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THE REMNANT Cain Madden
The Remnant
Once, Greenville had the largest Jewish BY CAIN MADDEN congregation in Mississippi. t 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 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
Once, hundreds would pack this sanctuary, home to what used to be the largest Jewish congregation in Mississippi.
NORMAN SEAWRIGHT
from the lobby of the Peabody Hotel in Memphis to Catfish Row in Vicksburg.”
But now the few Jews who remain are swallowed up in the high ceilings and spacious meeting rooms of the nearly empty, palace-like temple on Main Street. For a city that long prided itself on being the Delta’s premier business center, the flight of young Jews to places of better potential is an ominous sign.
“A lot of people have left, like me, so I know it is a smaller congregation,” said Hank Nelken, a screenwriter born in Greenville but now living in Los Angeles. “That being said, one of the nice things is that the people who are left take it very seriously and are very committed to keeping it going.”
People like Corrine Goodman, 84, who has been in Greenville since 1946, when she married into the family that has had the downtown clothing store by that name since 1902. Goodman’s story is unusual because two of her children, Sam and Rebecca Goodman, came back.
“They had something to come back to,” Goodman said. “The store.”
When she returned in 1986, Rebecca Goodman said, it was supposed to be for a short break. “I was planning to go to New York or Chicago.”
Twenty-five years later, she is still here.
“The grass is not really greener depending on where you live,” she said. “It is what you choose to make of it and what your attitude toward life is that is really important. Greenville is a wonderful place with a lot of great people.”
Since returning, she has helped
— Earl Solomon
revitalize the business.
“She decided to sell more formal wear, wedding and prom dresses,” Corrine Goodman said. “Used to, people had to go to Jackson or Memphis. Now, people from Arkansas, Louisiana and all over Mississippi come here to work with her.”
Rebecca started with nine different dresses in three different styles, and now her formal wear takes up half the store. She picked wedding dresses because they are recession-proof. “When people cut back on everything else due to the economy, they are going to pay their taxes, and they are going to get married,” she said.
Although hers came back, Corrine Goodman admits that children, the future, are in short supply at the temple.
“The temple once had around 65 kids,” she said. “Now it has one or two, and they are not from Greenville.”
Gaines Lamensdorf and his mother make the trip up U.S. 61 to Greenville from Rolling Fork, which had a Jewish mayor for 40 years, every couple of weeks for temple and Sunday school. Lamensdorf said his sisters, who have had their bat mitzvahs, no longer make the trip.
At 13, he has not yet figured out what to do with the rest of his life. But he’s already thinking about it.
“There is so much to choose from,” Lamensdorf said. “I want to become a famous researcher or astronomer.”
The Delta is not likely to be a big part of his future.
“I’m probably going to move to a bigger place,” Lamensdorf said. “I probably want to live in New York — there is a big Jewish community there.”
The Delta Jewish population has always been one big extended family, with Jews in one town very aware of what Jews were doing in other towns. Parents took care to arrange events and parties and dances all over the Delta so their children could socialize with other Jews. Even so, those in Greenville sometimes say they felt at least a little “different” in a region dominated by gentiles.
Hank Nelken said that when his parents divorced and his mother took him to Dallas, he felt there were pros and cons to being part of a bigger community of Jews.
“There were a lot more Jewish kids my age, and that was kind of nice,” Nelken said. “But on the other hand, there was sort of a uniqueness about being Jewish in Greenville. I was the only one in my grade, so when there was a Jewish holiday, my classmates would always come ask me what it was about.
“It was kind of cool to be unique. You know, I felt like I fit in better at my school in Dallas, but I also did not feel as special.”
Former Municipal Court Judge Earl Solomon, 74, said the Sunday school used to have six grades with six teachers. Now it has one student and one teacher. The temple used to have a full-time rabbi who lived in the house next door, which Solomon now rents as a law office.
“It was an unbelievable place to grow up,” Solomon said. “But the young people did not come back.”
Josh Bogen, an attorney who practices in nearby Leland, said the unrelenting exodus of upwardly mobile youth in search of opportunity is not just a Jewish problem.
“It is happening with a lot of Greenville’s children, but I would say a higher percentage of Jewish children went to colleges and universities outside of Mississippi and did not come back,” said Bogen, who now lives in Oxford. His great-great-grandfather was once the Greenville rabbi and wrote a letter to the governor strongly urging major improvements in the state’s schools.
