Josie’s Story: From 19th-century Sitka to her escape from the Holocaust.

Name: Josie’s Story: From 19th-century Sitka to her escape from the Holocaust.
Start: 2025-01-26T18:00:00-09:00
Location: Alaska Jewish Campus

Schedule

Sun, 26 Jan, 2025 at 06:00 pm

UTC-09:00

Location

Alaska Jewish Campus | Anchorage, AK

Alaska Jewish Museum presents:

Josie’s Story: From 19th-century Sitka to her escape from the Holocaust
Sunday, January 26th, 2025, 6:00 PM
At Alaska Jewish Campus
1117 E. 35th Ave.

Josephine Rudolph was the first white settler girl born inside the muddy wooden fortress of American Sitka— Josie, as she is remembered by her descendants today. Her parents were not the “hardy Nordic pioneers” praised by politicians of that era. They were immigrants to the New World, German Jews who had come to the outermost frontier to find economic opportunity and escape the oppressive antisemitism of Bavaria.
Josie Rudolph’s remarkable life story set, in an era of worldwide migration, is a new and different take on the familiar tale of modern Alaska’s birth. Josie’s story is one of history’s many twists and turns. Sixty-nine years later, when Alaska’s first pioneer daughter was an elderly Jewish widow trapped in Nazi Germany, her one hope for escape turned out to be the circumstances of her birth in the coastal rainforest of the Sheet’ká Kwáan.
On the very week in August 1869 when she was born, Sitka played host to retired Secretary of State William H. Seward, who was welcomed as a hero for negotiating the treaty with Russia two years earlier. His tour there included a visit to a brewery part-owned by Josie Rudolph’s father.

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Homer writer Tom Kizzia, a former reporter for the Anchorage Daily News, is author of “Pilgrim’s Wilderness,” “The Wake of the Unseen Object,” and “Cold Mountain Path.” His journalism has appeared in The New Yorker and the New York Times. He was named Historian of the Year in 2022 by the Alaska Historical Society.
To RSVP click here:
https://www.alaskajewishcampus.org/museumevents