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Encyclopedia of Southern Jewish Communities
Overview >> Mississippi >> Osyka
Osyka, Mississippi

Osyka, a small town on the border of Mississippi and Louisiana, was once a center for timber and cotton.  Osyka became a major town for three reasons: the cotton gin, the cotton warehouse, and the railroad.  These three factors in the 1850s brought Jews to this area of southern Pike County.

Starting in August 1854, nearly fifty Jews arrived in the Osyka area, as the town was the end of the rail line.  These Jewish settlers had previously practiced the art of peddling until deciding to settle down with general merchandise stores.  These people mostly originated from Alsace, the once disputed region of countless wars between France and Germany, but others also came from Bavaria and Italy.  Sam Wolf, for example, came to Osyka from Alsace, where he served as a cotton merchant as well as assisted in the construction of three houses.  His three houses were on Osyka’s Liberty Street between First and Second Streets, which included one house that had a room used as the local “synagogue.”  Sam’s daughter, Delphine, married into the Keiffer Brothers family, a prominent shoe company in New Orleans.  Another daughter, Fanny Wolf, married Eugene Frank, another Alsatian immigrant from New Orleans who fled Europe to avoid military impressment in the 1870s Franco-Prussian War.  Fanny Wolf Frank died in 1940 becoming one of the last people to disappear in the mysterious history of Jewish Osyka.

Although surprising to some, the Protestant communities of Osyka welcomed the Jews in the area.  After the Civil War, the Ku Klux Klan became very popular in Pike County.  Although their ghostly rides scared many Jews, there was one occasion when a ride occurred through the town center, and one of the horsemen yelled, “God bless Sam Wolf.”  Despite their foreign origins, Jews were part of the Osyka community.  In the 1880s, a group of Jews joined the local Masonic order.  These Jews not only found membership in the Knights of Pythias Lodge but also in the Lions’ Club.  On June 4, 1877, Meyer Wolf helped organize the Hancock Democratic Club of Osyka.  Finally, Jewish tolerance in Osyka could not be complete without a proper church story.  In 1894, Jews involved themselves in the affairs of First Baptist Church, as Leonard Cahn was featured in their production of “Mordecai,” possibly a story relating to the Jewish holiday of Purim. 

Jews also assisted in the local mercantile economy.  Such businesses as “Buggies and Sundries” and Wolf & Cerf existed in southern Pike County in the late 1800s.  Max Heuman edited a local paper called the Osyka Herald.  While some Jews opened grocery stores and a non-kosher butcher shop, others were horse traders and clerks.

In the 1860s and 1870s, local Jews worshipped together in the west front room of the Wolf family home on the corner of Pike and Second Streets.  The synagogue existed in the area until as late as 1900, the point at which the local German school closed as well.  Many of the Jews attended the German school with their Catholic neighbors who came to Osyka to escape religious persecution.

While Osyka was predominantly Protestant, the new immigrants attempted to form a German community in neighboring Kirksville.  Kirksville was not only home to the railroad like Osyka, but it also had a saw mill from the abundance of longleaf yellow pine trees in the area.  Unfortunately, the town never truly came into being because of the Civil War.  Union troops came to the area and decimated everything especially the cotton trade because Osyka served not only as Confederate agriculture center but also as a weapons depot.  The only part of Kirksville that remains today is the German Cemetery located off US Highway 51.  Started in the 1860s by John Jacob Bergold, over a hundred Catholics found burial sites in Osyka, while twenty-seven markers featured Jewish gravestones.  The Jewish part of the cemetery was home to such names as Hart, Heuman, Wolf, Cerf, Levine, Levy, Moyse, and Dreyfuss.  Adolph Cahn found a place there as well after he died during the 1878 yellow fever epidemic.  Interestingly, Adolph’s wife and child went back to Germany, where future generations moved to Israel and eventually found out about their ancestors in Osyka.  This recent interest in the German cemetery from many like the Cahn descendants has called upon some to restore this “dying” cemetery with its beautiful iron gate and brick wall that many Jews had once forgotten.

By 1878, nearly sixty Jews lived in the Osyka area, but that trend would eventually change by the 1900s.  By 1900, the synagogue and the German School had closed.  Some Jewish businesses still existed in Osyka as late as 1910, while the Klingman family of Chatawa was one of the first families in the 1920s to have a working phonograph in Pike County.  Many Osyka Jews left for New Orleans and Baton Rouge; Osyka’s economy had experienced changes as a result from the yellow fever epidemic and the extension of the railroad away from the area.  In addition, the boll weevil hurt the cotton trade greatly, while some locals theorized that the saw mill in this area closed around this time as well. 

With these economic changes, Jews left Osyka for greater opportunities elsewhere.  Today, only a cemetery remains from its Jewish past.  Under the supervision of the Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience, campers at the Henry S. Jacobs camp have worked to clean up the old orphaned cemetery.