2014

Ginger Jacobs

Ginger was born in Dallas in 1930, the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrant parents who were first cousins. The family name, anglicized upon arrival, came from a village in the region her family described as their home. Her father and his younger brother came to the United States around 1914, warned by relatives that war was coming and that they needed to leave Russia. They arrived through the port of Galveston, where they had cousins in the older Jewish community of Houston. Her father later brought over her mother, who first traveled to Cuba; because immigration laws prevented her direct entry, the couple married in Havana before she could join him in the United States as the wife of an American citizen.

Ginger's father built a modest one-man business dealing in bags, including burlap and cotton bags, working long hours and taking streetcars since he never learned to drive because of his poor eyesight. Deeply learned in Hebrew and Yiddish, he prized education and books, and considered his greatest success feeding his family and never standing in a bread line during the Depression. He put his children through college without scholarships as a matter of pride. When Ginger was twelve, the family finally bought a home on Park Row, which he paid off within six months. Ginger and her sister grew up in the largely Jewish neighborhood of South Dallas, walking to school and playing softball and tennis in the streets.

Ginger began Hebrew school at age five under a principal she admired, and later earned a master's degree in sociology, focusing her thesis on the development of Hebrew study in Dallas, which she turned into a book. She met her husband Mike, a recent immigrant and Holocaust survivor from Poland, at the Jewish Community Center, where she worked. Mike, the only survivor of his immediate family, became a leading voice urging Dallas survivors to speak out and to build a memorial and learning center. In the fall of 1970, Ginger founded an archive to preserve the history of Dallas Jews, which grew into the Dallas Jewish Historical Society. She and Mike raised four children and had grandchildren, with a great-grandchild on the way at the time of the interview.

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