Alliance Chapel Reopening
Norma, N.J. – The Alliance Heritage Center, which seeks to preserve the history and tell the stories of the first successful and long-lasting Jewish farming community in the United States, will celebrate the opening of a new exhibit housed within the colony’s newly renovated chapel starting at 11 a.m. on Sunday, Sept. 21.
Funded by a two-year grant from the Mellon Foundation, the center, along with Stockton student interns and community members, updated the interior of the chapel into a museum of Alliance history.
Attendees will have the opportunity to tour the Alliance site and the villages that developed from the colony (Norma, Alliance and Brotmanville); enjoy kosher refreshments; and be the first to view a newly unveiled mural. The reopening will also include a screening of the 2023 documentary “Alliance” and a Q&A with the film’s director and producer, Susan Kehnemui Donnelly, at the Landis Theatre in Vineland, starting at 4 p.m.
The Alliance Chapel is located at 970 Gershal Ave., in Norma. The Landis Theatre is located at 830 E. Landis Ave. in Vineland.
Alliance Chapel Renovation Project Nearing Completion
July 22, 2025
Pittsgrove Township, N.J. — Since Stockton University created the Alliance Heritage Center in 2019, it has collected about 1,000 historical photos, memoirs, letters and memorabilia about the first successful Jewish agricultural community in the United States.
Soon, the story of the Salem County colony just on the other side of the Maurice River from Vineland will have a newly renovated place to call home.
“We have the Alliance Heritage Center Digital Museum and documents in Stockton’s Special Collections, but we just really wanted to have this physical interpretation of public history,” said Patty Chappine, a Stockton adjunct professor and Rudnick Fellow studying the history of the colony.
Thanks to a $100,000 Mellon Foundation grant the center received in 2023, Chappine spent this summer, along with the center’s director Tom Kinsella, a Stockton distinguished professor of Literature, volunteers from the Noyes Museum of Art of Stockton University and a group of student interns renovating the Alliance Chapel in the Norma section of Pittsgrove Township.
— Story by Mark Melhorn, photos by Lizzie Nealis
