Dothan, Ala. — Five years ago, a Jewish businessman, worried that his synagogue was dying, put up $1 million to finance a program to recruit fellow Jews to move to a corner of the Deep South best known for peanuts.
Alabama might not be the promised land, but the plan worked.
The redbrick synagogue now has religion classes full of children, and a temple bowling team is starting. Six new Jewish families with 18 people who used to live in Florida, New York and elsewhere now call Dothan their home. Their arrival helped double the size of worship services, and more families are applying for the assistance.
The businessman, Larry Blumberg, smiles when he talks about what has grown in the few years since he had the idea to pay moving expenses for families relocating to the area.
“The injection of this new blood has really been helpful and refreshing,” Mr. Blumberg said. “I think the program has created a lot of buzz and attention both in our local community and throughout the Jewish community at large.”
Rabbi Lynne Goldsmith, who moved to Alabama from Connecticut to lead the reform Temple Emanu-El about a year before the program began, thinks Mr. Blumberg’s strategy could become a blueprint for other small-town Jewish congregations fighting to stay alive.
“I would hope that it does help people, you know, if they realize they need to be transferred to Louisiana or Mississippi, that they won’t be scared,” Rabbi Goldsmith said. “They’ll say, ‘Hey, you know they’ve got this vibrant community in Dothan, and I guess maybe Mississippi can’t be so bad.’ ”
Other small-town congregations could certainly use the help, according to Stuart Rockoff of the Goldring/Woldenberg Institute of Southern Jewish Life in Jackson, Miss.
While Jewish populations are booming in major cities like Atlanta, Nashville, Austin, Tex., and Charlotte, N.C., he said, synagogues are fighting for life in many small towns across the South. Congregations shut down in at least two other Alabama cities in recent years, Mr. Rockoff said.
“Dothan is bucking that trend,” Mr. Rockoff said. The institute is helping promote Southern Judaism by raising money in places like New York and California to support congregations, he said.
A few years ago, Temple Emanu-El was just another congregation on the critical list.
Rabbi Goldsmith would typically see about 15 people, most with gray hair, when she looked across the pews during worship services when she arrived in 2007. Children’s classes were small or worse, and the once-thriving congregation, formed in 1929, seemed to be in a downward spiral as many young Jewish people left town for larger cities after college.
Mr. Blumberg, who owns a chain of hotels, came up with a plan: offer Jewish families $50,000 in relocation assistance in exchange for pulling up their roots, moving to Dothan, getting involved at Temple Emanu-El and staying for at least five years.
With leadership from Robert J. Goldsmith, Rabbi Goldsmith’s husband and the executive director of Blumberg Family Jewish Community Services of Dothan, the program developed applications and a process for screening applicants. It bought advertisements in Jewish newspapers in cities like Boston, Miami and Washington.
Calls and applications began coming in as word spread through ads, friends and news articles about the program. Mr. Goldsmith visited the most serious candidates, and they were brought to Dothan, a city of 65,000 people in a part of the state known for peanut production and the annual National Peanut Festival.
Home to a new osteopathic school and a medical hub for southeast Alabama, Dothan calls itself the Circle City because it has one of the few complete perimeter roads in the state. The city is about 90 miles from the coast, making it a familiar drive-through spot for beach-bound tourists.
Stephanie Butler, a Jew who grew up in Birmingham but was living in Florida, did not believe the program existed when a friend who attended the University of Alabama mentioned seeing a news article about it a few years ago.
“He came over to watch a game with us, an Alabama game, and he said, ‘Did you hear about them relocating Jews to Alabama?’ ” Ms. Butler said. “I said, ‘You’re full of it, you’re totally full of it.’ ”
The friend was correct, and Ms. Butler, her husband, Kevin, and their sons, Isaac, 7, and Eli, 5, now live in Dothan after receiving the program’s financial aid. Ms. Butler, who teaches high school about 45 minutes away in Chipley, Fla., said she and her family never could have moved without the assistance.
“We weren’t in a position to pick up and move ourselves anywhere, so that had almost everything to do with it,” she said. “We wouldn’t have come if we had thought Dothan was awful. It’s no good to have someone pay to move you someplace that you’re going to hate.”
Other families have moved to Dothan from Georgia, Illinois, New York, Pennsylvania and Virginia, Mr. Goldsmith said. As many as 30 people attend worship services now, Rabbi Goldsmith said, or about twice as many as before.
Yet the program has not been a total success. The first family that moved to Dothan in early 2009 had to leave town because of job scarcities during the recession, Mr. Goldsmith said, and the economic downturn slowed interest in the program to a trickle for years.
But inquiries picked up as the economy improved, he said, and four or five more families are now deep into the screening process and could soon be moving.
Rabbi Goldsmith says she hopes people keep coming.
“Having younger families, having more kids, has made a tremendous, a tremendous difference,” she said.