Rabbi David Lefkowitz Jr. and the German Torah Scrolls of B’nai Congregation

May is Jewish American Heritage Month, an annual recognition and celebration of American Jews' achievements and contributions to the United States of America. It is also part of the inspiration behind our May (5/12/2026 at 10:30 AM) meeting of our monthly “World War Tuesday” coffee and conversation series. The other part is, to me, a pretty amazing “small world” story.

As the History Center’s “Outreach Historian,” a good part of what I happily get to do at my job is research local history and write and present about it in a variety of ways. One of those venues is this column. Others are monthly visits to local senior living facilities to talk about local history. One of my favorites is World War Tuesday. Sometimes I research and present a program myself, but I often try to get guest speakers who can offer their own unique perspective on events of the Second World War.

Since I’m always looking for new ideas for topics and speakers for these programs, my Central Library co-worker Larry “Taz” Sanchez, who took Hebrew language classes at the B’nai Zion Congregation in Shreveport, suggested I might ask their rabbi Jana DeBenedetti to speak. Taz told me something I’d not heard before: On display in the congregation’s foyer was an ancient Torah scroll (the sacred scroll containing the five books of Moses) that had been hidden from Nazis during the Holocaust in Germany’s Bavarian region. In 1938, the synagogue in the small town of Bad Neustadt was ordered to be cleared out by the Nazis, who commandeered the building for grain storage. A Christian farmer in the small town hid the Torah under the floor boards of his barn. When the war was over, no Jews remained in the town. The farmer presented the Torah to Jewish Army Chaplain David Lefkowitz, Jr. who had been sent to the Bavarian region to both minister to Jewish American troops as well as preside over the reconsecration of synagogues, including Bad Neustadt’s, which had also been used as an ammunition dump. The farmer requested that Rabbi Lefkowitz bring the ancient Torah back to his home congregation in Shreveport, where it could again be a central part of life of a congregation.

Before contacting Rabbi DeBenedetti, I decided to first do a little research and found some Shreveport newspaper articles that mentioned “the German Scroll”, as well as Rabbi David Lefkowitz Jr. who served the congregation from 1940 until his retirement in 1972, and continued to serve as Rabbi Emeritus until his death in 1999. He served as a chaplain for the US Army Air Corps during and just after WWII in Europe in from 1943 until 1946. As I read about Rabbi Lefkowitz and all that he did and saw during his service (in addition to reconsecrating synagogues and serving troops, he helped displaced Jews in Europe, and performed the blessing of remains of the victims at the Dachau concentration camp), I became intensely curious about his story, and wondered if there might still be family members or others who’d remember him or know his story well. And then…one of the articles, by late local historian Eric Brock mentioned by name one of the three children that Rabbi Lefkowitz and his wife Leona raised in Shreveport. I about fell off my chair when I saw the name of his daughter, Dr. Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, who was one of my favorite professors years ago when I was in college in Massachusetts!

If you want to learn more about this story, please come to World War Tuesday on May 12, 2026, at 10:30 a.m. with B’nai Zion’s Rabbi Jana DeBenedetti and a virtual visit with Rabbi Lefkowitz’s daughter, Dr. Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Sydenham Clark Parsons Professor Emerita of History and Professor Emerita of American Studies at Smith College. World War Tuesday meets every second Tuesday of the month at 10:30 a.m., so if you can’t make this one, please come to another. Please note: Starting Monday, May 4 the History Center, located inside the Bossier Central Library Complex, will be closed for up to two months while our new exhibits are installed. This means that our exhibit and research area will be closed, but we will continue to hold World War Tuesday and other programs in the Central Complex meeting room.

You can contact us at 318-746-7717 or 318-746-1693 or email history-center@bossierlibrary.org The Bossier Parish Libraries Central Complex is located at 7204 Hutchison Drive, Bossier City, LA. For other intriguing facts, photos, and videos, be sure to follow us @BPLHistoryCenter on FB, @bplhistorycenter on TikTok, and check out our blog at http://bpl-hc.blogspot.com/.

Images: 

• Rabbi David Lefkowitz Jr. on Victory in Europe Day. Photo from collection of Dr. Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz
• Photo of the German Torah Scroll, courtesy Rabbi Jana De Benedetti - B'nai Zion Congregation.

Article By: Pam Carlisle

Plaque Recalls History of Bossier City Arena

It is remarkable how quickly people come to take something for granted. Within weeks to months, even the things that thrilled one at first, such as a new car or a new job, lose their thrill as they become the new normal. One might even start to have trouble remembering when the thing entered one’s life, and may feel as though it has always been there. This phenomenon, I believe, is the biggest hurdle we face in studying and sharing local history. It is easy to take interest in the history of, say, ancient Egypt because it is so different from one’s modern-day life that learning about it gives one the thrill of novelty. It is more difficult to take interest in the history of one’s own neighborhood, because it feels so mundane and ever-present. Though most start life naturally curious, after a point, curiosity becomes a skill that must be intentionally honed and maintained.

