Atlanta | Jewish Virtual Library
Posted By admin on July 12, 2015
ATLANTA, capital of the state of Georgia, U.S. General population of greater Atlanta: 4,400,000; Jewish population: 97,000. Atlanta was chartered in 1837 as Terminus and developed as an important transportation center. German Jews lived in the area starting in the early 1840s. The first Jew who lived in Atlanta was Jacob Haas; he opened a dry goods business with Henry Levi in 1846. Moses Sternberger, Adolph Brady, and David Mayer followed shortly as did Aaron Alexander and his family, who were American-born Sephardim from Charleston, South Carolina. The Hebrew Benevolent Society established in 1860 became the Hebrew Benevolent Congregation in 1867. This occurred following a visit by Rev. Isaac Leeser of Philadelphia, who came to conduct a wedding. Leeser was the azzan of Mikveh Israel of Philadelphia in the middle of the 19th century. He established the monthly Occident newspaper in 1844 which became a major media vehicle for American Jewry. He stood for traditional Judaism as Isaac Mayer *Wise began to pioneer Reform Judaism in the U.S. Leeser urged the leadership to form an actual congregation which was incorporated that year. Later the synagogue came to be known as the "Temple." The first rabbi was appointed in 1869, and the first building was constructed in 1877. Although Reform from its inception, several of the rabbis in the late 1800s were more traditional, but with the arrival of Dr. David Marx in 1898, the character of the Temple became almost Radical Reform with even Sunday services substituted for Sabbath services from 1904 to 1908.
East Europeans emigrating in the late 1870s established several Orthodox congregations in the following decade. They merged into the Ahavath Achim synagogue in 1887. After several breakaway shuls were formed and then disappeared, the congregation built a synagogue in 1901. In 1896 a visitor from Palestine came to Atlanta to collect money to issue his new book. When it appeared in Jerusalem in 1898 as ir Ne'eman, the author, Yehoshua Ze'ev Avner, listed the 18 Atlanta contributors, including the Moses Montefiore Relief Society and the Ahavath Achim congregation. The descendants of some of the contributors still lived in Atlanta in 2005. One of the early rabbis, Berachya Mayerowitz (19026), gave his sermons in English. He also led a major fundraising effort at the city's Bijou Theater for the survivors of the Kishniev pogrom in April 1903. On December 56, 1904, he welcomed Jacob deHaas, director of the Federation of American Zionists, on his boom trip of three weeks throughout the south. DeHaas characterized the members of the congregation as "muscular Jews committed to Zionism."
One of the breakaway Orthodox congregations in the early 20th century, Shearith Israel, was incorporated in 1904 and survived. Several others did not. In 1910 Rabbi Tobias *Geffen became the rabbi of the synagogue, which was seeking a rabbi with "outstanding learning credentials" and one whose "sermons could touch the hearts of the people." His 60-year career in Atlanta was a blend of Orthodoxy and modernism. His determination to raise the level of Jewish education succeeded when he and later his children personally taught in the Atlanta Jewish Preparatory School and Shearith Israel Sunday School. Nine Atlanta men and one Chattanooga individual, who boarded, became Orthodox and Conservative rabbis. In two areas, he was the authority not only for Atlanta but throughout the South. He was the mesader gittin, issuing Jewish divorces throughout his career, and he checked the shoetim in Atlanta and 15 other cities. In 1916 in Atlanta 48 Jewish families, who did not live in the "center of the Jewish community," petitioned Rabbi Geffen to permit a slaughterer of chickens to be available in their area, outside of his normal jurisdiction, once a week to do kosher killing at "five cents a chicken." Rabbi Geffen's most notable halakhic decision, giving a hekhsher to Coca-Cola, an Atlanta company, was made in 1934.
In 1919 Rabbi Tobias Geffen met with Bishop Warren Candler, chancellor of Emory, a Methodist college which had just moved to Atlanta from South Georgia. Geffen's concern about Saturday classes prompted Candler to permit observant Jewish students who attended Emory to be present on the Jewish Sabbath and holidays without having to take notes and stand for exams. (Rabbi) Joel *Geffen and (Professor) Moses *Hadas were the first two Jewish students in this category. After a decade the Saturday classes ended, which resolved the issue.
The Jewish student body at Emory remained small until the 1950s. Professor Nathan *Saltz , who graduated from the Emory medical school in 1940, made aliyah in 1949 and established the surgical systems for all the major hospitals in Israel. In 1998 he was awarded the Israel Prize in Medicine. In the 1950s the number of Jewish students in all the Emory University schools was between 150 and 175. By the 1970s Emory's reputation was attracting Jewish students from the entire United States. Hillel statistics in the 1990s suggested that between 30 to 40% of the 5,500 undergraduates were Jewish. Parallel to the student growth was the faculty growth both in academic Judaica and general academia. Professor David Blumenthal was given the Jay and Leslie Cohen chair in Jewish Thought in 1976 when it was established. When the Carter Center came into being in the early 1980s, Professor Ken Stein, a Middle East specialist, was chosen as the academic director. In 2004 there were 12 full-time faculty members teaching in all areas of Judaica. The Dorot Professor of Jewish History is the noted Holocaust specialist, Deborah Lipstadt. A masters program in Jewish Studies exists and a doctoral program was being planned. When Arthur *Blank of Home Depot gave Emory a major gift, the department was given Blank's spiritual leader's name, Rabbi Donald Tam Jewish Studies Department.
