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N.O. Jewish community has plan for revitalization by Bruce Nolan, The Times-Picayune Saturday May 24, 2008, 9:47 PM
Twenty-three and single, Katie
Tutwiler is another of those idealistic new post-Katrina New Orleanians.
Although
she is only nominally Jewish, Tutwiler has been aggressively courted by the
area's Jewish community. It gave her a $1,000 moving grant and offered a
year's free dues to a synagogue. It gave her a year's free membership in the
Uptown Jewish Community Center and introduced her to other young Jewish
newcomers to New Orleans. The
effort may be paying off. Tutwiler, a self-described religious
"seeker" shopping for a religious identity, has signed up with
Birthright Israel, another Jewish program, which will introduce her to Israel
this summer, even as her personal exploration also occasionally includes Catholic
Masses. Tutwiler
is in play, so to speak. She thus qualifies as a poster child for the New
Orleans Jewish community's year-old "newcomers program," which so
far has devoted something like $180,000 for grants and loans to recruit young
Jews to rebuild the city's Jewish community, and the larger city as well. That is
but one of the initiatives in a five-year "strategic plan" New
Orleans Jews recently fashioned, an effort rare if not unique among local
ethnic communities. It is a
$24 million blueprint for revitalizing a small but sturdy community that had
been shrinking and graying even before Katrina made landfall in 2005. The
plan's first goal is to recruit young Jews to New Orleans and nourish them
here. The
newcomers program is the centerpiece so far. But plans are afoot to fashion
incentives to retain each year at least 50 of the area's 400 to 500 Jewish
college graduates, said Michael Weil, executive director of the Jewish
Federation of Greater New Orleans. With these
and other tools, Jewish leaders hope newcomers find a home in a rather
atypical New Orleans Jewish community, one that a survey confirmed is
simultaneously quite lax about some markers of Jewish life -- regular
religious observance, for example -- yet in other ways fiercely committed to
its Jewish identity, affiliating with synagogues or giving to Jewish causes. Besides
recruiting, there are 11 goals in the community's new strategic plan, said
Weil, one of its architects. Among them: ·
Maintaining ties
with an estimated 3,500 permanently dislocated Jewish New Orleanians ·
Building support
systems to nourish Jewish families living here ·
Fostering local
collaboration among Jewish institutions ·
Developing Jewish
education ·
Developing local
and national fundraising, as well as a national public relations campaign. "It's
ambitious, it's doable and we're going to make it happen," said Weil, an
economist and strategic planner who worked in Israel before he was hired by
the federation in 2006. Recruiting a seeker The
newcomers program that aided Tutwiler so far has distributed incentives to
some 116 Jewish individuals or families, said Jennifer Samuels, who helps run
the program. Weil estimated
the total number of Jewish newcomers, including those who didn't apply for
incentives or haven't yet been identified, at closer to 850. Tutwiler
said her decision to come to New Orleans was born out of a desire to join a
wounded but still fascinating community, and was not triggered by the
financial incentives package. Indeed,
as the daughter of an Episcopalian father and a nonobservant Jewish mother,
she said she grew up in a home with no strong religious influence. Tutwiler
said her exposure to Jewish tradition was so slight -- consider that her
birth name is Mary Catherine -- that she knows only the opening phrases to a
few common Hebrew prayers, and little else. Until recently, she did not know
there was a synagogue in her native New Iberia. "I'm
Jewish but not quite in the fold," she said. Tutwiler
heard about the Jewish incentives program from her grandmother, Catherine
Kahn, a New Orleanian and board member at Temple Sinai, who urged Tutwiler to
check it out. Now
Tutwiler sometimes accompanies her grandmother to temple, a starting point
from which Tutwiler has begun to inquire about her Jewish heritage. In that
sense she is quite typical, Weil said. "There's
a pattern here" among newcomers, Weil said. "They tend to be on the
margins of mainstream Jewish life. These are not your regular
synagogue-goers. Their Judaism is more virtual than real. They're less
actively involved. "But
they're motivated. They see themselves as pioneers." He said
their willingness to help rebuild the city often is part of a deeply Jewish
imperative toward public service called "tikkun olam," or
"repairing the world." Numbers had dwindled The day
Katrina made landfall, the area's Jewish community was already significantly smaller
than it had been three decades earlier, Weil said. A newly
revised figure estimates the pre-Katrina Jewish population at about 9,500, or
less than 1 percent of the metro area population, down from an estimated
13,000 nearly 25 years ago. "You'd
think that when you're hit with a major disaster it would knock you flat and
you wouldn't have the strength to get up again," Weil said. "But
what this community has said is we're not accepting that. We think we're
important, and we have a future, and we intend to go to some significant
place, and we'll do whatever it takes to get there." Research
for the federation by LSU sociologist Frederick Weil and others estimated
that Katrina reduced the area's Jewish population from 9,500 just before the
storm to about 6,000 in the summer of 2006. They believe the number rebounded
to 7,000 to 8,000 in early 2008. At the
same time, a few key leadership posts in the community are turning over at an
extraordinary rate: For different reasons, three of six major local synagogues
are under new post-Katrina leadership, or soon will be. Weil is a post-storm
recruit to the federation, and Hillel, the Jewish outreach to Tulane
University students, is about to get a new director. As
Katrina's third anniversary approaches, the city's 19 synagogues and other
Jewish institutions have been weaned from $16 million in rescue subsidies
national Jewish groups provided through the end of 2007, Weil said. All
survived. Most are smaller. Slowly growing back Most
leaders, such as Rabbi Robert Loewy of Congregation Gates of Prayer in
Metairie, see near-term futures in which they have to scale back some
activities, or rely more on projects that involve collaboration with others. But
even so, Loewy and other community leaders say their institutions have
stabilized on new footings from which they intend to mount a recovery. Some
even exhibit signs of relative vigor. Two
Reform congregations, Temple Sinai and Touro Synagogue, although 8 percent
and 10 percent smaller in their membership, respectively, recently elected to
continue multimillion-dollar capital projects that had been on the books
before the storm. "If
you had asked me two and a half years ago if our losses would've been this
low, no one would have predicted it," said Rabbi Andrew Busch, who will
soon leave the Touro pulpit for a larger Baltimore synagogue. The
area's Jewish leaders agree that the 35 percent or so of displaced New
Orleans Jews include some of the community's elder elite, including many of
its most reliable donors. But sociologist Weil's research found a good deal
of residual prosperity: Working from income disclosures from 60 percent of
800 respondents to his survey, Weil estimated a mean family income of
$180,000 annually, although he cautioned that figure might be high. As a
result of the financial strength of the local families, Michael Weil, the
federation executive, said that organization's annual communitywide
fundraising drive last year raised $2.7 million, or only 6 percent less than
the 2005 drive. Busch
said the community's recovery owes a lot to local Jews' unusually high rates
of affiliation with synagogues and other institutions. Those
affiliations heightened a self-protective sense of identity, most leaders
agreed. "That
tells me we're moving ahead positively," Loewy said. "We may not
have the same numbers of people, but we have people who care about the
institution and who want to be involved," at least through financial
support. "I
think people felt the synagogue, the Jewish community, stepped up for them
when they needed it." Bruce Nolan can be reached at bnolan@timespicayune.com or
(504) 826-3344 This story may remain
available where it first appeared: here. |