However, it is also possible for curiosity to be sparked in someone, even about the things they take for granted. At least, this was my own experience when, while looking through a large, recent donation from the Bossier City Council, I stumbled upon a plaque commemorating the ceremony of the “Bossier City Multipurpose Arena,” now known as the Brookshire Grocery Arena. I moved to Northwest Louisiana in 1999; I cannot remember a time that the arena has not been there. I don’t recall ever thinking about its age, but if you had asked me, I would have guessed it was around fifty years old, though, internally, I would have felt that it’s always been there, serving as a venue, a landmark, and a source of much stress for those caught in pre- or post-event traffic. I was rather taken aback when I looked at the plaque, and saw the year 1999, meaning the arena is several years younger than I am. I was also surprised to see Bossier City Multipurpose Arena. I had believed it only had three names, CenturyTel Center, CenturyLink Center, and the present Brookshire Grocery Arena. That led me to more questions, such as “So when was it opened?”, and “Who decided to build it?”, and “How many names have they given that thing?” “Why on Earth have they changed it so much?”

Bossier City received a significant economic windfall in the early 1990s, thanks in large part to the debut of the riverboat casinos. Talk soon turned to more city development, with a potential entertainment district and amphitheater being discussed as early as 1994. Such ideas originally centered around downtown Bossier, but in February of 1998, the city council revealed development plans for south Bossier, including a 14,000-seat arena to be built on Arthur Ray Teague Parkway, on a site that had once been part of Mrs. Paulina Pickett’s Chalk Level Plantation.

Despite controversy, particularly over the chosen site, the groundbreaking ceremony for the Bossier City Multipurpose Arena (called simply “The Bossier City Arena” in other sources) commenced on March 30, 1999, with over 150 people venturing out into “chilly temperatures and a light rain” to witness city officials plunge spades into “a sea of mud,” as the Bossier-Press Tribune reported. On July 20, 2000, Mayor George Dement announced that CenturyTel, Inc. (a Monroe-based telecommunications company, now known as Lumen Technologies, Inc.) had agreed to sponsor the arena, and had paid over $5 million - approximately 1/12 of the arena’s construction cost - to have the arena renamed the CenturyTel Center. It opened with a public walk-through on October 28, 2000, with an estimated 400 people participating. It was renamed the CenturyLink Center in 2011, two years after CenturyTel, Inc. itself had been renamed CenturyLink. CenturyLink would continue to pay Bossier City for the arena’s naming rights until 2021, after which a new contract was signed with Brookshire Grocery Group of Tyler, Texas.

Whatever its name, the arena has more than lived up to its original title of “multipurpose arena.” It hosted its first concert (REO Speedwagon & Styx) on November 21, 2000, and since then, it has been a venue for concerts, tournaments, circuses, graduations, rodeos, and more, and has served as the home of three sports teams, including the recently-created Louisiana Rouxgaroux. It has hosted more than 7 million visitors from all 50 states, and accounts for the vast majority of ticket sales in the Ark-La-Tex. As of 2025, its “estimated economic impact since opening” was around $500 million. Whether you love or hate it, there is no denying that this building has irrevocably altered Bossier Parish.

Yet, despite that enormous impact, I hadn’t thought about the arena until I saw the plaque. This, I believe, is why the preservation and presentation of historical artifacts is so important, particularly for local history. Historical information is easier to access than ever, thanks to archives, museums, and Internet databases. However, all other information (and misinformation) is also easier to access than ever, and with so many competing distractions, it’s easy for history to be overlooked. Objects can help cut through the noise, as they can spark curiosity and make the abstract information feel more “real.” In a swirling sea of information, artifacts can be lighthouses, guiding us towards true knowledge.

If you have any information relating to the history of Bossier City and Bossier Parish, the History Center may be interested in adding the material to its research collection. Call or visit us to learn more. We are open Monday - Friday 9-6, and Saturday by appointment. Our phone number is (318) 746-7717 and our email is history-center@bossierlibrary.org. We can also be found online at https://www.facebook.com/BPLHistoryCenter/ and http://bpl-hc.blogspot.com/

Image:   Plaque from the 1999 groundbreaking for the Bossier

Article by: Jaylie Rester

Looking at Earth (Day) with a View from the Moon:

Earth Day, a celebration of clean air, land, and water, is coming up on April 22nd. Earth Day began in 1970 as part of a newly-developing environmental movement. But did you know, the environmental movement really took off, so to speak, far away from the Earth, with the Apollo space missions?

