Stephanie Butler had not seen Reggie Wilson in almost a decade and then there he was, standing beside her, at a grocery store in St. Petersburg, Fla.

Reggie was new in town, so Ms. Butler invited her old college pal over to watch what every other University of Alabama alumnus watches in early September: Alabama’s season-opening football game.

On game day, in addition to serving snacks, they chatted, like old college friends do, about old times, about life, and how hard it was for Stephanie and her husband, Kevin, to scratch out a living in an expensive big city like St. Petersburg — especially with two toddlers — and how much the Butlers missed Alabama and wanted to move back.

“So Reggie says,” says Ms. Butler, “ ‘Have you heard about those Jews who are paying other Jews to move to Alabama?’ ”

She had not heard. In fact, she had never really heard of Dothan, Ala., either, except to drive by it on her way to someplace else. Or considered what she and her Alabama-raised-non-Jewish husband would do if a Jewish congregation in a small Southern city in a state where they wanted to live offered them US$50,000 to move there.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Ms. Butler says. “So I called them up.”

Rob Goldsmith answered. He is the executive director of the Blumberg Family Jewish Community Services of Dothan, runs the Family Relocation Project and goes home each night to his wife, Lynne, the rabbi at Temple Emanu-El.

The synagogue has served Jews in Dothan and surrounding counties for more than 80 years. The Goldsmiths are relatively new to the place, and when they showed up three years ago the Temple looked like Heaven’s waiting room.

Almost 95% of the faces were elderly. The Sunday school had five students. A once robust congregation of 100 families had dwindled to 40 and was dying off fast.

“Dothan was just like so many small towns in the South that had thriving Jewish communities in the 1800s and the 1900s and have seen their Jewish populations wither,” Mr. Goldsmith says.

Larry Blumberg, a Dothan native who operates 67 hotels across the southeast, wanted to stop the bleeding and was willing to put up a million dollars to do so. His vision: convince 20 young families to move to the town of 60,000 in southeastern Alabama — the added incentive: $50,000 per family.

“It’s a pretty interesting idea,” says Dr. Stuart Rockoff, head of the history department at the Institute of Southern Jewish Life in Jackson, Miss. “Dothan is a pretty small community, and if they are even able to attract a handful of Jewish families it is going to have a transformative effect on the congregation.”

Jews have been shaping Southern life for almost 300 years. The first Jewish congregation was established in Savannah, Ga., in the 1730s, and up until 1820 Charleston, S.C., boasted the largest Jewish community in the United States.

The diaspora enjoyed freedom of religion in the United States, and blew all around the South, collecting in port cities and market towns — and smaller places like Dothan — where Jews were the merchants, wholesalers and retailers.

Anti-Semitism, while it existed, and always will, was the exception. The South, first with slavery and then with segregation, was a binary society. It was black and white. And Jews were white. They owned slaves, held elected office, joined the local chamber of commerce and fought for the Confederacy in the American Civil War. They were Southerners, through and through.

“It is remarkable how well the Jews were received,” Dr. Rockoff says. “There are examples in old newspapers celebrating the arrival of a town’s first Jewish merchant. It was a sign that your town had arrived, that it was on the move and doing well.”

By the mid-20th century Dothan’s main street was lined with marquees for Blumberg’s department store, Bauman’s, Greenburg’s, Kraselsky’s and more. The Jewish community was thriving, while also undergoing a tectonic shift where the sons and daughters of Dothan’s merchant class were leaving for college to become doctors and lawyers and bankers and never looking back.

In 1980, the Jewish population of Atlanta, Ga., was 20,000. Today it is closer to 120,000, thanks to the small town exodus that ultimately produced Larry Blumberg’s million-dollar solution for Dothan.

For Rob Goldsmith, selling the Butlers on Alabama life was a slam-dunk. Alabama was already sweet home in their eyes. But for other prospects interested in relocating the sales pitch is not always so easy. Indeed, the thought of moving to small-town Alabama three years ago wasn’t all that easy for the Goldsmiths to digest.

He is originally from Baltimore. His rabbi wife is from New England. The couple’s preconceived notion of the Deep South had a decidedly Northern influence, and was painted with images of Civil Rights marches, men in white hoods, shotgun shacks and burning crosses.

“That chip on our shoulder that we had in the northeast before we moved here, it just hasn’t proven out,” Mr. Goldsmith says, chuckling. “We have Starbucks. We have highways. People wear shoes. It is the new South, and the quality of life here has been great.”

And that old myth, about Southern hospitality, well, apparently it is not a myth. Lisa Greenman-Gonzalez, a Spanish teacher, and her husband, Dany, an El Salvadoran-born flight instructor, were greeted by 20 members of the Temple on the day they moved into their apartment in Eufaula, a town even smaller than Dothan 40 minutes from the synagogue.

“I didn’t know any of them,” Ms. Greenman-Gonzalez says. “Some of them stayed late helping us. Some even brought flowers.”

The family has two boys. A third child is due in December. Their move from Granite City, Ill., was not a matter of money, but a matter of faith. Lisa is Jewish. Dany is Catholic. They could not find a house of worship anywhere near their previous home that would accept them both.

“For us, the $50,000 — and we have only spent about half of what was offered — was only really a factor in terms of covering our moving costs,” Ms. Greenman-Gonzalez says. “We have received some funding to go towards my student loan and that helped, and it’s nice. But I really think we still would have come anyway.”

Dothan welcomed them with open arms, and helping hands. It is a welcome that occurs after a vetting process lasting several months. It involves filling out questionnaires, exchanging multiple phone calls and finally meeting Mr. Goldsmith, when he travels to an applicant’s home city for an intense three-night, two-day, get-to-know-each-other visit followed by a return engagement in Dothan.

The rabbi’s husband has met seven families so far: in Illinois, Massachusetts, Florida and North Carolina. Three have moved to Alabama. Three out of the other four are in the “pipeline,” waiting for a lurching U.S. economy to improve.

For the Butlers, there was no hesitation. Their family dog is named Bama. Alabama is where they wanted to be.

The place they could not really afford in St. Petersburg is a now a three-bedroom house with a big backyard in a quiet neighbourhood that costs US$750 a month to rent.

They are 20 minutes — at most — from everywhere in town, and less than two hours from some of the best beaches in Florida. Ms. Butler recently secured a teaching job at a nearby high school, while Mr. Butler has gone back to school to study finance while working full-time at one of Mr. Blumberg’s hotels, a job arranged through the congregation.

“It’s cheap, it’s quiet, it’s calm, and the people here are really nice,” Ms. Butler says.

It is the kind of place where a young couple can raise a few kids and grow old together, can put down roots and never leave.

Change has come to Dothan’s Jewish community. Heaven’s waiting room is looking more and more like romper room. Temple Emanu-El’s Sunday school will have 22 students in September, and Rob Goldsmith is always on the lookout for more.

“This place has been reinvigorated, and now, when you look around at the congregation, there are younger faces, younger families,” he says. “We’ve actually had quite a few contacts from Jewish families in Canada, especially when it gets cold.

“And we’d really like to keep hearing from them.”