Posters depicting the role of American Jewry in the Civil War are being issued by the American Jewish Archives here in connection with the Civil War Centennial, it was announced today. The Archives is the historical research center on the campus of the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion.
American Jews played a substantial part in the war between the States. As its contribution to the national centennial observance, the Archives is using military and civilian records to assemble the dramatic story of their participation. Some notable episodes of American Jewry’s Civil War experience in both North and South are dramatized in the set of six colorful posters which will be distributed nationally to congregations, religious schools, historical societies and libraries.
Northern Jewish patriots are symbolized by German-born Louis A. Gratz, who commanded the Union’s Sixth Kentucky Cavalry and proved himself a hero at Chickamauga. Other Jews who fought in the ranks for the Union are memorialized in posters featuring the “Yankee ingenuity” involved in preparing a wartime Passover Seder in the West Virginia mountains, and showing the faithful care given his wounded charges by Jacob Frankel, the first rabbi in American history to be appointed a military chaplain.
Southern Jewry, too, had its heroes and patriots, though there were fewer Jews in the South. An Archives poster depicts the fortitude under fire of Mississippi’s Max Frankenthal at the “Bloody Angle” of Spotsylvania Court House. Another recalls the effort of Mayer Lehman, father of former U.S. Senator Herbert H. Lehman, to aid captive Alabama soldiers languishing in Northern prison stockades.
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