The Apollo missions, which began in 1961 and concluded in 1972, brought back to us Earth-dwellers inspiring photographic images that set our startlingly blue orb of a planet in stark contrast to the blackness of space. The first photo of the Earth taken from space by a human (as opposed to images from unmanned observation flights or satellites) became known as the “Earthrise” photo of the Earth rising over the Moon’s horizon on Christmas Eve, 1968, during the Apollo 8 mission. The most famous of the Apollo Earth photos became known as the “Blue Marble,” a portrait of the Earth taken on Dec. 7, 1972, during Apollo 17. Over 50 years later, the Artemis II mission has been recreating many of these same photographs, with technological upgrades, such as the “Hello, World” photo of April 3, 2026, that catches the Earth in the same “pose” as the Blue Marble.

Perhaps the most famous of the Apollo missions was Apollo 11, which launched July, 1969. Its lunar landing module put humans, astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong, on the moon for the very first time. In 1989, the Shreveport Times did a 20-year retrospective story on locals’ memories of that day, and their own special connections to the event. At least half of the group were Bossierites, including John and Maybelle Manry of Plain Dealing. Mr. Manry’s memories and reactions were fascinating, because as a native of the year 1903, his memories predated the arrival of automobiles in his hometown. And Maybelle Manry pointed out how exciting the Apollo missions were to her, because their son Charles Manry, was a crucial part of the mission.

John Ardis Manry was a printer, regional historian, photographer, and genealogist who for a while was publisher of the Bossier Banner newspaper and worked for the Shreveport Times. He was born two weeks before brothers Orville and Wilbur Wright took their famous flight in December, 1903. He remembers the “pop-pop-pop” sounds of the first Model T Ford automobiles in town keeping neighbors awake in Plain Dealing. He watched the first hot air balloon liftoff from Bossier Parish soil in 1915 and thought that the pilot “had gone to heaven right there.” The moonwalk of Apollo 11, though, “was the greatest thing that ever happened in my 85 years,” he said. Mr. Manry remembered, “We saw every bit of it we could and we read everything we could.” He reminisced that before that, the most fantastic thing they’d personally seen was the sending of the first newspaper wire photo in 1935, “a marvel.”

At one point in Mr. Manry’s remisncenses of Apollo 11 for the Times reporter, his wife Mrs. Maybelle Manry interjected that really the missions were so interesting to them and that they didn’t miss a minute of coverage of it was likely due to the fact that they “had a child involved in it.” The Manrys’ son Charles E. Manry, a 1954 graduate of Plain Dealing High School, majored in physics at Georgia Tech. Following college, he entered the US Navy working as a “radio man” and as an electronics instructor and then worked in the Naval Ordnance Design station in California, developing the technology to photograph the ocean floor. In 1963 he went from exploring the ocean floor to exploration of space, by moving to Houston and taking a job with NASA.

At NASA, Manry designed the guidance system that was used on the Apollo spacecraft and personally trained each astronaut in how to use it. He became an expert in manned space flight and in 1971, in the thick of the Cold War, was selected as member of a team of physicists sent to Moscow to work out a joint rendezvous and docking system. These systems were to allow US and Russian spacecraft to link up in space, and give each country the ability to rescue the other’s astronauts or cosmonauts in space. As a part of NASA’s Manned Space Center, Guidance and Control Section in Houston, Charles Manry had worked in the Gemini manned space program, and he also helped create the NASA computer programs to map the Space Shuttle's routes. He then worked for the Martin Marietta company in Denver and passed away in Colorado in 2011.

If you have stories or photographs of some of the area’s space or environmentally-minded citizens, we’d love to see or hear them, and perhaps make copies for our collection, with your permission. The Bossier Parish Libraries History Center located at 7204 Hutchison Drive, Bossier City, LA and are open M-F 9-6. Our phone number is (318) 746-7717 and our email is history-center@bossierlibrary.org For other fun facts, photos, and videos, be sure to follow us @BPLHistoryCenter on FB, @bplhistorycenter on TikTok, and check out our blog http://bpl-hc.blogspot.com/.

Images: 

• NASA’s Apollo 8 Earthrise photo
• John and Maybelle Manry on their 50th anniversary, BPLHC photo
• Charles Manry as a boy, BPLHC photo

Article by Pam Carlisle 

Disappearance of Flight Carrying Barksdale General Still A Mystery

Throughout history there have been many intriguing and mysterious disappearances that remain unsolved such as Amelia Earhart, the crew of the Mary Celeste, the Lost Colony of Roanoke, and big band leader Glenn Miller. One such disappearance has ties to Barksdale Air Force Base, and, although not as well-known as these more famous cases, it nonetheless is still mystifying 75 years after it happened.

