History & Highballs: Missing History: Jewish Life in Western NC

CJJ members have been invited to this community event by the North Carolina Museum of History. This event is not hosted by CJJ.

This is an online program. Click here to register. An email containing the Zoom link will be sent to all registrants an hour and a half before the program begins.

Speaker: Sharon Fahrer, Historian, Author, and Co-Founder of History@Hand

Sharon Faher, historian, author, and co-founder of History@Hand, will speak with us about the previously unrevealed history of Western North Carolina’s Jewish Community. Fahrer moved to Asheville in 1996 partly because of its rich history and architecture. She began to document Asheville’s Jewish history with her History@Hand co-founder Jan Schochet in 2003 to capture the memories of people who knew Asheville’s downtown in its prime and to better understand her adopted home.

Fahrer has done extensive work enhancing an archive on Jewish life in western North Carolina at the D. Hiden Ramsey Library Special Collections at the University of North Carolina at Asheville. She chaired the 37th annual meeting of the Southern Jewish Historical Society in Asheville and currently serves on the board of Jewish Heritage NC, as well as on the research committee of the Community Remembrance Project.

Jews in Appalachia? Who knew? Little has been documented about the Jewish history of western North Carolina, yet clues are all around us. Jews could be found in many towns including Brevard, Hendersonville, Statesville, Asheville, Rosman, Boone, Blowing Rock, Franklin, Sylva, Little Switzerland, Valle Crucis, Marion, Canton, Bryson City, Robbinsville, and Waynesville. Why did they come? How did they get here? What did they do in these mountains? What remains so long after they are gone? Join us for the answers to some of these questions.