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“I didn't have the first clue about how to preserve wet, moldy, damaged documents, just a deep desire to do something to make a difference,” says Furman, who today is curator of the archive. “With that kind of stuff, there's only one copy of it in the world. He and Rice’s centennial historian Melissa Kean waded into severely damaged synagogue basements, and eventually private local homes, to salvage irreplaceable artifacts such as photographs, cemetery maps and synagogue membership directories. In the days after the 2017 storm that devastated Houston, Furman was struck with the urgency to save historical documents that were at risk of disappearing forever. Yet, what began as an idea to compose oral histories of Houston’s Jewish residents was suddenly transformed into a passion for rescuing and preserving local Jewish history in the wake of Hurricane Harvey. “Nobody had really written a scholarly book on the subject, and relative to other Jewish communities in the United States, Houston had not been receiving any attention.” Based on his findings, Furman decided to begin conducting research for a book on the history of Houston’s Jews. “I discovered that there was a considerable gap in terms of available resources on Houston Jewish history,” he recalls. As the Stanford and Joan Alexander Postdoctoral Fellow in the Program in Jewish Studies, his interest in researching local Jewish history arose in 2016 as he was preparing to give a lecture on the history of Meyerland, a historically Jewish neighborhood in southwest Houston. Joshua Furman’s path to building the Houston Jewish History Archive was more serendipitous than deliberate. This is a really exciting moment … we're beginning to change the way that Texas Jewish history is preserved and studied.
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