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Emma Morgenstern and Lisa Newman view Bill Aron’s exhibit “Bagels & Grits: Exploring Jewish Life in the Deep South.”

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Greenwood, Miss "Joe Martin Erber and Meyer Gelman, who passed away in the fall of 1991, stand before the lovely ark of Congregation Ahavath Rayim, the last orthodox shul in the State. Joe is the lay leader of the shul, a local policeman, and a faithful employee of the U. S .Post Office."

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The black and white photos in the exhibit create a portrait of small Jewish communities in Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi.

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This photo shows the Shabbat table in Cary, Miss. Its text says, “The Shabbat Table is a scared place where traditions and family come together before Friday evening worship begins. Cotton, family silver, challah and pecan pie create a unique southern Shabbat in the Mississippi Delta.”

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Greenwood, Miss "The sidewalk tile provides a record of the many Jewish businesses once located throughout the Deep South, including the original site of J. Kantor and Son, a well-known men's tailoring shop."

It's a striking image, notable not only for its beautiful still-life tableau but its juxtaposition: a dinner table set with a Shabbat meal, challah and candles, arranged before a window that looks out on a field filled with blossoming cotton plants.

There's another photograph, of a sukkah - a small, temporary structure built for the Jewish festival of Sukkot that's traditionally topped with branches or palm fronds and decorated with autumnal and harvest themes. But this sukkah, in Vicksburg, Miss., is adorned with cotton, soybeans and corn husks.

The pictures are part of "Bagels & Grits: Exploring Jewish Life in the Deep South," an exhibit of black-and-white images by photographer Bill Aron on display at the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst. The 20 large contemporary photos, plus several smaller pictures from earlier years, create a portrait of small Jewish communities in Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi, where Southern culture is as much a part of life as Jewish traditions.

"It's been a really popular exhibit this summer with our visitors from the South," said Lisa Newman, the book center's public relations director. "It's a chance for them to see some really great images of their heritage."

The exhibit, which will remain on display through Sept. 28, is on loan from the Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience in Jackson, Miss. Its images are culled from Aron's 2002 book "Shalom Y'all," a photographic essay about Jewish life in the South that reflected his travels in Dixie in the 1990s.

As Aron writes in the book, "Southern and Jewish are two words not often associated with each other ... [But] throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, Jewish peddlers were instrumental in helping to settle the South by travelling from town to town to sell their wares and by eventually establishing stores and raising families ... They became southern Jews: southerners as defined by their location and lifestyle; Jews by virtue of their religion and their heritage."

Telling the story

The text accompanying the photo exhibit, written by Vicki Reikes Fox - she is the co-founder of the Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience - helps tell the story. In conjunction with the exhibit, she interviewed people who described the importance to many Jews of observing their traditions in a land that's deeply religious and overwhelmingly Christian.

For instance, the text with a portrait of Marc Perler, a regular lay leader of Temple B'nai Israel in Tupelo, Miss., includes this observation: "I work with Bar and Bat Mitzvah kids to make sure that they know what it means to be Jewish and they have a strong identity. Here the first thing you're asked is 'What church do you go to?' "

Another photo shows a woman from Long Beach, Miss., Robin Dorfman, teaching her two bright-eyed young daughters how to make matzo balls. The accompanying text includes a comment from Robin Dorfman's husband, Lou, who notes that "The Deep South is where our personal Judaism has flourished. You can't stand on the sidelines here and watch it happen, you have to make it happen."

A few photographs document the historical roots of Southern Jews, some of whom first came to the region in the 1700s. A store owner from Lake Village, Ark., describes how the business was founded by his Russian immigrant grandfather, who floated down the Mississippi on a riverboat around 1900 and stayed put: "He was broke and just got here. I guess he opened up a store or a couple of stores."

One of the most compelling images shows farmer Ben Lamensdorf of Cary, Miss., and his wife in the foreground of a quintessential Southern Delta scene: furrowed rows of an enormous, table-flat field waiting to be planted with cotton, a thin line of shelterbelt trees in the distance. Says Lamensdorf: "People are surprised that you're Jewish and a farmer." In fact, he adds, he's the third generation of his family to be farming that land.

Sad side

For all its celebration of small-town Jewish life, there is a certain poignancy to the exhibit. Most of the images date from the early 1990s, a time when many of these communities, like small towns all across the country, were steadily losing population. The photos show synagogues that have closed their doors - even one that was turned into a private home - and untended cemeteries with slumping, mossy headstones and a profusion of weeds.

Indeed, the Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience was started in the 1980s as a repository for Torah scrolls, arks and other artifacts from disbanded congregations across the South. As the text for the exhibit notes, many small Southern towns have seen their Jewish populations decline as people have moved to nearby cities, intermarried or left the region entirely.

Emma Morgenstern, managing editor of Pakn Treger, a biannual magazine published by the Yiddish Book Center, says a number of Southern cities have seen their Jewish populations increase substantially in the last few decades. Atlanta, she notes, now has about 200,000 Jews, and the congregations of the city's synagogues have grown accordingly.

Still, if small-town Southern Jewish communities have shrunk over the years, many of the traditions nurtured in those towns have continued. Reikes Fox, a Hattiesburg, Miss., native who also wrote the text for Aron's "Shalom Y'all," notes in the book that she's still got a taste for things like gumbo with matzo balls, or bagels and lox with cheese grits: "I celebrate my Jewish and southern identity equally."

"Bagels & Grits" can be seen in the Yiddish Book Center's Brechner Gallery through Sept. 28, from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Sunday and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday to Friday. Admission is free. The center is located on the Hampshire College campus, just off Bay Road and Route 116 in South Amherst. For more information, call 256-4900 or check online at www.yiddishbookcenter.org.

Film documents search for roots

The Yiddish Book Center will feature another version of "Shalom Y'all" this Sunday, Sept. 4, at 2 p.m. - a documentary by that name by filmmaker Brian Bain, a third-generation Jew from New Orleans. The one-hour film chronicles Bain's 4,200-mile trip through the American South, from small towns to sprawling Sun Belt metropolises, as he traces his Southern and Jewish roots. Along the way he woos his wife, talks to Andrew Young about the Jewish role in the civil rights movement, and meets memorable characters like Kinky Friedman.

Tickets are $10 for general admission, $8 for Yiddish Book Center members and $5 for students.