Only five months after Gen. James Edward Oglethorpe established the new colony of Georgia in 1733, pioneering Jewish settlers arrived at her shores. They landed in Savannah, where over the next several centuries they built a thriving community within one of the South's most revered cities. Savannah's Jewish citizenry, while a well-defined entity on its own, is also steeped in the rich, overall heritage of the area, contributing to every facet of civic, business, and cultural life. The Jewish Community of Savannah celebrates, in word and image, the colorful history of one of the nation's oldest established Jewish communities. Vintage photographs culled from the Savannah Jewish Archives, housed in the Georgia Historical Society, reveal what life was like in days gone by. Early twentieth-century scenes depict Savannah Jews not only in times of steadfast worship and engaged in earnest business efforts, but also in lighter moments of celebration and recreation. The three local congregations are all represented in this collection, including those practicing Reform Judaism (Congregation Mickve Israel), Orthodox Judaism (Congregation B'nai B'rith Jacob), and Conservative Judaism (Congregation Agudath Achim.) Many readers will be surprised and delighted to view images of their ancestors within this treasured volume.

Only five months after Gen. James Edward Oglethorpe established the new colony of Georgia in 1733, pioneering Jewish settlers arrived at her shores. They landed in Savannah, where over the next several centuries they built a thriving community within one of the South's most revered cities. Savannah's Jewish citizenry, while a well-defined entity on its own, is also steeped in the rich, overall heritage of the area, contributing to every facet of civic, business, and cultural life. The Jewish Community of Savannah celebrates, in word and image, the colorful history of one of the nation's oldest established Jewish communities. Vintage photographs culled from the Savannah Jewish Archives, housed in the Georgia Historical Society, reveal what life was like in days gone by. Early twentieth-century scenes depict Savannah Jews not only in times of steadfast worship and engaged in earnest business efforts, but also in lighter moments of celebration and recreation. The three local congregations are all represented in this collection, including those practicing Reform Judaism (Congregation Mickve Israel), Orthodox Judaism (Congregation B'nai B'rith Jacob), and Conservative Judaism (Congregation Agudath Achim.) Many readers will be surprised and delighted to view images of their ancestors within this treasured volume.

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“Jonathan Rabb is one of my favorite writers, a highly gifted, heart-wise storyteller if ever there was one. What a powerful, moving book.” —David McCullough, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award–winning author A moving novel about a Holocaust survivor’s unconventional journey back to a new normal in 1940s Savannah, Georgia In late summer 1947, thirty-one-year-old Yitzhak Goldah, a camp survivor, arrives in Savannah to live with his only remaining relatives. They are Abe and Pearl Jesler, older, childless, and an integral part of the thriving Jewish community that has been in Georgia since the founding of the colony. There, Yitzhak discovers a fractured world, where Reform and Conservative Jews live separate lives–distinctions, to him, that are meaningless given what he has been through. He further complicates things when, much to the Jeslers’ dismay, he falls in love with Eva, a young widow within the Reform community. When a woman from Yitzhak’s past suddenly appears–one who is even more shattered by the war than he is–Yitzhak must choose between a dark and tortured familiarity and the promise of a bright new life. Set amid the backdrop of America’s postwar south, Among the Livinggrapples with questions of identity and belonging, and steps beyond the Jewish experience as it situates Yitzhak’s story within the last gasp of the Jim Crow era. That he begins to find echoes of his recent past in the lives of the black family who work for the Jeslers–an affinity he does not share with the Jeslers themselves–both surprises and convinces Yitzhak that his choices are not as clear-cut as he might think.

Occasionally one comes across a book, which is unexpected, delights and inspires. Surinam, known as the 'Jewish Savannah', where a vibrant Jewish community was granted full and equal rights two hundred years before the Jews of other communities in the region. St Eustatius, where the economically successful Jewish community was plundered during the British occupation in 1781. Curacao, named the 'Mother of Jewish communities in the New World', where a prosperous Jewish community comprised nearly half of Curacao's non-slave population and was the center of Jewish life in the region. For all their economic and local political power, the Jews were little more than pawns in the 200-year struggle for control of the Caribbean by Holland, Great Britain, France and Spain. Eventually growing tired of this chess game, the Jews of the Caribbean drifted into assimilation or immigrated to the United States, where life was more secure. An ideal resource and captivating read for those traveling to the region or people with an interest in Jewish history, this is an exceptional book that brings the Jewish communities of the Caribbean to life, with intensity, and with a heartbeat so strong as to secure their proper and rightful place in recorded Jewish history.

In the 1660s, Jews of Iberian ancestry, many of them fleeing Inquisitorial persecution, established an agrarian settlement in the midst of the Surinamese tropics. The heart of this community-Jodensavanne, or Jews' Savannah-became an autonomous village with its own Jewish institutions, including a majestic synagogue consecrated in 1685. Situated along the Suriname River, some fifty kilometers south of the capital city of Paramaribo, Jodensavanne was by the mid-eighteenth century surrounded by dozens of Jewish plantations sprawling north- and southward and dominating the stretch of the river. These Sephardi-owned plots, mostly devoted to the cultivation and processing of sugar, carried out primarily by enslaved Africans, collectively formed the largest Jewish agricultural community in the world at the time and the only Jewish settlement in the Americas granted virtual self-rule. Sephardi settlement paved the way for the influx of hundreds of Ashkenazi Jews, who began to emigrate in the late seventeenth century from western and central Europe. Generally banned from Jodensavanne, these newcomers settled in Paramaribo, where they established their own cemeteries and historic synagogue. Meanwhile, slave rebellions, Maroon attacks, the general collapse of Suriname's economy, soil depletion, absentee land ownership, and a ravaging fire all contributed to the demise of the old Savannah settlement beginning in the second half of the eighteenth century..

A lively look at southern Jewish history and culture.

What is there of Jewish interest to see in Bombay? In Casablanca? Where are the kosher restaurants in Seattle? How did the Jewish community in Hong Kong originate? The Jewish Traveler: Hadassah Magazine's Guide to the World's Jewish Communities and Sights provides this information and much more.

As Atlanta evolved from a sleepy, backwater, 19th-century frontier railroad town into a 21st-century international metropolis, Jewish men and women significantly contributed to the rich tapestry of the "Gate City of the South." The commercial infrastructure of the expanding city was greatly enhanced through numerous small businesses established by Jewish merchants, some of which became major players in various industries. Many of Atlanta's most recognizable icons--The Coca-Cola Company, Georgia Institute of Technology, and the Atlanta Braves--originated, in part, thanks to support from visionary leaders in the Jewish community. While there are many success stories throughout Atlanta's Jewish history, there are also dark episodes of blatant antisemitism that traumatized the community and had national implications. The lynching of Leo M. Frank; the bombing of the city's historic synagogue, the Hebrew Benevolent Congregation; and the deliberate expulsion of Jewish students from Emory University Dental School marred Atlanta's self-proclaimed reputation as "The City Too Busy to Hate."