhere to pray.
One website summarizes the situation in Greenwood as follows: "As of 2022 only a handful of Jews live in Greenwood and nearby towns, and most of them belong to the Goldberg family. Still, there are no plans to dissolve Ahavath Rayim, which will mark a century in its current synagogue in 2023." As long as there are Goldbergs, there'll be a synagogue in Greenwood. If a day comes when they can no longer maintain it, who knows.
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| Temple Ahavath Rayim |
While in town we stopped at the Jewish cemetery - small and not particularly noteworthy except that our professor/guide's great-great-uncle is buried there.
We had another lunch on the bus as we drove to Oxford, MS, home of Ole Miss (the University of Mississippi). There wasn't very much Jewish-related stuff to discuss there; even today, maybe 30 out of the school's16,000 identify as being Jewish. Instead, we were scheduled to hear about the "recontextualization" or Confederate artifacts (that means stuff like removing statues of Confederate heroes, and recognizing the contributions of enslaved people to the building of the school) at Ole Miss. We met with Andy Mullins, a former aide to the governor, co-founder of the Mississippi Teacher Corps (like Teach-for-America), and longtime university administrator.
I wouldn't say he exactly delivered on the intended subject. He gave us a lot of history of the building we were meeting in, and laudatory statements about James Meredith, the first African-American student admitted to Ole Miss (he left out the part we learned later at a museum, that the university turned Meredith away four times - including having the governor himself show up to tell Meredith he wasn't welcome there - before letting him in). Mullins had that elliptical Southern way of story-telling, where every time you'd think he was about to get to the point he'd go off into some tangential folksy anecdote (Gail Goldberg had been like this too) and so he talked for a long time but never really quite got around to saying much about recontextualization, even when we went to see the spot where a big statue of Robert E. Lee had stood. He also noted that they hadn't removed everything related to the Confederacy; for example, the admin building is still graced by lovely stained glass windows honoring the "university greys" - Ole Miss students who fought for the Confederacy, and who he felt deserved to be honored for bravely fighting for a cause they believed in.
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| Dr. Mullins tells us more than we needed to know about the history of the building |
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| Andy Mullins with a statue of James Meredith |
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| Honoring the "university greys" |
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| Find the spelling mistake if you can! |
We stayed overnight at a hotel right across from the campus, located on the historic square at Oxford - a cute college town. We browsed the historic Square Books bookstore and the other shops around the square. I had had an upset stomach for a couple of days, and so for dinner I went off on my own and found a place where I could get a plain grilled chicken sandwich. I had hoped to find some kind of crunchy granola vegetarian kind of restaurant where I could get something light to eat, but apparently things are different in Mississippi - while pretty much every college town I've ever visited has such a hippie tofu restaurant, such a thing doesn't exist at Ole Miss. The chicken sandwich was fine and I was recovered the next day.
Day 7 (Thursday - Memphis, TN):
On our last day we climbed on the bus for a drive to Memphis. Yes, I was spending my precious vacation time in Tennessee, of all places. Our first stop in Memphis was the
National Civil Rights Museum, which is cleverly built to encompass the Lorraine Motel, where Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. Where the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum had been more of a history museum, the National Museum told the story of a movement, to "share the culture and lessons from the American Civil Rights Movement and explore how this significant era continues to shape equality and freedom globally" - from the awful backstory of slavery and post-Reconstruction Jim Crow, through Brown vs. The Board of Education, the Montgomery bus boycott, student sit-ins, Freedom Riders, the March on Washington, Selma, Emmett Till, etc., through to the current day. One comes away with an appreciation of the courage and commitment it took to challenge, and ultimately change, American laws and culture.
As an aside, I'll note that even without the MLK connection, the Lorraine Motel would itself have been noteworthy. A "Green Book" hotel, it hosted scores of African-American performers who came to record in Memphis.
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| The Lorraine Motel - the wreath marks where Martin Luther King, Jr. was standing when he was shot |
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| Read about the Lorraine Motel yourself |
Our last stop was at Temple Israel. Now, we belong to the largest Jewish congregation in Virginia, located in one of the
wealthiest counties in the U.S., and so we're used to large, affluent shoooo-uhls, but nothing prepared us for Temple Israel, practically a mega-church among synagogues. We entered an enormous building where our agenda started with lunch with the congregation's clergy, which consisted of tasty barbeque (chicken and beef - no pork) from a restaurant owned by a congregant, with plenty of fixin's - coleslaw, salad, and southern banana pudding (complete with vanilla wafers). By another coincidence, Temple Israel's senior rabbi had been a seminary classmate of our senior rabbi, and their junior rabbi was likewise a classmate of Rabbi Stein, so we had a connection from the get-go. Like Beth Israel in Jackson, Temple Israel has its own historic civil rights figure in the person of
Rabbi James Wax. Wax's civil rights activism, as in Nussbaum's case, put him somewhat at odds with his congregation. When Martin Luther King was assassinated, Wax issued a rebuke of Memphis' mayor and, as the leader (and only Jewish clergy!) of the Memphis Ministers' Association, led the MMA's participation in the protest march that followed. Per
Memphis magazine's web site, "The rabbi’s rebuke ... got national coverage. He got 81 letters of support, and 121 letters of condemnation. There were countless hostile phone calls and a loss of friends. Some members of the congregation talked of removing him from the pulpit, but the temple’s board of trustees refused to consider such an action — although other ministers who had participated in the march did lose their jobs."
Oh, and I mentioned how enormous this place was. The building contains a gigantic main sanctuary, a more "intimate" chapel which seats several hundred (and is amazingly 70's groovy in design), a museum, a sizable Judaica shop, and seemingly endless grand gathering spaces, classrooms, and more. Plus, in contrast to the age and decay which seeped in around the edges of even the thriving congregations we had visited, Temple Israel was totally up-to-date and spotless. Nonetheless, they talked about how they were about to embark on a big renovation of some the building's spaces. Apparently they benefit from being the only congregation in the region: west to Little Rock, south to Jackson, east to Nashville or Huntsville, and north to I don't know where - maybe St. Louis. Many congregants belong even though they're too far away to attend services regularly in person. They stream weekly services and attend in person only on holidays. Plus the synagogue benefits from being in the thriving city Memphis, a major transportation and shipping hub (FedEx is headquartered there) - and I would guess from some well-heeled donors. Their congregation isn't growing, but membership is close enough to steady that they feel like they can sustain things for a long time to come. We were left pretty breathless by the vitality and scale of this place.
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| The main sanctuary at Temple Israel |
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| Groovy chapel |
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| Antique Tiffany menorah |
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| From the museum |
We had hoped to have a little free time in Memphis - to see the Stax Record Museum, or maybe visit Graceland, but alas, by the time we left Temple Israel, we didn't have much free time. We met up again for a farewell dinner, then we were Walking in Memphis, strolling down Beale Street, and poking our heads into the Peabody Hotel.
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| Farewell dinner |
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| Beale Street |
Friday morning another traveler and I who had reservations on the same early morning flight, caught a 5:30 AM Uber to the airport. And so ended our visit to the deep south, with a return home to the ... um, shallow south?