Bogen grew up next door to Jay Stein, who went to the University of Cincinnati to study marketing and returned to Greenville to run Stein Mart. The venerable family discount clothing store was located for decades on Washington Avenue at the foot of the levee, until abandoning a decaying downtown for a new spot on Highway 1 South.
“Jay came back to work with his father, Jake Stein, who was a brilliant man, but Jay had a much larger vision,” Bogen said.
Benjy Nelken, Hank Nelken’s father and curator of several Greenville museums, said Stein once came to him to discuss that vision, back when Nelken was running his family’s store, The Fair, which closed in 1986.
“He came to me and asked me if I’d ever thought about opening up some stores out of Greenville,” Nelken said. “He was convinced that the future of retail was in chains, and out of Greenville. I thought about it but never did it.
“Now, he is a multimillionaire, and I am running some museums.”
Nelken came back to Greenville from college to run The Fair, and when he closed that down he got into real estate. Many of Greenville’s businesses did not last that long. The discounter era arrived and shut down the mom-and-pop stores, he said.
“Many Jewish people came to Greenville to trade, and ultimately ended up running those mom-and-pop stores,” Nelken said. “But they started to close down in the 1960s and 1970s.”
Across America, the same trend continues to drive the heart of the
PHOTOS BY NORMAN SEAWRIGHT The shrunken congregation is much older now, but there are still some young people to worship here and gaze at the star of David. And all who come here are determined to keep the temple going and keep the memories alive.
The domed temple on Main Street, a downtown landmark, used to draw worshippers from little towns 60 and 70 miles away.
CAIN MADDEN
community, its downtown, elsewhere, Hank Nelken said.
“The big stores like Walmart come in and run the small businesses away,” Hank Nelken said. “A lot of those stores tended to be Jewish-owned — they ended up having to move on.”
The children of these store owners did not have much of a reason to come back to Greenville, Benjy Nelken said.
“These children went off to college, and they got degrees in professional career paths such as law, medicine, whatever,” Nelken said. “There was not much in the way of opportunities here, so they went where better opportunities existed.”
Nowadays, said Solomon, whose children now live in Atlanta, most people in the temple are over 60.
“I am 74, and I’m not really the oldest, but the youngest people are not far below me,” Solomon said. “They are in their 60s. There are only a few people below that. The youngest member won’t be here long. She is in her 20s or 30s, and is only here with the Coast Guard.”
When Solomon got out of the Army in 1964, he became a director of the temple. He remembers the congregation having 188 families.
“We were much, much bigger than the temple in Jackson,” Solomon said. “Now, Jackson dwarfs us.”
Back then, life was better not only at the temple but in Greenville, a place where the merchandise could be as good — if not as plentiful — as anything in Jackson or Memphis. It was a proud, progressive city where culture was treasured, best-selling authors were born and reared and the newspaper editor, Hodding Carter Jr., won a Pulitzer Prize in 1946 for his editorials on tolerance. David Cohn was instrumental in luring Carter to Greenville.
“I cry real tears when I drive through downtown sometimes,” Solomon said. “I just remember how it used to be. This is my hometown.”
Rebecca Goodman fondly remembers growing up here. “Greenville really was a wonderful place to have a childhood,” she said. “All of the kids came together and we would have fun playing sports. I don’t remember anything anti-Semitic.”
Corrine Goodman said she remembers a story from when the schools integrated.
“One day, Rebecca had a black friend over, and they were studying in the front yard,” Goodman said. “I asked her if they wanted to come inside to read, but she wanted to sit in the yard.
“You know what? I think it was because she wanted people to see them together.”
Well before legal segregation ended, Jewish merchants started employing black workers in their stores. In 1950, Corrine Goodman remembers hiring a black woman who worked up front until she could no longer work.
“My dad and Goldie both used to joke that they were never going to quit,” Rebecca Goodman said. “When they did
stop working, they would be coming out in a casket.
“She worked for 50-something years. She was in her 80s, and she walked to work every day.”
Benjy Nelken’s grandfather Herman Benjamin Nelken and father, Lester Nelken, found that it made good business sense to hire black people to work in the front of the store.
“My grandfather saw that the black women in the store helping in the back had a good rapport with the black customers,” Nelken said. “Soon they started helping the white customers up front, too, and the white customers were happy to have the help and thanked them.”
