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Message: <br /><br /> If you are having trouble reading this email, you may view this article online at: http://www.jweekly.com/27198/full/27198/rabbis-jewish-leaders-weigh-damage-in-new-orleans/ <br /><br /> <b>Rabbis, Jewish leaders weigh damage in New Orleans</b> <br /> Friday, September 23, 2005 | by <p>gabrielle birkner </p> <br /><br /><p><b>new orleans |</b>  Eric Stillman carefully maneuvered his way around the giant oak tree uprooted on his front lawn and the black roof shingles that littered his yard.<br /><br /> On Saturday, Sept. 17, he unlocked his front door and found his modest brick home just as he had left it two weeks ago: the neatly made beds, the family photographs on bookshelves, the colored pencils spread across the coffee table.<br /><br /> It was the first time since Hurricane Katrina that Stillman, executive director of the Jewish Federation of Greater New Orleans, had returned to his home in suburban Metairie, La.<br /><br /> Stillman feverishly made his way from room to room packing up pieces of his life. He carried out business suits and computer software, video games and a small television, the stuffed animal his older son had won at a carnival and child-size knit kippot, loading the items into his SUV before securing his home.<br /><br /> As he backed out of the driveway, Stillman glanced at the clock. It was nearly noon. When he would be returning he didn’t know.<br /><br /> On most Saturdays at this time, Stillman’s street would be bustling with homeowners mowing their lawns, unloading their groceries or walking their children to the nearby playground. But on this day the neighborhood was empty and lifeless.<br /><br /> “This is surreal,” said Stillman, 40, who would return home moments later to retrieve his framed ketubah, or marriage contract, which he wrapped in a beach towel for protection. “The absence of people, the absence of cars, the silence.”<br /><br /> Stillman, who has led the federation for more than five years — and is now attempting to unite and serve the New Orleans Jewish community diaspora created by the tempest — had spent the morning with about 20 local Jewish professional and lay leaders taking their first post-Katrina glimpse of the damaged and deserted city.<br /><br /> The group, escorted by Baton Rouge law enforcement officials, assessed damage to the area’s Jewish institutions, which are likely to need millions of dollars in repairs, and rescued Torah scrolls from vacant synagogues.<br /><br /> Rabbi Edward Paul Cohn, the spiritual leader of Temple Sinai — a Reform congregation with 850 family members in New Orleans — brimmed with excitement as he surveyed the ornate synagogue and found it all but untouched by the storm winds and subsequent flooding.<br /><br /> “The floor is dry — this is great news,” Cohn, wielding a flashlight, told those who accompanied him inside.<br /><br /> It was his first time back inside the synagogue after spending two weeks in Atlanta, where his family sought refuge from the storm.<br /><br /> Last weekend Cohn, not knowing when he would be able to return, had three Torahs removed from the synagogue and took with him the High Holy Days sermons he had been polishing prior to the hurricane’s arrival.<br /><br /> The Touro Synagogue, a five-minute car ride from Temple Sinai up St. Charles Avenue — a boulevard lined with old oak trees — some uprooted, some seemingly unscathed (the colorful plastic beads from past Mardi Gras parades still hanging from limbs) — fared almost as well.<br /><br /> Save several missing roof tiles and some minor basement flooding, the Reform Touro Synagogue, reputed to be the nation’s oldest Jewish congregation outside of the 13 original colonies, seemed intact.<br /><br /> In quick succession, Touro’s nine Torahs and one Megillah, the Jewish text read on Purim, were carried out of the sanctuary. Rabbi Martha Bergardine, the executive director and only staff member of the Jewish Federation of Baton Rouge, tagged each scroll with a Touro label, so one congregation’s Torahs would not be mistaken for another’s.<br /><br /> Touro’s executive director, Mark Rubinstein, was visibly relieved to see how well the synagogue weathered the storm, but noted, “I don’t have time to get emotional yet.”<br /><br /> Beth El, a Modern Orthodox synagogue, was still flooded to its roof two weeks after the storm, satellite images showed. Roselle Unger, the assistant executive director of the Jewish Federation of Greater New Orleans, whose family had long attended Beth El, said she was unsure about the congregation’s long-term viability given that it already was suffering declining membership.<br /><br /> “I was just devastated,” said Unger, noting that Beth El would likely be razed with all its waterlogged Torahs and prayerbooks inside. “We just hope to get in there before they bulldoze the building.”<br /><br /> New Orleans Jews mostly were not among the poorest of the poor who were trapped in the Superdome or airlifted from rooftops. Most heeded warnings and fled the city before the levees broke. Still, Jewish evacuees — despite being spared by some of Katrina’s most stomach-turning images — face significant obstacles before returning to normality.<br /><br /> Even once the city is dried, scrubbed and rebuilt, some in the Jewish community, especially those who lost their homes to the flooding, don’t know if they will return. Worried about a hemorrhaging Jewish community, New Orleans rabbis discussed the importance of maintaining its identity despite its dispersal throughout the country.<br /><br /> That’s why Rabbi Robert Loewy, who is renting an apartment in Houston, said he will go on the road in the coming months, traveling to the communities where his congregants have settled.<br /><br /> Loewy said he and his counterparts from Sinai and Touro are considering holding joint High Holy Days services in Houston and Baton Rouge.<br /><br /> “At this point we’ve dropped our congregational labels,” he said. “We’re all just rabbis of the New Orleans Jewish community.”<br /><br /> That community, many New Orleans residents said, would survive and even thrive. “We love the city and can’t wait to go back and rebuild,” said Susan Good, whose house suffered no serious damage as a result of the storm. “It’s going to be different, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be better. I look at this as an opportunity, not the end.”<br /><br /> <br /><br /><br /> <a href="/content/2-0-/module/displaystory/story_id/27054/format/html/displaystory.html">Journal of hope</a></p> <p> </p>

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