Freyhan Foundation Has Ambitious Goal Of Preserving Splendid Early Structure As Cultural Center And Museum Of Early Jewish Culture
Anne Butler
Wednesday, March 05, 2008
In 1820 there were just a few thousand Jews in the US, but anti-Semitism in Central Europe combined with cheaper transatlantic ship passage to swell the population through the mid-1800s, with many of the immigrants landing in Louisiana just as the cotton empire moved westward toward the fertile lands along the Mississippi River. The religious persecution that had kept them from owning land in the Old World ironically prepared these immigrants for success in the New, where their mercantile skills would prove vital to the South's agrarian economy in the heady reign of King Cotton.
The penniless new arrivals began as peddlers taking much-needed merchandise into the isolated countryside in horse-drawn carts or heavy back packs. Then they clerked in stores owned by other Jews, often propering sufficiently to open stores of their own in the small towns serving as commercial centers for surrounding plantations. Other Jewish immigrants became wholesalers supplying stock for the stores or moved north to act as buyers and sellers for family firms. Close family, marital and business ties linked all these immigrants.
The whole southern cotton economy was balanced precariously on credit, and the rural merchants' sales and terms of payment depended on the prevailing agricultural economy. When crop liens were used as security by planters needing advances for planting, harvesting and shipping crops, the small-town storekeepers had to become traders in the big cash crops of cotton and sugar cane. As the country deteriorated into Civil War and its devastating aftermath, many Jewish immigrants fought alongside their neighbors, then returned home to provide life-saving credit to suffering post-war planters and sharecroppers. With cash in short supply and banks unreliable, their far-reaching credit arrangements were conduits funneling much-needed funding into rural areas.
The South was the center of the country's Jewish population, offering religious and political freedom and the possibility of great financial success. Synagogues and temples were built and charitable organizations formed as the Jews shared their prosperity in far-reaching philanthropies, funding museums, civic improvements, hospitals, schools. The early 1900s decline of the cotton empire found many Jewish families moving from country to city and from mercantile to professional status in mainstream American society.
But before the Civil War, as the aristrocratic planters lived lush and lavish lifestyles, what they lacked was mercantile experience. They planted, socialized, philosophized, and beautified their surroundings, but they needed somebody else to provide the practicalities, the dry goods and equipment and underpinnings of the cotton culture, somebody with enough shrewd business sense to survive the ebb and flow of a fluctuating economy based on chancy crops and credit. Into this gap stepped the Jewish immigrants, many from mercantile or trade backgrounds in the European villages they had left behind, and they filled the need admirably
One of these was Julius Freyhan, who arrived in Louisiana in 1851 as a penniless 21-year-old German Jewish immigrant and died one of the richest men in the South. His extensive business interests included dry goods stores, cotton gins, cotton mills and real estate along the Mississippi River in Louisiana, first in the St. Francisville-Bayou Sara area and later in New Orleans. After the Civil War, his shrewd fiscal policies saved many a struggling planter and small sharecropper. Mr. Freyhan shared his prosperity in far-reaching philanthropies, including the funding of the first central public school building in St. Francisville, LA. When he died in 1904, the obituary that ran in the New Orleans paper said, "Through his energy and business acumen, he was able to build up one of the largest supply houses in the states, and during the hard times which swept over the country at various periods, he was able to keep the farmers on their feet until the price of their crops rose."
Julius Freyhan's daughter Juliet in 1903 married Rabbi Dr. William S. Friedman, considered the most important reform rabbi in the West. The dynamic Dr. Friedman, who'd been raised in a Jewish orphanage, served for half a century as rabbi of Denver's Temple Emanuel, one of the largest congregations west of Chicago. With several other clergymen of different faiths, Rabbi Friedman began the organized charitable movement that became the United Way, and also helped to found and fund the National Jewish Hospital for Consumptives at a time when tuberculosis was dreaded White Plague. Particularly hard hit were the eastern tenements crowded with poor immigrants; there being no known cure, patients were sent west for clean mountain air and sunshine, and the streets of Denver teemed with throngs of emaciated sufferers coughing up blood and falling dead in the snowbanks. Rabbi Friedman's far-reaching sense of compassion and civic commitment helped shape the hospital's guiding principle of offering deliverance to indigent sufferes of all religious and ethnic backgrounds: "None may enter who can pay, and none can pay who enter." A gifted orator and scholar, the rabbi traveled the world raising funds for worthy causes and studying world conditions; he was also a great patriot and preached that America was the Promised Land for American Jews.
Rabbi Friedman and his wife had two children. Their son J. Freyhan Friedman served in World War II and distinguished himself in financial circles in New York, while daughter Pauline Friedman enjoyed one of the longest tenures as a residential guest at California's Hotel del Coronado, the wonderful Victorian seaside resort dating from the 1880's. Miss Friedman, when she died in 2004 at age 94, would continue her family's commitment to philanthropy by making generous bequests for medical and cultural programs as well as toward the restoration of Temple Emanuel in Denver and the Julius Freyhan School initially built through her grandfather's gift in St. Francisville.
The non-profit Freyhan Foundation is now trying to raise additional funds to restore this splendid school building, which overlooks the Mississippi River in the historic little rivertown of St. Francisville, LA. A three-story brick structure with magnficent woodwork and staircases, its upstairs auditorium crowned by a patterned-tin ceiling, the Freyhan School has not housed classes of students since the 1950s and requires considerable work to bring it up to safety standards. An open house in November 2007, at the time of St. Francisville's bicentennial celebration, generated great community-wide support and brought together hundreds of former students, some of whom recalled turn-of-the-century youngsters riding horseback from outlying plantations and one intrepid fellow even rowing across the Mississippi River for classes every day.
The Freyhan Foundation's goal is to preserve the facility as a community cultural center, site for exhibits and performances of all sorts, as well as permanent home of museum exhibits in tribute to the contributions of the area's Jewish community in the 19th century. Pauline Friedman, granddaughter of Julius Freyhan, left her entire collection of family photographs to the museum. Other exhibits will explore early education in the area. The Foundation website is www.freyhanfoundation.org, and mail may be addressed to Freyhan Foundation, P.O. Box 338, St. Francisville, LA 70775. Contributions and other expressions of support are warmly welcomed!
