new orleans | One afternoon earlier this summer, Rabbi Gabe Greenberg stood on the backyard patio of the new Beth Israel synagogue describing the deluge that destroyed the Orthodox congregation’s building 10 years ago. The 10 feet of water that filled the premises when Hurricane Katrina triggered massive flooding in August 2005 ruined most of the now 111-year-old synagogue’s possessions.
The remains of more than 3,000 of its holy books are now buried under a mound of dirt at the nearby Ahavos Sholem cemetery. Stacked on top of each other in a nearby grave are the disintegrated parchments of seven Torah scrolls that didn’t survive the storm.
In 2012, Congregation Beth Israel erected a new building in the northwest suburb of Metairie. Etched into the patio bricks are the names of synagogues and Jewish organizations whose donations kept the congregation afloat as it regrouped.
Beth Israel is emblematic of how New Orleans’ small Jewish community recovered from Katrina, rebuilding from the ground up in the face of colossal property damage and population decline. As Greenberg, a 33-year-old Massachusetts native who began his tenure last year, said: “There’s a lot of pride.”
Ten years on, many parts of New Orleans still bear scars left by the storm. After the levees were breached on Aug. 29, 2005, flooding swallowed neighborhood after neighborhood, causing a reported $100 billion in damage and displacing more than 400,000 people. Most devastating were the deaths of 2,000 people across the Gulf Coast.The city’s population, about 465,000 before mass pre-storm evacuations, is now about 384,000.
No Jewish deaths were reported as a direct result of Katrina, but more than 80 percent of Jewish homes were battered, and damages to communal institutions totaled $20 million. Most of the city’s 9,500 Jews fled New Orleans, seeking shelter with family and friends elsewhere.
For New Orleans’ Jews, the havoc was compounded by an already sagging community infrastructure that had been deteriorating for years before the storm, plagued by unmet fundraising goals, a steady outflow of young people and a struggling day school, said Michael Weil, executive director of the Jewish Federation of Greater New Orleans. Katrina brought several years of uncertainty as the Jewish population plummeted to 5,200 in January 2006. It was unknown if the thousands who left would ever return.
As the Jewish community marks the 10th anniversary of Katrina, that anxiety has largely faded. There are now an estimated 10,000 Jews in the city, about 2,000 of whom moved here after 2007, when the New Orleans federation introduced a program offering $1,800 grants to newcomers, 81 percent of whom were under 40. They helped offset the 1,800 or so people — mostly elderly evacuees — who did not return.
The retention rate, Weil wrote in a 2013 report, is more than 70 percent. Since Avodah, a national service organization that coordinates nonprofit internships for 10 college-age Jews each year, opened a New Orleans branch in 2007, “some 75 percent of its alumni” stayed in the city after their program ended, according to the report.
Other young-adult groups such as Moishe House, an international organization that funds Jewish-themed communal housing, and the Limmud Jewish learning festival have expanded a tight-knit Jewish landscape of nine synagogues, two Jewish community centers, two day schools and four kosher restaurants.
Many agree that piecing the community back together fostered a newfound spirit of collaboration across institutions and denominations in this Reform-dominated city. During summer months, the local Reform synagogues — Touro, Temple Sinai and Gates of Prayer — rotate hosting Saturday morning services for their three congregations. With Chabad overseeing the city’s lone mikvah, Greenberg said there is talk of Beth Israel and Shir Chadash, a Conservative synagogue in Metairie, joining forces to build an alternative.
Allan Bissinger, who was the federation’s president in the aftermath of Katrina, noted that among New Orleans Jews, “there still is a lingering sense of community — that’s one of the legacies of Katrina.”
Indeed, most of the city’s Jewish institutions have recovered fully or continue to make headway. In Metairie, the Chabad-run Torah Academy, wrecked during Katrina, opened a $5.7 million facility last year. A few blocks away, the Community Day School is expecting a student body of 37 in September, far short of the 90 who attended when Katrina hit, but a 37 percent increase from 2013, when “Jewish” was removed from the school’s name in a controversial bid to recruit students from less-observant families.
Beth Israel hasn’t held a daily minyan since Katrina and draws a group of about 30 on Shabbat, but the congregation’s “pulse is good,” said Greenberg, who spent a year at the U.C. Berkeley Hillel before landing in New Orleans. He said hosting a daily minyan is a long-term goal, along with attracting more of the 20-somethings who have flocked to New Orleans in recent years to capitalize on the city’s swelling post-Katrina economy.
In an effort to reach those young, unaffiliated Jews, many of whom live in New Orleans proper, Reform Congregation Gates of Prayer, which dropped to 450 member families after Katrina from 480, is hiring an assistant rabbi to hold roving Shabbat services in coffee shops, restaurants and bars across the city.
When Greenberg interviewed for the Beth Israel job in 2013, the hiring committee, he said, was insistent that he understand how much Katrina was still a part of the congregation’s identity. He likened some of the elderly members to grandparents reminiscing about the old country, not over the agony of displacement necessarily, but the fond nostalgia for how life used to be.
“There is a generation gap. It really is a schism in their history,” he said of lifelong New Orleanians. Newcomers, he added, are “respectful and honor Katrina. But it’s not a part of their narrative.”
The gap can hardly be described as a conflict, but it has left some slightly unclear about how Jewish New Orleans will choose to portray itself as more and more newcomers assume leadership roles in the community.
“Nobody wants to sit back, nobody wants to mourn, but nobody wants to move on,” said Weil, the federation chief.