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COMMUNITY
A Abraham Haber certificate of US citizenship
1845 87-12-L.1
B Abraham Haber membership certificate for Germania No. 46 Masonic Lodge
1846 87-12-L.2
C Katz and Barnett business receipt
1877
1982.162.7
ON THE JOB
Jennifer Schwartzberg
POSITION: Education coordinator, on staff since 2015 ASSIGNMENT: Research the history of Jewish life in New Orleans
In creating programs for visiting educational groups, I work closely with docents, museum programs staff, and Williams Research Center staff to coordinate an experience that best meets the needs of each group. Often, these programs center on an exhibition, a particular item or collection of items from our holdings, or a specific theme. Last year I was asked to create a program for a group from the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati, Ohio. The visitors wanted to view materials from our collection that spoke to the history of Jewish life in New Orleans, so I began to search the catalog for relevant holdings.
One set of manuscripts, the Goldsmith-Haber Certificate Collection, caught my eye. According to the catalog description, this manuscript collection contains several documents related to Ferdinand and Louis Goldsmith and Abraham Haber, German Jewish merchants who lived in New Orleans during the mid-19th century. I recognized Haber’s name from some genealogical research that I had done recently—Abraham Haber is my great-great-great-great grandfather! The collection contains two documents relating to Haber: his US citizenship certificate from December 13, 1845, and a membership certificate for the Germania Lodge, a Masonic organization founded by German immigrants in the early 1840s. Being able to see and touch these documents that recognized foundational events in my ancestor’s life was an incredible experience—for the first time, I began to see Abraham Haber as an actual person instead of a series of dates, names, and numbers.
After this find, I was even more excited to keep searching for information about my ancestors in 19th-century New Orleans. Through documentary evidence in our archives and digitized information from America’s Historical Newspapers and the Louisiana Biography and Obituary Index, both accessible at the Williams Research Center, I was
able to piece together biographical sketches of Haber and another ancestor, Sigmund Katz. Haber (1808—^1888) emigrated from Bavaria to New Orleans around 1835. He was involved in several commercial ventures with other German Jewish immigrants around the city, establishing and dissolving multiple business partnerships, all of them related to retail. In 1860 Haber owned two commercial buildings designed by noted architect Henry Howard; they are still standing today, at 820 and 822 Baronne Street. But the most compelling piece of evidence I found was a runaway-slave ad that Haber posted in 1853, in which he B described his slave Esther and her
14 The Historic New Orleans Collection Quarterly