This is a cross post from Samuel D. Gruber’s Jewish arts and monuments blog, reflecting on the life and work of Texas Jewish history expert Donald Lee Teter, who died in Houston, Texas on January 26, 2012, at 86.
It is important to note that Teter carried out much the same research and documentation work on Jewish heritage in Texas that so many dedicated individual do in Europe (though in Texas, Jewish sites were abandoned by natural demographic shifts, not as the result of the Holocaust).
Don was a founder of the Texas Jewish Historical Society and the Baytown Historical Museum. Over many years he organized efforts to locate, describe and preserve Jewish cemeteries, synagogues and other historical sites throughout Texas. […] I followed Don’s work in Texas throughout the 1990s. When I was collecting information on abandoned Jewish cemeteries in Eastern Europe, Don was doing the same for Texas.