Upcoming Events | The Breman Museum in Atlanta

Gary Palgon, past president of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Georgia and a popular presenter, will hold a workshop to help us all break through our personal and research barriers to achieve success.

Jeremy Katz, Senior Director of Archives at the William Breman Jewish Heritage Museum, and Eric Lidji, Director of the Rauh Jewish Archives at the Heinz History Center, will discuss the life of Rabbi Jacob Rothschild through their archival collections. Born and raised in Pittsburgh, Rabbi Rothschild moved to Atlanta shortly after World War II to become the new spiritual leader of the city’s oldest and largest Jewish congregation, The Temple. He soon became a civil rights activist and agent of change in the Jewish and general communities of Atlanta.

Mark Bauman, retired professor of history at Atlanta Metropolitan College, will discuss the origins of Reform in Charleston and especially Baltimore and how Jews from these cities took Reform across the country as they moved westward. More than changes in religious practices, the push for Reform reflected freedom of choice and the feminine-ization of American Judaism.

An acclaimed new book by award-winning journalist Libby Copeland explores the rapidly evolving phenomenon of home DNA testing through her lens as an Ashkenazi Jew and that of the protagonist, Alice Collins Plebuch, whose parents are Irish American Catholics but whose DNA test indicates lots of Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry. In so doing, The Lost Family: How DNA Testing Is Upending Who We Are (Abrams, 2020) illuminates how we think about family, heritage, and ourselves.

A hundred years ago, Atlanta's largest Jewish neighborhood stood on the city's south side. There, Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jewish communities lived and worked alongside Greeks, Syrians, and native-born southerners, both black and white. By the 1960s, only a few Jewish storekeepers were left; the city's Jews had moved away, and the area was now known as a site of highways, stadiums, and concentrated poverty. This lecture by Dr. Marni Davis, Associate Professor of History at Georgia State University, will tell the story of Atlanta's old Jewish neighborhood: how it grew, why it declined, and what's been left behind.

Ann Woolner, journalist and author, traces Georgia’s first Jews from the torture chambers of the Portuguese Inquisition through escape to London and then onto a forbidden voyage to Savannah. Unexpected and unwanted, 41 Jews landed in the infant colony 1733 in the midst of a deadly epidemic there — seemingly quelled by one of their own, a Portuguese-born doctor. His curative treatments brought respect and equal treatment for Jewish settlers. When the Revolution came, these families fought as patriots, ran supplies and helped finance the war.