Interesting facts about Atlanta Georgia’s Jewish History

By Michael Schuman

The multiple choice questions below are unusual but not to residents of Atlanta Georgia. Who are Ron Blomberg and Harris Barton.

Were they:

A) founders of Atlanta’s oldest department store?

B) cousins who fought for the South during the Civil War?

C) professional sports figures?

Answer later in the article.

Meanwhile, in another part of this building is a life-sized mock-up of the D. Haver Grocery store, a Kosher market that served customers in Atlanta for many years. Kids visiting here can do their own shopping, with faux food items and toy shopping carts.

Nearby and attached to the ceiling is a set of rail tracks used in 1942 to transport Jews and others to the Nazi death camp Treblinka, in Poland. The building’s architect and a Holocaust survivor, Ben Hirsch, was told during the planning stage that if the tracks were on the ceiling they would be upside down. Hirsch’s response: “The world was upside down then.”

To many Americans the term “Jewish community” may evoke thoughts of cities such as New York, Chicago or Los Angeles. However, Jews have lived in the American South since there was an American South. And one of the healthiest Jewish communities in the United States — for well over a century — has existed in Atlanta, Georgia, home to the William Breman Jewish Heritage Museum.

Museum Executive Director Jane Leavey says, “Visitors who are not from here often comment that they are impressed with the achievements of Atlanta’s Jewish community and fascinated with our interaction with southern culture.”

The experience of Southern Jewishness is placed under a microscope at the Breman. Visitors learn that Jews have been in Georgia since its founding as a British colony in 1733. The third oldest existing synagogue in the United States is in the coastal Georgia city of Savannah. Jews first came to Atlanta in 1845. Unlike cities to the north such as New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore, the majority of Jews who settled here after the Civil War had lived elsewhere in the United States. To southern-born residents they may have seemed foreign, but the Jews who came here had already adapted to American culture and language.

They also found much opportunity here. Banned from owning land in Europe, many first worked as traveling peddlers who eventually opened retail stores. An oversized façade of a retail block displayed here and dominated by Jacobs’ Pharmacy (“fine chemicals, toilet articles, soap perfumery” are advertised on storefront signage) is emblematic of that era.

A relocated neon sign from “Kay’s 5 & 10 cent” store accompanies a row of products manufactured or sold by Jewish-owned businesses. It’s a wide range. A little, rectangular box of Scripto “non-smudge” erasers, ca. 1960, is sure to elicit a smile from baby boomers who carried packages like this in their pencil boxes when John F. Kennedy was in the White House. Valentine’s Day in Atlanta was always sweet thanks to Jewish-owned businesses; an elaborate multi-hued candy box, ca. 1920, decked with a Dutch canal scene represents Norris, Inc., a candy company founded here in 1910. Nearby is the blue, plastic form of a woman’s chest, once used as a model display from the Lovable Brassiere Company and dating from 1950. “It costs so little to look lovable,” was the business’s enterprising slogan.

But not all was lovable for Jews here. A pair of short films offer two ugly stories about life as a minority in Atlanta. One relates the 1958 bombing of an Atlanta synagogue. The rabbi, Jacob Rothschild, had been a public supporter of the burgeoning civil rights movement. Four men were indicted, none convicted. In the wake of the bombing, Atlanta’s non-Jewish community rallied around the local Jewish citizenry. Many Atlantans donated to the synagogue‘s rebuilding fund including the local German consulate and a local girl who could afford only one dollar.

The second film, narrated by late actor Jack Lemmon, tells the true tale of Jewish pencil factory superintendent Leo Frank, arrested in 1913 for the murder of a young female employee. Egged on by bigoted newspaper publisher Thomas E. Watson, 25 men kidnapped Frank from prison and hung him eight weeks after his death sentence was commuted to life in prison; an issue of Watson’s newspaper, The Jeffersonian, dated December 31, 1914, is displayed. Following a confession by Frank’s former office boy in 1982 that implicated a coworker named John Conley, Frank was posthumously pardoned, not on the basis of his guilt or innocence, but because the state failed to protect him.

Relics of Jewish day to day life, such as displayed stained glass windows from former Atlanta-based Congregation Ahavath Achim (“Brotherly Love” in Hebrew), offer testimony to Atlanta’s Jewish populace. A Torah scroll, ca. 1800 and salvaged from the hands of the Nazis in World War II, along with immigrants’ identification cards and prayer books distributed to Jewish soldiers during World War II are further hallmarks of Jewish existence here.

The Holocaust gallery, officially titled “Absence of Humanity: The Holocaust Years,” utilizes artifacts (such as the aforementioned train tracks), photographs and an abundance of posted commentary to afford an overview of the Holocaust, now part of the curricula in several Atlanta schools. Unlike museums elsewhere devoted to the Holocaust, this one has a local slant and a personal tone. Videotaped oral histories of survivors with a Georgia connection are presented. Says Leavey, “Wherever possible, we have interwoven family photographs, personal documents, and video testimony of Holocaust survivors who have made new lives in Atlanta with archival photographs and historical material.”

To young people of today who ask what in the world they need to know about the Jews and their history, Museum Director of Visitor Services Judi Ayal responds, “This is about planting seeds, through stories about resistance and heroism.”

It is also about listening to the recorded memories of Georgians who made it through Hell in Europe. “You can’t imagine how we felt when we gave away the children,” comments Rachel Wise. Pola Bienstock Arbiser recalls a righteous gentile named Franciszka Sobkowa: “She was a religious woman. She was a Catholic, and she believed that God would help her save us… She put her life on the line for us. Nobody can do anymore…” Hana Kraus Beer verbalizes the justification for the new nation of Israel following the liberation of the concentration camps: “Each of us knew we wanted to go back to our hometown, but there really wasn’t anybody there to go back to.”

A third major gallery is devoted to special exhibitions. Topics have varied widely. One celebrated the work of children’s author and artist Maurice Sendak. Another focused on Jewish life in the American South. A third showcased the golden age of comic books, from 1938-1950. What do comic books have to do with Judaism? The vast majority of the creators and subsequent interpreters of all those superheroes who are household names — Superman, Batman, Captain Marvel, the Green Lantern — were Jewish, and most of their creations were battling Nazis in comic books before the United States entered World War II.

And the answer to the question that opened this article is C. Blomberg played baseball, mostly for the New York Yankees, retiring with a .293 lifetime batting average; Barton, an offensive lineman for the San Francisco 49ers spent much of his career protecting Hall of Fame quarterback Joe Montana. It is part of an interactive question and answer display. Try to remember the answers if you are ever on Jeopardy.

INFORMATION

The William Breman Jewish Heritage Museum is in midtown Atlanta at the intersection of Spring and 18th streets. The William Breman Jewish Heritage Museum, 1440 Spring Street, N.W., Atlanta, GA 30309; (678) 222-3700 for recorded information, (404) 870-1632 to speak with a human.

www.thebreman.org