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09.16.06

Elaine Justice: 404-727-0643, elaine.justice@emory.edu

New Exhibit Tells the Story of Jews at Emory

In 1919, an unlikely meeting took place between one of Atlanta’s orthodox rabbis and Methodist Bishop Warren A. Candler, the chancellor of Emory University. Rabbi Tobias Geffen, known as the ‘dean’ of orthodox rabbis in the South and the rabbi who made Coca-Cola kosher for Passover, wanted his children to gain a superior secular education along side their religious studies. Emory University had recently been founded, and its undergraduate division (which had existed since 1836 as Emory College) had just relocated to Atlanta from rural Oxford, Georgia, the same year. Geffen wished to send his eldest son to the new university, but was concerned about its policy of holding classes on Saturday, the Jewish sabbath. After hearing the rabbi’s reservations, Candler exempted Geffen’s son from all writing and exams on Saturday and also invited him to attend Emory for free, as the children of other clergymen did. Over the next eighteen years, six of Rabbi Geffen’s children attended Emory, collectively earning eight academic degrees.

Since Geffen’s time, Jews have been a significant presence at Emory, where they have served as important symbols of change during the university’s transformation from a regional Methodist college into a national research university. A new exhibit chronicling this story is on display at the Robert W. Woodruff Library. “Jews at Emory: Faces of a Changing University,” will appear in the exhibit hall of the Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library (MARBL) on the library’s tenth floor through early January. The exhibit is cosponsored by the Emory University Archives, MARBL and Emory’s Rabbi Donald A. Tam Institute for Jewish Studies.

MARBL initially decided to stage the exhibition as a means to highlight its collection of Geffen Family Papers, contributed by Emory alumnus Rabbi David Geffen, a grandson of Rabbi Tobias Geffen and the son of Louis Geffen, an early Jewish graduate of the university. At Geffen’s encouragement, the curator of the exhibit, American Jewish history professor Eric L. Goldstein, broadened his focus, deciding to use the family papers as a starting point for exploring the larger history of Emory’s Jewish experience, with the Geffen story as one if its centerpieces.

Using sources from the Emory Archives, as well as items from the Geffen Family Papers and items loaned by alumni, the exhibit traces Emory’s Jewish history from the arrival of the first Jewish students through the emergence of a rich Jewish campus life in the 1970s and the founding of one of the South’s premier Jewish Studies programs. Visitors will learn about the central role played by Jewish-affiliated fraternities and sororities in the lives of Jewish students, and about the intensive involvement of Jewish students in campus activities. Through photos, documents and original artifacts, the exhibit explains how Jews began to break down barriers and seize larger roles in the life of the university as Emory began to emerge onto the national scene.

As the exhibit emphasizes, Emory has historically been very welcoming to Jews, although at certain points in its history the university approached them with an ambivalence that reflected a larger uncertainly about its own changing identity. In 1961, for example, controversy erupted over Emory Dental School’s admissions policies regarding Jewish students, and during the mid-1970s a campus-wide discussion emerged about whether an influx of Jewish students from the northeast would alter Emory’s traditional role as a southern university. Since the 1970s, however, Jews have become an integral part of the university’s fabric, now making up about one-third of the student body and a large portion of the faculty. Jews also serve in the administration and on the board of trustees. Their significant presence on campus is one of the factors that gives Emory is distinctive style and tone.

The exhibit will be inaugurated at 2:00pm on Sunday, September 10 with a panel discussion examining Jewish life at Emory during several different time periods. Panelists will included Dr. Rela Mintz Geffen, the president of Baltimore Hebrew University and daughter of one of Emory’s first Jewish graduates, Rabbi Joel S. Geffen (class of 1922); Hon. Elliott H. Levitas, (class of 1952, law school class of 1956), an Emory Rhodes scholar and former U.S. Congressman; and Daniel Israel (class of 1989), who served as the president of Emory Hillel during the late 1980s. The panel will be held in the Jones Room, third floor of the Robert W. Woodruff Library, with a reception and exhibit unveiling to follow.

A second exhibit-related program celebrating 30 years of Jewish studies at Emory will be held on Wednesday, Oct. 18, 7:30pm, also in the Jones Room of the Woodruff Library.

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