Lisa Collis Cohen, born in 1958 in Kingstree, South Carolina, is the elder of two daughters of Jennie Goldberg and Moses Collis, both natives of Charleston, South Carolina. Lisa discusses her grandparents, Rebecca Leah Kirshtein and I. M. Goldberg, whose families migrated from Kaluszyn, Poland, to Charleston. Lena Schiawitz and Meyer Collis, who emigrated from Bialystok in the early 1900s, owned a Jewish bakery at 165 King Street in Charleston, and Lena ran a kosher catering business. Lisa describes the bakery, which closed, she believes, sometime during World War II. Her father, Moses, began working as a young boy for Charleston plumber W. K. Prause, whose shop was across the street from the bakery. Ultimately, Moses became "the state's youngest licensed journeyman plumber at age sixteen." His sister Becky married Harry Schreiberg. Harry's brothers Morris and Nathan had a store in Lane, South Carolina, and they lived in Kingstree. Morris encouraged Moses to come to Kingstree, where there were no plumbers. With help from his sister Sadie, Moses pursued the opportunity and, by 1947, he was in business in the small town about seventy-five miles north of Charleston. Later he became a licensed mechanical contractor. Lisa talks about growing up in Kingstree where she joined her Christian friends in their religious activities and went to their camps. The Collises observed the Sabbath on Friday nights with a family meal and services at Temple Beth Or in Kingstree. Lisa recalls the other Jewish families that lived in Kingstree and surrounding small towns, who were members of Beth Or, which was founded in 1945. The congregation relied on rabbis from Charleston's Conservative Synagogue Emanu-El to preside over bar mitzvahs and recruited students from Jewish Theological Seminary for the High Holidays. Lisa recounts how the family kept kosher, adding that every summer her father made large quantities of kosher dill pickles. Lisa went to Jewish camp in the summers and was involved in the Temple Youth Group that met in Sumter. "My Judaism, for me, was a very natural thing." When she was young, Lisa's mother, Jennie, tried to keep Lisa and her sister, Rhonda, "almost shomer Shabbat." Moses didn't agree with that degree of observance and encouraged assimilation. "My father didn't want me to feel different." Lisa, who attended public schools through sixth grade, discusses why her parents sent her to a private academy when integration was enforced in South Carolina. Among the topics covered in this interview are the Collis connection to the Mazo family of Charleston and Lisa's memories of her aunts and uncles, including Davy Collis, his band, Buddy Shaw, and his music company, Carolina Instrument, competitor of Fox Music House. Note: transcript includes comments and corrections made by interviewee during proofing. See Mss 1035-550 for part two of this interview. For a related collection, see also the Collis family papers, Special Collections, Addlestone Library, College of Charleston.
Lisa Collis Cohen, in the second half of a two-part interview, talks about her nursing career at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, where she worked in obstetrics and gynecology, and at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, Georgia, where she says, "I found my home on the cardiothoracic service." In 1996, she retired to take care of her family, which consisted of her husband, Sherman Cohen of Atlanta, and her young children, Michael and Meredith. Lisa and Sherman are founding members of Congregation Or Hadash in Atlanta. The interviewee describes the Conservative congregation's break from Ahavath Achim Synagogue in 2003; their spiritual leaders, Rabbis Analia Bortz and her husband, Mario Karpuj; and their synagogue, which was created through the "adaptive reuse" of a Chevy dealership's auto repair shop. The Cohen children attended Jewish day school, and, for that reason, Lisa feels, "it's been a lot easier for them to be Jewish" than it was for her. Contrasting her children's constant exposure to other Jewish Atlantans with her own childhood in the small rural town of Kingstree, South Carolina, where there were few Jewish residents, Lisa thinks her children take Judaism for granted more than she did. Lisa's parents kept kosher in their Kingstree home, but not outside the house. About her mother, Jennie Goldberg Collis, Lisa says, keeping a kosher home "was the one thing she did that would still cement her Jewish identity." Lisa believes it's important to give your offspring an identity and hopes Michael and Meredith will incorporate Judaism into their homes in some way. She explains why she is proud to be a Jewish southerner and offers her thoughts on the controversy surrounding Confederate monuments. She honors her family's past, stating, "I'm really proud of the fact that I am keeping the ideals that my grandparents risked their lives for to come over to this country." Lisa has not experienced antisemitism as an adult, nor did she as a child in Kingstree, recalling that she and her Christian friends were respectful of each other's religious traditions. She remembers one headmaster of her private school in Kingstree as a bigot who "espoused a lot of commentary about Hitler and the Nazi party." When her parents brought it to the attention of the board, he was fired. That single instance of intolerance from her childhood contrasts sharply with her current outlook: "I think in the last few years I have personally felt like there is more of a mandate that supports hate in this country across all borders... I think this is the first time in my life, as an American Jewish citizen, that I really feel like we are facing a credible threat to what everybody knows as their... way of life." Other topics covered in this interview include how the Collises celebrated the holidays when Lisa was young and how Lisa and her husband celebrate now; the impact the Holocaust had on her family; Lisa and Sherman's support for Israel; Lisa's observations of the Jews of Atlanta; and Lisa's connection to Marian Birlant Slotin?now deceased?of Charleston. Note: transcript includes comments and corrections made by interviewee during proofing. See Mss 1035-549 for part one of this interview. For a related collection, see the Collis family papers, Special Collections, Addlestone Library, College of Charleston.