In addition to the thousands of new Judaic volumes in Hebrew, English, Yiddish, and many other languages purchased by the Woodruff Library of Emory in the last 25 years, the Special Collections department under the leadership of Dr. Linda Matthews, now head of all libraries at the school, began to receive diverse collections of Jewish interest. The Rabbi Jacob Rothschild papers, Holocaust collections from various sources, the Elliot Levitas papers (Rhodes Scholar and Georgia congressman), the Morris Abrams papers, the Geffen papers, and numerous other collections are all in Emory's Special Collections. Nineteenth century Judaica Americana has both been donated and purchased.
Atlanta's earliest Jews were mostly merchants. Some, primarily members of the Temple, were active in such fields as banking, brokerage, insurance, and real estate and pioneered in the manufacture of paper products and cotton bagging. The East European Jews had small stores, and a large number were pawnbrokers on Decatur Street in the heart of the city. Throughout the 1920s, Jewish lawyers and physicians were not allowed to join most law firms and could only practice at certain hospitals. Prior to World War II those barriers were broken down, and the number of Jewish professionals increased dramatically. The main department store in the city, founded in 1884, was Rich's until it was purchased by a conglomerate in 1991. In 2005 the name Rich's disappeared completely from the store's nomenclature. Starting with its arrival in Atlanta in 1987, the Home Depot became the major Jewish-owned firm in the city.
Jews have held public office in Atlanta since the post-Civil War era. Samuel Weil and Lewis Arnheim served in the Georgia legislature in 1869 and 1872. Aaron Haas became the city's mayor pro tem in 1875. Victor Kriegshaber was president of the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce from 1917 until 1922. A founding member of the Atlanta Board of Education, David Mayer, was known as the "father of public schools." In the 1930s Max Cuba, Charles Bergman, and Louis Geffen served on the Atlanta City Council and Board of Education. After being a vice mayor of Atlanta from 1961 to 1968, Sam *Massell Jr. ran for mayor against the candidate of the Atlanta power structure, labeled as antisemitic in the course of the campaign. He won the election with 20% of the white vote and 90% of the black vote. After a very successful four-year term, Massell lost to Maynard Jackson, the first black to be elected mayor of the city.
Elliot Levitas was elected to Congress for four terms, the first Jew from Georgia in the U.S. House of Representatives. Liane Levitan was the County Commissioner of DeKalb County for 20 years (19832003). The major electoral change in the Atlanta area was in Cobb County. There in 1915 Leo *Frank was lynched by vigilantes in the town of Marietta near the home of the young white Protestant girl whom he was convicted of murdering by circumstantial evidence. Few Jews lived in Marietta and Cobb County until the 1980s. In 2000 Sam Olens, an attorney and active Conservative Jew, was elected chairman of the Cobb County Council. After his reelection in 2004, he was chosen chairperson of the Atlanta Regional Planning Board. Two other Marietta Jews were elected as judges in the county judicial system and statewide to the Georgia Court of Appeals.
Dr. David Marx (18721962) was rabbi of the Temple for 52 years. A leader in interfaith activities, Marx was extremely anti-Zionist, helping to found the American Council for Judaism. In 1945 his Yom Kippur sermon was a "tirade against the establishment of a Jewish state." He was challenged publicly by one of his own members, Albert Freedman, director of the Southeastern Region of the Zionist Organization of America. When Dr. Jacob *Rothschild succeeded Marx in 1947, he brought a deep commitment to social justice and also became a Zionist advocate. Rothschild was so outspoken for the civil rights of blacks that in 1958 the Temple was bombed, fortunately when no one was in the building. From the Atlanta mayor to the Georgia governor to President Eisenhower, strong support poured out against the perpetrators of this act. Ralph McGill, editor of the Atlanta Constitution and a visitor to Palestine and Israel in 1946 and 1950, won a Pulitzer Prize for his moving editorials condemning the bombing. In the 1960s Rothschild worked closely with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as new federal legislation was passed assuring American blacks their rights. When King was awarded the Nobel Prize, Rothschild organized the dinner in King's honor in Atlanta. Rothschild died a very young man and was succeeded by his associate Dr. Alvin Sugarman, an Atlanta native. Sugarman took the lead in the Atlanta Jewish community in regard to developing closer relations between the blacks and the Jews. The Rich's store, whose owners belonged to the Temple, was the first major Atlanta store to allow its cafeteria to be integrated. Many Jewish firms hired blacks for administrative positions prior to such hiring becoming widespread in the general community. The Anti-Defamation League's southeast region office in Atlanta and the American Jewish Committee's regional office worked diligently to aid blacks in court and through demonstrations. The changing attitude of the blacks toward American Jews was influenced by funding from Muslim groups and anti-Israel propaganda, which reached deeply into the South in general and Atlanta in particular.
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Atlanta | Jewish Virtual Library
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