Jewish Book Month Remembering the Jews of Avoyelles Parish Many of the early settlers of Avoyelles Parish were Jewish. Today, only one Jew remains in the parish, but a huge proportion of residents who have never known anything but Catholicism have this heritage as well, according to Carol Mills. The only child of an only child, Mills had been told while growing up that she had no relatives, so she embarked on a personal quest to learn more about her mother’s ancestors. Born in Michigan and raised in Long Island, Mills made her first visit to the parish in 1999. Randy DeCuir, editor of Marksville Weekly News, said to her, “You do know you are Jewish, don’t you?” The world of her ancestry opened up, and she soon had a family tree with 33,000 entries, and a wealth of knowledge of a Jewish community that has long since assimilated into non-existence. Their story had been untold until now, with her 610-page newly-published work, “The Forgotten Jews of Avoyelles Parish, Louisiana.” Today, only Jim Levy, retired editor of the Bunkie Record, remains as the Jewish presence in Avoyelles. In the parish, the story is that if you are descended from the 12 or so original Pointe Coupee and Avoyelles families, you are related to one-third of Louisiana’s current population. Her personal exploration of the Jewish Siess family “grew into the history of all of the many Jews who lived and worked in Avoyelles parish.” Soon after starting her research, she met Rabbi Arnold Task at Gemiluth Chassodim in Alexandria, who showed her “Fourscore and Eleven, A History of the Jews of Rapides Parish 1828-1919,” where she found information about her “forgotten Jewish ancestors.” Michael Suss, whose family name would become Siess in later generations, is her third-great-grandfather, and Abraham Rich is her great-grandfather. “Due to all the intermarrying of the early Jewish families amongst themselves, as well as with the French families of Avoyelles, only the Schlessingers and Schreibers have escaped being branches on my family tree,” she said. She spent the last 10 years researching her family and meeting others who have done genealogy of the area. She traveled to France and Germany to seek out records of the Siess family. After becoming “comfortable” doing Jewish genealogy, made more of a challenge by the paucity of surnames before 1808, she started to study the other Jewish families of Avoyelles. After six years she had enough material for a book, which took four more years to compile. The parish is located just southeast of Alexandria, not far west of the southwestern corner of Mississippi. Towns include Bunkie, Cottonport, Evergreen, Hessmer and Marksville. The parish seat is Marksville, which was named after Marc Eliche, who some have said was a Jewish Italian trader who established a trading post there. But his name is nowhere to be found in this book. Very little about him is known, Mills said. “Whether or not he was a Jew is just speculation… I did not 22
November 2012
Southern Jewish Life