Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience dedicates Southern Jewish Family Research Center

Kenneth Hoffman cuts the ribbon opening the new Southern Jewish Family Research Center, with members of the Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience board, representatives of the Downtown Development District and New Orleans City Councilmember Eugene Green.

In dedicating the Southern Jewish Family Research Center on Nov. 7 in New Orleans, Executive Director Kenneth Hoffman started off by asking how many of the attendees could name all eight of their great-grandparents.

He counted just seven hands in the crowd — and said even that small number was amazing compared to when he usually asks the question. “The minimum I would like everyone to know about their own family… is to be able to be able to name their ‘great eight’.”

That is one of the goals of the new research center, which is a major expansion of the Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience.

Since the museum opened three and one-half years ago, Hoffman said, over 35,000 people have visited and seen the stories of how Jews from so many backgrounds made their way to the South and forged “a unique identity, a mix of Southern and Jewish,” and “contributed to growth and success of their communities.”

Many visitors have wanted to explore their Southern Jewish roots, and connections to other Southern Jewish families, “a Southern Jewish geography.” The new space will begin to answer that demand, he said.

“This center is being established to give us opportunities to engage and educate the public, not only about the archival materials in our own collection but to empower people to become the historians of their own families.”

The center will offer programs, internships and workshops, as well as being a repository for information from around the region.

Hoffman said, “we want the center to serve as a gathering place for families, scholars, teachers and students… for anyone who sees the value in studying the past to better understand ourselves today, and to provide us with lessons for our future.”

The capital campaign for the center is ongoing, and is around the half-way point toward its $3 million goal. Several naming opportunities remain.

The 2,500 square foot center on the building’s third floor has five distinct spaces devoted to different aspects of family history.

The reference library, named for Ben May of Mobile, is a repository for materials donated to the research collection, including published works, reference materials, individual family genealogies and community histories. The archive will house the most sensitive items, making them accessible to researchers and the public.

The conservation room is where museum staff will conserve, catalogue, digitize and prepare archival material for exhibition and online accessibility. The goal is to have the entire collection digitized.

The oral history studio will be for preserving interviews, and also serve as a distance learning studio to videoconference with classrooms all over the country.

A special exhibition gallery houses changing exhibits and traveling exhibits.

As an example of the center’s materials, at the dedication, curator Michael Jacobs gave a presentation with items from two family collections.

The Oettinger family collection goes back to the 1840s in North Carolina, where they started a business empire and had a “complex web of marriages” among Oettingers, Rosenthals and Wises. “They all married each other,” Jacobs said.

The collection includes a 200-page photo album with meticulous captioning of every photo, with names, places and dates. “This family had an incredible passion for writing family history,” he said.

The second story centered around a trunk the museum was able to save from an estate sale in Tallulah the previous month. The trunk’s exterior says “Dr Yosef Sperling, 2111 Camp St,” the former address of the Jewish Federation of Greater New Orleans. The trunk was shipped there when Sperling moved to the area after surviving the Holocaust.

Sperling was seen as valuable to the Nazis as he spoke five languages, and he served as a translator in the concentration camps. Because of his status, he had a couple perks, including a personal purse made from the same material as the concentration camp uniforms. The trunk has that purse and its contents, as well as his concentration camp uniform, which he often would wear when giving talks throughout the state about his experiences.

After liberation, he fell in love with his doctor’s daughter, Anni Frind, who had been one of Europe’s leading opera singers until the Nazis rose to power and she decided not to perform any more.

Among those assisting at the ribbon cutting were representatives of the Downtown Development District and New Orleans City Councilmember Eugene Green.