Jackie Gothard, the driving force behind the rebuilding of her New Orleans Orthodox congregation after it was devastated by Hurricane Katrina, has died.
Gothard died Monday of heart failure following emergency surgery. She was 83.
The first female president of Congregation Beth Israel in the Lakeview section of New Orleans, Gothard was in office when Katrina struck in 2005. She oversaw the burial of the synagogue’s seven Torah scrolls as a result of water damage from the flooding in a story she recounted 10 years later for The My Katrina Story project, a multimedia partnership of the Loyola University School of Mass Communication, the Center for the Study of New Orleans and NOLA.com/The Times-Picayune.
Some 150 people attended the burial in a cemetery plot of the Torah scrolls.
JTA