A friend in the NW told me that a businesslady told her that a Jewish man in the New Orleans area had a revelation of how bad Katrina would be, and alerted his fellows to evacuate before it hit the fan. My friend turned it around on the lady & wondered if they might have caused Katrina & got out before just like with the WTC on 9-11. (My friend is quite the joker.)
Now on a Christian discussion board, I saw some talk about N. O. Jewish folk evacuating very early. I figured I’d do a google to refute things & came up with this-
Only thing I can think of is that some observant Jews who were planning to evacuate might have left on or before Friday the 26th in order to avoid moving on the Sabbath (Saturday). Would that have constituted “leaving early”? Are there a significant number of New Orleans Jews who are “shomre Shabbes” enough to change their schedules in that way?
Absent any such effect, I’d figure such rumors to originate in nothing more than the usual “the Jews are to blame/profiting/unfairly benefiting” background noise that certain ignorant people generate whenever something bad happens.
(After all, even if Jews or any other group did evacuate early, wouldn’t that be a good thing? Less crowding for everybody else during the more critical evacuation period.)
No doubt it’s the usual crap. However, it would be possible to misuse statistics to ‘prove’ something - I’d presume that few of the overwhelmingly-black crowd in the Superdome were Jewish.
AFAIK travel as part of an evacution from a hurricane is a perfectly acceptly reason to violate Sabbath restrictions. Wouldn’t most Jews in NO be in the upper and middle classes and have better access to transportation?
That sounds like a better guess to me. What a weird rumor. There may be some truth to it, but I feel like it may have grown out of the Sept. 11 urban legend all the same.
Yeah, I know, but I thought some observant Jews might figure that if they had the choice, they’d rather get out of town early and keep the Sabbath as they prefer.
And I tend to agree that most evacuating Jews probably just had a socioeconomic class advantage over poorer residents. And anything more sinister-sounding in rumors of Jews “getting out sooner” is most likely just born of low-level antisemitism.
One of the threads on this board actually had an assertion that one particular community of N.O. Jews chose to stay. I have found nothing on Google News and do not know what prompted that remark.
Sure, smear the Episcopalians. Of course they got out early. After all, if they hadn’t, all the good places for Sunday brunch in other places might have already had reservations. Do you want to face an angry Episcopalian who has no where to go for Sunday brunch? I thought so!
I didn’t mean there was anything confirming the vision story or my friend’s joke about Jewish conspiracy theory, but just that a good amount of the NO Jewish community got out quite soon. Incidentally, the Christian site I read the discussion on & the lady talking to my friend were not promoting this as a conspiracy theory but as a sign that the Jews were particularly blessed. (For all the complaints about C’tian Zionism not caring about them except as pawns in the End Times drama, there does exist among many Fundist C’tians a near-superstitious awe & favor towards them.)