The Remnant
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Once, Greenville had the largest Jewish congregation in Mississippi. BY CAIN MADDEN
en people filed through a side door of the domed Hebrew Union Temple on a Friday night, a holy night. One was pushed in a wheelchair, another hobbled with a cane. Others slowly made their way into the cavernous sanctuary despite their advanced ages. When the Torah was presented, they all promised to guard its wisdom. Twenty years
ago, hundreds would have made such a vow, but now only a handful of Jews remain in Greenville, once home to the largest congregation of Jewish people in Mississippi.
Among the many casualties of Greenville’s decline, the vanishing Jewish community stands out because it was so large, so successful, so influential for so long. It drew from little towns scattered around the Delta for 60 miles or more. Jewish families were here in 1870, already 10 percent of the population when the city was born, and in that fluid cotton frontier they were quickly assimilated, their drawls growing just as slow and thick as gentile drawls. As in other Delta towns in the frenzied
early years of the cotton empire, they moved smoothly into leadership roles in politics, business, civic clubs, garden clubs and the country club. Today, annual civic leadership awards are named after Jake Stein in Greenville, Ed Kossman in Cleveland and Morris Lewis in Indianola – all Jews. In Greenville, Jewish merchants ran the best stores downtown. Some owned cotton plantations. They also ran the city. The city’s first mayor, Leopold Wilzinski, was elected in 1875 and was Jewish. So
52 • W H AT E V ER H A P PE N ED TO M A I N ST R EE T ?
was the third mayor, Jacob Alexander, great grandfather of Andy Lack, CEO of Bloomberg’s multimedia group. Greenville’s Jewish community contributed one of the Delta’s most famous and prolific authors, cosmopolitan David Cohn, whose perceptive and farsighted works on cotton and the Delta are still quoted by those trying to make sense of the region. It was Cohn who coined that oft-quoted phrase to describe the geographic limits of the Delta: “The Mississippi Delta runs
