Native New Orleanian: I held the Torah aloft as Katrina hit the Louisiana coast

Hurricane Katrina Victim Describes Loss

On Monday, August 29 my world and the world of nearly 15,000 Jews in New Orleans came crashing down. A city that was known as the birthplace of jazz, whose citizenry was accepted as some of the wildest partiers in the country, and whose charming architecture was acknowledged as one of the most beautiful was literally shook apart and flooded out of existence in a natural disaster the likes of which this nation has never seen.

What began for me as a simple weekend vacation to visit family and my girlfriend became a nightmare. As I watched helplessly from the safety of a Cleveland vantage point, the soul of my birthplace became tortured and ravaged as 130 mile-per-hour winds struck with such ferocity that sides of buildings resembled pictures from war-torn Beirut. Roofs were lifted off like toothpicks on several houses. Yet, most of the structures somehow remained intact, some sustaining holes here and there from wind-strewn projectiles. Others were not so fortunate and lay shattered atop foundations or had trees driven into their sides by the force of the winds.

The rain drove continuously throughout the day, driven by the relentless winds, reminding one of white-outs during the winter here. And then the flooding began.

New Orleanians had long known that its system of levees was its only source of protection from cataclysmic flooding. It stood poised on the banks of the Mississippi River at a place that made it strategically valuable for shipping since the French settled it in 1718. If the truth be known, Native Americans had used the area near the Farmer’s Market for centuries before Jean Baptiste LeMoyne, the Sieur d’Bienville, found his “beautiful Crescent” on an expedition years earlier in 1699.

French authorities insisted that a city be founded in the area to control their claims in the New World. Yet, it was Bienville who successfully argued that the improbable location for this settlement should be on the banks of the Mississippi and not on the shore of nearby Lake Pontchartrain to its north.

Throughout my upbringing as a Jew in New Orleans, I was steeped in the rich history of my state and my city. Much of the city lived on the precipice due to the fact that we lived below sea level. All rain waters that fell within our boundaries had to be pumped out by a series of massive, mammoth pumping stations and drainage canals. We had been warned to look for “the big one” that was coming. Somehow, New Orleanians never heeded the dire predictions of what would happen if we sustained a direct hit from a major storm. The partying kept on going and the parades never seemed to stop. Our neighbors to the north in areas like Shreveport and Monroe could never understand the “heathens” who resided in New Orleans. Bourbon Street with all of its garishness and Mardi Gras with its wild, frenetic activities seemed like a foreign country to them. Yet, our metropolitan area comprised one-third of the population of the state and so our strength in numbers always qualified us as a special consideration in the Legislature and in our state constitution.

The announcements of the impending storm began shortly after my plane touched down at Cleveland Airport on Friday evening. When I boarded in New Orleans in the afternoon, the weather forecasters, who were always right on the money, said that Katrina was headed up towards the panhandle of Florida and could, possibly, advance towards the Alabama Gulf Coast that Hurricane Ivan had destroyed last year. One track suggested that a Louisiana landfall was possible, but everyone ruled that out. In my hands were a small carry-on with a CD player and a suitcase with enough clothes to last me comfortably for five days.

It was too late to check the news that night, but I was glad to see my girlfriend after several months of absence. She had just moved from Winston-Salem, North Carolina to take up a fellowship as a physician and we enjoyed a relaxing meal together at a quaint restaurant in Shaker Square. We planned to attend religious services the following morning at Fairmount.

Because many of the service participants were elderly, I volunteered to be the hagbah (the person who holds the torah scroll aloft following the reading). It was about the time that I held the Torah scroll aloft that Katrina began to bear down on the Louisiana coastline as it strengthened from a weak category one storm into a monster category five storm with sustained winds of 175 miles-per-hour and gusts as high as 215 miles-per-hour.

When it made landfall, Hurricane Katrina was downgraded to a mammoth category four storm with sustained winds at 140 mile-per-hour that made her the deadliest natural disaster since the unnamed storm that hit Galveston, Texas 105 years ago this week.