NCJW, Hadassah welcome Jewish Women’s Archive panel
By ALAN SMASON
Katrina’s Jewish Voices, an oral and video history catalogued and maintained by the Jewish Women’s Archive (JWA), has recently been relaunched. In commemoration of the JWA’s ongoing mission of promoting the roles of women during the recovery period following the landfall of Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent failure of the levees in the area, both the Greater New Orleans section of the National Council of Jewish Women and the Greater New Orleans Chapter of Hadassah welcomed key members of JWA to New Orleans to promote the site.
JWA interviewer and moderator Rosalind Hinton, right, interviews panelists for joint NCJW-Hadassah event. (Photo by Alan Smason)
Judith Rosenbaum, JWA executive director, and Paula Sinclair, JWA director of programs and partnerships, were two of the key members of the staff who met with the two women’s groups at Touro Synagogue in the Social Hall on Wednesday, June 17 at 5:30 p.m.
Cathy Glaser, former Anti-Defamation League South Central Region director, welcomed attendees to the panel and reminded them of the words of the then-Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert: “New Orleans is a waste. It looks like a place that should be bulldozed.”
Glaser noted that Hastert is today the subject of a federal investigation for alleged sexual improprieties with young men. “We’re here today better and stronger than ever,” she boasted.
Glaser introduced Rosenbaum to the audience, who recounted a poem by Muriel Rukeyser. “”What would happen if a woman told the truth about her life?,'” she quoted the poet. “‘The world would split open.'”
Rosenbaum said she wanted to turn the phrasing around for the event. “What happens when the world splits open? Women tell the truth about their lives.”
Rosenbaum said it was important to hold such a special gathering to honor the lives of those women who had helped the Jewish community survive the devastation of the passing storm and flooding. Many of these unheralded women accomplished deeds and “flew under the radar” of chroniclers of the storm.
A panel consisting of several women community leaders, each important in their own right was convened to answer questions put to them by moderator Rosalind Hinton. Panelists were former Jewish Family Service (JFS) executive director Deena Gerber; present JFS executive director and former interim Federation executive director Roselle Ungar; Tulane Chabad Student Center co-director Sarah Rivkin; attorney Leann Opotowsky Moses and Michelle Erenberg, a Gulf Restoration Program Policy analyst.
Each recounted their own experiences of having survived the difficult days, weeks and months that followed the storm’s landfall and the ways in which communication between community members was re-established.
Hinton was responsible for gathering many of the video interviews with community leaders from 2006 to 2007 that are now housed on the JWA site. Several clips of these interviews with Ungar, former Federation president Julie Wise Oreck and others were shown to the audience.
