Group tries to lure Jews to small southern US town
Blumberg is chairman of the Blumberg Family Relocation Fund, which is offering Jewish families as much as $50,000 to relocate to Dothan, an overwhelmingly Christian town of 58,000 that calls itself the Peanut Capital of the World. Get involved at Temple Emanu-El and stay at least five years, the group's leaders say, and the money doesn't have to be repaid.
More Jews are living in the southeastern U.S. than ever — about 386,000 at last count in 2001, according to Stuart Rockoff, historian at the Goldring/Woldenberg Institute of Southern Jewish Life in Jackson, Mississippi. But young Jews are leaving small places like Dothan in favor of big southern cities like Atlanta and Birmingham, Rockoff said, and dozens of small-town synagogues have closed in the so-called Bible Belt, an area of predominantly Christian southern states.
"A lot of the older people have died, and not many of the younger ones have stayed," said Thelma Nomberg, a member of the Dothan temple who grew up in nearby Ozark, where she was the only Jewish student in public school in the 1940s."We are dying."