Members of the Tribe by Zev Chafets Read Free Book Online

that we’ve got the only Yahrzeit candles between here and Memphis.”
    Feldman’s clientele has included a number of visiting celebrities, such as Jan Peerce, Rosalyn Carter, and the Allman Brothers, but his fondest memories are of the time back in the sixties when the restaurant was a hangout for Jewish civil rights lawyers and activists. The Jews of Mississippi supported civil rights, and in those violent days such support could be dangerous.
    Macy and Vicki Fox talked about growing up during the civil rights era as we drove to Meridian on Sunday morning. Black church music on the radio provided a sound track as they discussed the fear and confusion of those days. For Macy, much of it was secondhand—Winona made a relatively peaceful adjustment, and the Harts, as the only Jewish family in town, were never identified with the northern agitators. But Vicki, who grew up in Hattiesburg, had vivid recollections of firebombings and frightened conversations among her parents’ friends.
    As southerners invariably do, they assured me that things have changed radically since then. But the memories and scars are still fresh, and Meridian is a particular symbol of the time when it was dangerous to be a Jew in Mississippi.
    Back in the 1960s, Meridian had a flourishing Jewish community, self-confident enough to have built an impressive temple, complete with a modern Sunday school wing. But not long after it was finished the temple was firebombed, and one of the town’s leading Jewish citizens received death threats. The Jews of Meridian banded together, raised money, and funded an FBI investigation that led to the capture of the would-be assassins, who included a local grade school teacher moonlighting as a Ku Klux Klan hitperson.
    Those were days of high drama for the Jews of Meridian—days that contrast sharply with the present drab reality of the community. The religious school, built with such optimism only a generation ago, stands empty and padlocked—there isn’t a single Jewish child left in town. The Meridian Jewish community is coming to its end, not with a white-sheeted bang, but a whimper.
    As we pulled into town, Macy informed me that we would have not one, but two meetings. Meridian, despite its depleted condition, has both a Reform temple and an Orthodox shul. The split is a relic of the flush days when Meridian had enough Jews to indulge in theological contentiousness.
    We went first to the Herzogs’, transplanted New Yorkers whose Honda Accord SE bears the vanity plate CHAI 18 . About twenty members of the temple, most of them in their fifties or sixties, were gathered in the spacious family room, munching bagels and lox imported from the Olde Tyme. Macy greeted each person by name and asked about their children—his contemporaries—now scattered across the South. Most of the people had known Macy since his teenage youth group days, and they treated him with respect, even deference.
    Al Herzog called the meeting to order in a hoarse Yankee voice and gave Macy the floor. As Macy described the decline of communities in Port Gibson, Laurel, Natchez, and elsewhere, his audience listened with dismay. But no one contradicted him. He spoke quietly, almost dryly, leading them step by step to the need to face the future and prepare for the end.
    It was an exercise in grass roots leadership that reminded me of the Rabbinical injunction: “Where there is no man, be a man,” and the people in the room responded with gratitude. When Al Herzog proposed that the community draw up a “last will and testament,” several flinched, but again no one disagreed.
    As the meeting was breaking up, a man in a golf outfit took me aside and introduced himself as Arnold Frishman. He asked if I had run across his son, Arnold, Jr., in Jerusalem. “He’s a student at the Or Samach Yeshiva,” he said in a deep drawl, naming an ultra-Orthodox rabbinical academy that caters to born-again Jews. Mr. Frishman didn’t seem very happy with