c. 1997 Religion News Service

(Rabbi Rudin is the national interreligious affairs director of the American Jewish Committee.)

UNDATED _ Sometimes tired cliches such as”the end of an era”are really true. This was certainly the case when Emanuel J. Evans, the 89-year-old former mayor of Durham, N.C., died Feb 8.

Evans, known by his high school nickname of”Mutt,”was a well-known political and community leader in the South. He was one of the first Southern Jews elected to public office, and served as Durham’s mayor from 1951 until 1963.

A pioneer in race relations, Mayor Evans successfully desegregated his city’s schools, public accommodations, police and fire departments, and other city agencies during the tense early years of the civil rights struggle.

As the owner of a chain of North Carolina and Virginia department stores, Evans’ Durham store was the first in the city to have integrated lunch counters, rest rooms, and drinking fountains.

Today that seems quite tame, but it was not tame in the 1950s and `60s, when the public accommodations struggle was at a fevered, often violent pitch.

Four years ago, Terry Sanford, a former North Carolina governor and U.S. senator, called Evans a”near legendary figure,”and another Durham mayor said Evans”… cut a clearing in the woods for a race relations breakthrough.” But for Jews like me who grew up in the South, Mutt Evans represented something else as well.

Within his single lifetime, Evans was a human bridge connecting the Jewish Lithuania of his immigrant parents with the American South, specifically North Carolina, where he was born nearly 90 years ago.

While most American Jewish families settled in the urban centers of the Northeast and Midwest, it is often forgotten that other Jews grew up in small towns throughout the South.

Eli Evans, one of Mutt’s sons, described that little known culture in his 1973 book”The Provincials: A Personal History of Jews in the South.””My ambition was to marry a cheerleader and go into my father’s business,”he writes.”I really knew no other Southern Jewish boys who didn’t have the same ambition. Yet the story of the South is the story of fathers who built their businesses to give to their sons who didn’t want them.” Indeed, neither of Mutt Evans’ sons entered the department store world. Eli is the head of the Revson Foundation in New York City, and Robert is the former Moscow bureau chief for CBS News.

During the Holocaust, Mutt Evans and his wife Sara, who died in 1986, signed emigration affidavits for 55 European Jews who were fleeing the Nazis, and the couple personally guaranteed the refugees jobs in the United States. Tragically, such strict employment guarantees were necessary in the isolationist, anti-Semitic America of those years. And despite the bureaucratic restrictions, the Evanses did all they could to save fellow Jews from mass murder.

Even though Mutt and Sara Evans lived far from the large Jewish population centers of New York and Chicago, they were ardent backers of Israel, and together they built strong public support for the Jewish state throughout the South. Evans and his wife also helped establish the Center for Judaic Studies at Duke University in Durham.

That commitment to the survival and security of the Jewish homeland was succinctly captured in”The Provincials”:”I am not certain what it means to be both a Jew and a Southerner … to have inherited the Jewish longing for a homeland, while raised with the Southerner’s sense of home.” Strong religious feelings and a”sense of home”have long been part of the American South. Clearly, it is no accident that the title of the most famous Southern novel about always being”home”despite a crushing military defeat and occupation comes from Psalm 103:”Gone With the Wind.” In my own childhood in Virginia, I, too, sensed the double bond of”home”that Mutt Evans’ son so accurately describes. The sense of both Southern and Jewish loss was always mitigated by the perpetual hope that not only would the”South rise again”from the ashes of a terrible defeat (as indeed it has!), but that Israel reborn would also rise from the ashes of the victims of the Holocaust.

Mutt Evans, a son of the Old South, was a respected leader who helped bring his region to new and higher ground in black-white relations, and he was always a faithful son of the Jewish people. He provided strength and devotion throughout his long and distinguished life. Truly, his death is the end of an era.

MJP END RUDIN