MSJE Partners with St. Charles Parish Library for New Holocaust Exhibition
- Dec 6, 2025
- 2 min read
Updated: Mar 26
Destrehan, December 6, 2025 – Michael Jacobs, Curator at the Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience (MSJE), delivered the keynote address at the St. Charles Parish Library’s opening of Americans and the Holocaust, a traveling exhibition from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and the American Library Association. At the invitation of the library, Jacobs has guest-curated a parallel exhibition, New Americans in a New Land, spotlighting the unique journey that brought one couple through the Holocaust and to New Orleans. Both exhibitions are on view at the library through January 10, 2026.
The Americans and the Holocaust exhibition spotlights Americans’ knowledge of and responses to the rise of Fascism and the Holocaust in Europe in the 1930s and 40s. The exhibition aims to challenge the common conception that Americans knew little about the Holocaust while it was occurring.
The parallel exhibition from MSJE, New Americans in a New Land, focuses on the experiences of Dr. Joseph Sperling and his wife Anni Frind, a couple who survived the Holocaust and rebuilt their lives in New Orleans. The exhibition includes artifacts from MSJE’s collection related to Joseph’s imprisonment during the war, as well as from the couple’s post-war life in Louisiana. Says Jacobs of the Sperlings, “Their journey of displacement, resilience, and rebuilding mirror many of the challenges facing immigrants and refugees around the world today. This exhibit reminds us that the work of welcoming newcomers and supporting those seeking safety is as urgent now as it was nearly eighty years ago.”
In his address, Jacobs described the artifacts on display, including Joseph’s concentration camp jacket and armband, the steamer trunk that carried the Sperlings’ possessions from Europe to New Orleans, and poignant photographs of the lives they built in New Orleans. Said Jacobs, “each item allows us to see history not as an abstraction, but as the lived experience of two people who forged hope and home out of devastation.”
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