NCJW Services to Immigrants

Many of the late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Jewish immigrants settled in what was once called the Dryades area. Both the immigrant women themselves and those Jewish women long established in the city worked with NCJW to teach newly arrived women cooking, sewing, and housework. NCJW also monitored the juvenile courts to protect young white women from the slave trade. In 1908, NCJW joined the Traveler’s Aid Society, a collection of social welfare agencies, primarily at ports of entry, dedicated to helping immigrants find safe places to stay.

Under Irma Samson Barnett’s Presidency (1930-1934), NCJW New Orleans held a series of meetings on the German-Jewish situation and anti-Semitism, and created a plan to bring German-Jewish children to this country. The document to the right here mentions the first ships from post World War II Europe, and Jewish immigrants’ reactions on arriving. In 1948, the Port and Dock Program sent women volunteers to meet refugee ships at the Port of New Orleans, as the exhibition items on Clara Schwarz explain further. See also this document that shows notes kept on the placement of a newly arrived dressmaker at the French Quarter’s Lylian Shop.

NCJW New Orleans continued to work on immigration in the 1960s and 1970s, demanding quotas be lifted, and pressing Congress to condemn Soviet Anti-Semitism, as the letter on the far right here, notes.