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N.O. Jewish community has plan for revitalization
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| Contributor | Brandonius Maximus |
| Last Edited | Brandonius Maximus May 25, 2008 05:48pm |
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| Category | General |
| Media | Newspaper - New Orleans Times-Picayune |
| News Date | Sunday, May 25, 2008 11:45:00 PM UTC0:0 |
| Description | Twenty-three and single, Katie Tutwiler is another of those idealistic new post-Katrina New Orleanians.
Reared in New Iberia, she moved to New Orleans fresh out of college last summer, tugged by something like a moral call to join the city's great story of reconstruction.
Although she is only nominally Jewish, Tutwiler has been aggressively courted by the area's Jewish community. It gave her a $1,000 moving grant and offered a year's free dues to a synagogue. It gave her a year's free membership in the Uptown Jewish Community Center and introduced her to other young Jewish newcomers to New Orleans.
The effort may be paying off. Tutwiler, a self-described religious "seeker" shopping for a religious identity, has signed up with Birthright Israel, another Jewish program, which will introduce her to Israel this summer, even as her personal exploration also occasionally includes Catholic Masses.
Tutwiler is in play, so to speak. She thus qualifies as a poster child for the New Orleans Jewish community's year-old "newcomers program," which so far has devoted something like $180,000 for grants and loans to recruit young Jews to rebuild the city's Jewish community, and the larger city as well.
That is but one of the initiatives in a five-year "strategic plan" New Orleans Jews recently fashioned, an effort rare if not unique among local ethnic communities.
It is a $24 million blueprint for revitalizing a small but sturdy community that had been shrinking and graying even before Katrina made landfall in 2005.
The plan's first goal is to recruit young Jews to New Orleans and nourish them here.
The newcomers program is the centerpiece so far. But plans are afoot to fashion incentives to retain each year at least 50 of the area's 400 to 500 Jewish college graduates, said Michael Weil, executive director of the Jewish Federation of Greater New Orleans. |
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