In early 1951, the U.S. Air Force’s Strategic Air Command (SAC) established the 7th Air Division and assigned it to England to help counter the growing threat from the Soviet Union. SAC bombers stationed there could serve as a deterrent to Soviet hostilities. Barksdale’s Vice Commander Brigadier General Paul Cullen was chosen to lead the division and oversee its operations.

Born in 1901 in Peru, Cullen later moved to California and joined the military at a time when aviation was still developing. According to his official Air Force biography, he entered service as a flying cadet in June, 1928. Only a year earlier, Charles Lindbergh had become the first person to fly solo, nonstop across the Atlantic Ocean. Advancing through the ranks, Cullen commanded the Air Force Photo Unit during Operation Crossroads, the atom bomb tests conducted just after World War II, and served as commander of the 311th Reconnaissance Wing at SAC headquarters in Maryland in the late 1940s. Newspaper accounts state that he was considered the foremost expert at the time on strategic reconnaissance, which involved using high-altitude photography to collect intelligence on enemy targets. It was while serving as vice-commander that Cullen boarded the flight which would carry him and 52 others into the unknown.

The Douglas C-124 Globemaster II, a heavy-lift cargo aircraft, departed Walker Air Force Base in Roswell, New Mexico on Wednesday, March 21, 1951 and landed at Barksdale late that afternoon where Brig. Gen. Cullen and his staff joined other passengers already aboard, which included four high-ranking SAC officers, as well as specialists in various air defense operations. Built to haul troops and equipment such as tanks, guns and trucks, Globemasters had a reputation for giving bumpy rides. According to a story in the aviation periodical Flying Magazine, the Globemaster was an aircraft which “tended to shake a lot, even in calm skies, earning it the nickname ‘Old Shaky.’”

It was in these somewhat uncomfortable conditions that the flight left Barksdale Wednesday evening and made a refueling stop at an Air Force base in Maine before heading out Thursday, March 22 over the vast North Atlantic Ocean. England was its destination, where General Cullen would take charge of the 7th. Checking in with weather ships along the route that were tasked with gathering meteorological data of the upper atmosphere and ocean’s surface, the flight’s radio operator reported the plane’s position Thursday evening as being approximately 800 miles southwest of the coast of Ireland.

By Friday morning, March 23, it became evident that the flight had encountered trouble. According to an article in The Shreveport Journal from that afternoon, no further communications had been received from the plane, so a search of the aircraft’s last known position was initiated by both U.S. and British forces. Nothing was found. There was a brief glimmer of hope Saturday morning, when a B-29 pilot sighted possible life rafts and other items approximately 450 miles west of the Irish coast, but a search of that area also found nothing. The leader of the search effort is quoted in The Shreveport Journal of

March 24 as saying attempts to find the plane would continue “as long as we have any hope of finding survivors.” Those attempts, which The Shreveport Times of Tuesday, March 27 says covered 25,000 square miles of ocean and constituted one of the largest rescue operations in history, spanned a week and were halted on March 30 before being restarted four days later. Ultimately, only small pieces of charred debris and a small briefcase were discovered. No trace of the crew or passengers was ever found.

The incident was consigned to the pages of history until it was revived in two articles in The Shreveport Times, the first in 2011 and a follow-up in 2015. Both articles were written by former Times staff member John Andrew Prime, and in them he mentions obtaining an accident report about the flight from the Air Force which offers interesting details such as a weather ship picking up a radio report of a fire on board the aircraft and the plane being intact when it struck the water. The report also states that the Globemaster carried equipment such as life rafts, life vests and emergency radios.

Despite the passage of time, answers to the mystery of what happened to Cullen and the others haven’t been forthcoming. Was the flight sabotaged? Could rough seas have swamped the plane after it came down, sending it to the bottom of the Atlantic? Did the Russians, as some have speculated, snatch the men? The website for the Bureau of Aircraft Accidents Archives states that “… it was revealed that Soviet submarines and surface vessels were active in the area.” The website also notes, “Due to their expertise in nuclear and other defense matters, Cullen and the other men on the airplane would have been an intelligence windfall to the Soviets.”

Perhaps one day, we’ll know their fate. Perhaps a long-secret document will come to light that will provide some sense of closure for the men’s families. For now, the incident remains, like so many stories of the past, unexplained.