When Nelken took over The Fair in 1975, he hired a black woman to manage the store in The Greenville Mall, he said.
“One time I was interviewing a person for the store who asked if Maxine (Amos) was the manager,” Nelken said. “I told her that she was, and she asked, ‘Is she not black?’
“She told me that she couldn’t work under a black manager, so I said, ‘Well, then, you are not hired.’ ”
The first Jews who came to Greenville were of Polish and German descent. Later, they came from Russia and France.
“It was mostly by word of mouth that they heard about American opportunities and decided to come here,” Nelken said. “America was the land of milk and honey, where opportunities abounded, and as Jews had a long history of being discriminated against in Europe, many decided to come here in hopes of success.”
Not long after the first Jews arrived, as early as 1870, a congregation formed and began using Alex Hall as a place of worship. By 1906, the temple on Main Street had been built.
Nelken said many Jews who came through Ellis Island met success, including his grandfather, who traveled down the Mississippi River to Greenville, where he had family. There, he opened The Fair in 1896.
“Most Jews who came here to Greenville did find success, at least enough to make a comfortable living,” Nelken said. “They became patriotic, and they loved this city.”
In the 1960s, the Ku Klux Klan bombed temples in Jackson and Meridian and tried to assassinate a Jewish merchant in Meridian active in civil rights. But there were no problems with the Klan in Greenville, in part because of opposition from popular local leaders and in part because of farmers’ fears that the Klan would drive away black labor.
In Greenville, the Jewish population built good relations with Christian churches in the downtown area.
“I don’t know how we built such a good relationship, but we did it here,” Nelken said. “We help them, and they help us.”
An example is the annual Dutch Lunch, a charity fundraiser started in the 1880s. It continues today, the first Thursday in March, as the Deli Lunch. Nelken said the congregation typically serves more than 1,500 plate lunches including sauerkraut. Sixty-five percent of the workers are Christian, including Florence Signa, better known as Aunt Florence of Doe’s, Greenville’s iconic restaurant.
“One night, Richard Dattel came in to eat,” Signa said. “I asked him how he was, and he said, ‘Aunt Florence, I’m OK, but the Jewish population is getting thin and we need help with the lunch.’ ”
Signa gave it some thought, and that night she called Dattel and volunteered her services.
“I’ve been working there the last three years,” Signa said. “I love it. I always get the sweetest thank-you note from the ladies at the temple, that and they always treat the volunteers to one of the nicest lunches at the country club.
“But I always tease Benjy about my paycheck when I see him,” Signa said with a smile.
Corrine Goodman said the temple used to have services every Friday night and Saturday morning. Now, it meets only once every two weeks.
“We used to meet every week, trying to do a service even when the rabbi couldn’t come,” Goodman said. “We would have one member lead the congregation every other week, but it got to the point to where no one came, except the person leading the congregation and a couple of others. My husband and I came, because he grew up in the temple and was used to coming every week.”
Solomon said when he was growing up, his parents gave him the option of going Friday night or Saturday morning. In high school, Friday night meant football, so Saturday morning was the easy choice most times, excepting Jewish holidays.
During his senior year, Solomon was the Greenville High School football manager. The school was to play Jackson Central in the Big 8 Conference playoffs.
“I told my mother how big a game it was, and that I needed to be there, but she said that it was a Jewish holiday and that I was going to temple,” Solomon said. “So I had to tell the coach that I could not go.”
After he finished loading equipment onto the bus Friday morning, Solomon started walking away.
“I could hear someone asking where was Earl going,” he said. “Then the coach, Clark Maddux, stood up and said that it was a Jewish holiday.”
The coach said: “Earl Solomon is doing the right thing, putting religion ahead of football. I am proud of him. I am just as proud of him as I am of anyone on this bus. You are respected if you respect your religion.”
Solomon’s parents also kept him out of school on Jewish holidays, and he said he never encountered any problems from teachers over such absences.
“On one holiday I missed a test,” Solomon said. “I came back to class after the holiday and the teacher had me take the test.” Solomon said one student asked the teacher why he was taking the test that day.
“It is because he is Jewish,” she told the ninth-grade class.
“His parents would not let him come to school during the holiday. That is why the Jewish religion survives: They take it seriously.”
