MSJE announces expansion with new Southern Jewish Family Research Center

The Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience (MSJE) has announced its first major expansion since it opened in the spring of 2021. The museum will cut the ribbon on its new Southern Jewish Family Research Center on Thursday, November 7, 2024. 

The Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience. (Courtesy)

Located on the museum’s third floor, the new “Center” will include an area devoted to artifact conservation and digitization, a secure vault to hold the museum’s growing archival collection, an oral history and distance learning studio, and a reading room and reference library. Visitors to the center will be able to research their family’s Southern Jewish roots.

“Since we opened the museum three years ago, countless people have asked us to help them discover more about their Southern Jewish family history,” said executive director Kenneth Hoffman. “The programs and services that we offer in this new Center will help us do just that.”

“Jews have been an important, but lesser known part of Southern history from colonial times up to the present day,” Hoffman stressed. “The museum, and now the Southern Jewish Family Research Center, is part of our on-going conversation with those who came before us and those who will come after. Ultimately, that conversation can expand our understanding of what it means to be an American.”

A temporary exhibit titled, Greetings from Main Street – Southern Jewish Postcards from Our Collection, will be on view in a new special exhibition gallery, adjacent to the Center. It will feature postcards from many of the thirteen states the museum covers, spanning most of the twentieth century and showing the variety of ways Southerners encountered the Jewish presence in their communities on a daily basis.

Key to the success of the museum’s effort to build the Center was the enthusiastic financial support from people across the South interested in preserving the unique history of Southern Jews, according to Hoffman. He cited the leadership giving of the Perlin Family Foundation, of Fairfax Station, VA. and the Ben May Charitable Trust of Mobile, AL, along with generous local support from Joanne B. Fried and Dr. Ivan Sherman.

The Center’s preservation and digitization suite is made possible thanks to a generous gift from the Perlin Family Foundation, led by Rabbi Amy and Gary Perlin. Rabbi Perlin is featured in the museum as the first female rabbi in the United States to start her own congregation, Temple B’nai Shalom, in Fairfax Station, VA, in 1986.

The Center’s reading room and library has been named for Ben May (1889-1972), a son of Alsatian Jewish immigrants who became a successful businessman and philanthropist in Mobile.