If you have any information relating to the history of Bossier City and Bossier Parish, the History Center may be interested in adding the material to its research collection. Call or visit us to learn more. We are open Monday - Friday 9-6, and Saturday by appointment. Our phone number is (318) 746-7717 and our email is history-center@bossierlibrary.org. We can also be found online at https://www.facebook.com/BPLHistoryCenter/ and http://bpl-hc.blogspot.com/

Images:

• Brigadier General Paul Cullen/courtesy United States Air Force 
• C-124 Globemaster II/courtesy United States Air Force
• The Shreveport Journal headline/March 23, 1951

Article by: Kevin Flowers

A Gold Star Spouse of World War II

This is a story to commemorate Gold Star Spouses Day, April 5th, and the sacrifices made by a young couple in World War II, Haughton’s Cassius Clay “Buddy” Brandenburg Jr. and his young widow Cora Ann Foote Brandenburg. Gold Star Spouses Day is officially recognized by Congress, according to the US Army’s Office of Enterprise Management (OEM), as a time “to remember the profound impact that the loss of a loved one in military service can have on families. It serves as an opportunity for communities to come together in support of these spouses and to hold sacred the memory of their fallen heroes.”

Buddy Brandenburg graduated from Haughton High School in 1932. He entered Louisiana State Normal College in Natchitoches, La (now Northwestern State) and after graduating in 1936, he took a teaching position at Bossier High School. He taught for one year, then took a variety of jobs, including as a field representative with the Universal Credit Company of Shreveport and at General Motors Acceptance Corporation in Alexandria, Louisiana before volunteering for the Army Air Corps December 27, 1941 at Barksdale Field. (A separate branch of service for air power, the US Air Force, was not established until 1947.)

                 

Buddy trained as a bombardier and married a young librarian, Cora Ann Foote, in Walla Walla Washington in August of 1942. Walla Walla was a training airfield for heavy bombers. Cora Ann, originally of Baton Rouge and a graduate of Louisiana State University, had been a librarian trainee at the Benton location of the Bossier Parish libraries. Buddy left for overseas duty on January 1, 1943. Cora Ann worked as a librarian for the US Army’s Camp Claiborne in central Louisiana.

Barely two months after leaving for overseas, Buddy’s plane lost altitude at a point near Utrecht, Holland while returning from a mission over Germany, for which he served as lead bombardier. He wasn’t declared “Presumed Dead” by the War Department for another year, after “all possible efforts” had failed to find the twenty-eight-year-old.

Buddy Brandenburg’s remains have never been recovered, even though some successful attempts to locate remains of WWII soldiers were done through the 1970’s. His name was carved among the 1,722 names on the Wall of the Missing at the Cambridge American Cemetery in Cambridge, England. Like the other American cemeteries in Europe, this one is breathtakingly beautiful, designed by the famed American landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted and featuring views of the English countryside that, by law, will always remain farmland.

C. C. “Buddy” Brandenburg also has a monument in the Cottage Grove Cemetery in rural north Bossier Parish, and a memorial service was held for him at the Methodist Church in Benton. Buddy’s young widow Cora Ann received a letter from a member of one of Buddy’s combat crews, giving her what details he could about the fate of Buddy’s plane. (the letter is in the History Center’s collection).

Cora Ann returned to south Louisiana briefly and was a children’s librarian in Lafayette before leaving that position in March 1947 to become a librarian at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Alexandra, La. She recruited volunteers to help her do bedside visits, bringing books directly to patients. In June of 1948, she remarried WWII veteran John E. Jungkind from Arkansas. They moved to Columbia, Missouri where she was medical librarian at the University of Missouri Medical School. By 1950 they returned to Lafayette, where John worked as a reporter. They lived and worked various places over the years, but ultimately spent their final years in Baton Rouge.

If you are interested in World War topics, please attend one of our monthly World War Tuesdays coffee and conversation programs at the History Center. They are on the second Tuesday of the month at 10:30 AM. The History Center is located in the Central Complex Library at 7204 Hutchison Street, Bossier City, LA and is open M-F 9-6. Our phone number is (318) 746-7717 and our email is history-center@bossierlibrary.org

For more local history facts, photos, and videos, be sure to follow us @BPLHistoryCenter on FB, and check out our blog at http://bpl-hc.blogspot.com/.

Images: 

• 2nd LT Cassius Clay "Buddy" Brandenburg Jr./History Center collection
• Cora Ann Foote Brandenburg/The Shreveport Times, August 30, 1942
• Tablets of the Missing, Cambridge American Cemetery, England. Creative Commons Photo via Wikimedia: Stevekeiretsu, CC BY-SA 3.0

Article by: Pam Carlisle