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1770 Kirby Pkwy, STE 118
Memphis, TN 38138
Client: Temple Israel Museum
Righteous Among Men: Rabbi James A. Wax
Turning a physical museum exhibit into a permanent online experience.
The Story
Rabbi James A. Wax served as senior rabbi at Temple Israel in Memphis from 1954 to 1978. In that time, he became one of the city’s most consequential voices for social justice. He co-founded the Memphis Committee on Community Relations, helped quietly desegregate businesses and public facilities, and served as the only rabbi among 115 ministers in the Memphis Ministers Association. When the 1968 sanitation workers’ strike reached a breaking point and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in downtown Memphis, Rabbi Wax led 250 Black and white ministers in a march on City Hall and confronted Mayor Henry Loeb on national television with a message that still resonates today.
His story isn’t just Memphis history. It’s American history. And it needed to live somewhere people could find it long after the lights in the exhibit hall went dark.
Expertises
Services
The Challenge
The Challenge
Temple Israel had built a powerful physical exhibit, “Righteous Among Men: Rabbi James A. Wax, A Life Dedicated to Social Justice,” featuring hundreds of artifacts, photographs, and video installations tracing his life, his faith, and his role in the civil rights movement. But a museum exhibit has a clock on it. The space would eventually rotate to a new installation, and the story of Rabbi Wax would lose its most complete home.
The client wanted two things. First, a way to preserve the exhibit experience digitally so it could outlive the physical space. Second, a way to share it beyond Memphis, because a rabbi who marched alongside Dr. King and helped change a city belongs to more than one zip code.
The Approach
We didn’t build a website about the exhibit. We rebuilt the exhibit as a website.
We stepped into the physical space and captured everything: high-resolution photography and scans of the artifacts, the documents, the images on the walls. We also produced all of the video content used throughout the exhibit and the site, giving viewers access to the same stories and voices that brought the physical walkthrough to life.
The site is a single-page, scrollable experience designed to guide the viewer through Rabbi Wax’s story from beginning to end, the same way walking through the exhibit would. But translating a physical space into a digital one isn’t a straight copy. In a room, the architecture does some of the storytelling. Objects sit next to each other. Lighting shifts the mood. Visitors move at their own pace and take in context through proximity and space. On a screen, you lose all of that. So we wrote additional copy to bridge the gaps, creating the narrative thread that replaces the physical “guide” of the room itself. Every section was crafted to give the viewer just enough context to understand what they’re looking at and why it matters, without stepping on the artifacts or the videos doing the heavy lifting.
The Result
The website (rabbiwax.org) is a fully realized online museum exhibit. It’s comprehensive, it’s respectful, and it works. Visitors anywhere in the world can now experience the story of Rabbi Wax, his commitment to social justice, and the role he played in one of the most important movements in American history.
