Over its nearly 100 years, the Ohev Zion Synagogue in Martinsville has gone through the stages of growth, strength and decline – and appears to be on the rise once again.
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The last time my dad went to his hometown of Martinsville, Virginia, was for his mother’s burial at the Jewish cemetery there two years ago. It had been nearly five decades since he’d moved away from the little industrial town on the Carolina border part of a mass migration of the South’s small-town Jews to the region’s urban centers and at least fifteen years since he’d last returned. The main street where his parents had run their department store for thirty years was full of empty storefronts. The thoroughfare had once been lined with shops owned by other Jewish merchants, but Mr. Black’s music store, where my dad had gotten records as a teenager, had long ago shuttered. There was no evidence of cousin Gilmer’s shoe store, where my grandfather used to go smoke cigars with the other shopkeepers to catch a break from his wife, a New Jersey native who thought she could do anything better than you until the day she died.
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