NEW ORLEANS — “Do you have a pioneering spirit?” read the recent ad in the Jewish Week newspaper of New York. “Are you searching for a meaningful community where you can make a difference?”

To generations of American Jews, the pitch had a familiar ring. But this was not an invitation to settle the Promised Land. It was a call to repopulate New Orleans, a city known less for its Jewish culture than for its shellfish, sin, and pre-Lenten Mardi Gras.

But New Orleans’s Jewish population long has been a subtle but important ingredient in this curious dish of a city. Its numbers, though always small, have declined since Hurricane Katrina. Of the 10,000 Jews in the area before the storm, 7,000 remain.

With fewer dues-paying members, some synagogues and Jewish service agencies have been kept afloat by donations from Jews around the country. But the bulk of that largesse, provided by the nonprofit United Jewish Communities, dries up at the end of the year.

The Jewish community is by no means New Orleans’s most afflicted demographic group. But Jewish leaders do not want to see a single Jewish institution closed. They don’t wish to consolidate any of the seven synagogues and two Chabad centers that offer a full range of religious observance.

“We need people,” said Jackie Gothard, president of Congregation Beth Israel, a modern Orthodox synagogue that has seen more than 40% of its members move away.

So Jewish New Orleans has cooked up a novel solution: a recruitment drive.

The city’s Jewish leaders are advertising and hoping to attract at least 1,000 Jews to the city over the next five years. They are stressing the Jewish concept of tikkun olam, Hebrew for “healing the world” — or, in this case, healing a broken city.

They also plan to lure them with benefits. Starting in August, any Jew who has relocated to the city since January 1 will be eligible for up to $5,500 for moving and housing expenses, interest-free loans of up to $30,000, half-price tuition at Jewish day schools, and a year of free membership at a synagogue and a Jewish community center. The concept was hatched, in part, by Michael Weil, an economist who moved here from Israel in October to head the Jewish Federation of Greater New Orleans, the umbrella group for the city’s Jewish agencies and programs.

As a consultant to the Israeli government, Mr. Weil helped settle thousands of Jewish refugees in Israel after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The New Orleans benefits were based, in part, on the sal klita, the “absorption benefits basket” offered to Israeli newcomers. “I would hope that nobody’s going to move here just because of the incentive package, but it will be a lubricant,” Mr. Weil said. “We cannot sit around waiting for the Road Home program and all these other things to take place, because we want to be in that great, better place tomorrow.”

Road Home is a Louisiana state program that distributes federal funds for Katrina recovery efforts. The only recruitment ad that has run thus far, the one in New York’s Jewish Week, was paid for by Rabbi Uri Topolosky, who recently was chosen to lead Congregation Beth Israel. It touts the Jewish Federation subsidies and the chance to join in an “inspirational rebuilding effort.” The federation will begin running its own ads this year in the nation’s Jewish newspapers.

So far, Jewish leaders acknowledge that they have attracted only a few newcomers, such as Hal Karp, a former magazine writer from Dallas who is moving here to teach in the public schools.

Mr. Karp, 43, said he was “ready to fix the … world down there.”

In December, attorney Serena Pollack, 32, headed south from Chicago to take a job with the New Orleans law firm of Lowe, Stein, Hoffman, Allweiss & Hauver.

A Milwaukee native, Ms. Pollack fell in love with the city last year after she volunteered to gut Jewish-owned houses in the Lakeview district. Inside the homes, she found the musty trappings of grandparents, or photos from bar mitzvahs. They reminded her of the people she grew up with.

When she moved here, she found a Jewish community that strongly identified with her new Southern home. “There’s such a deep Jewish tradition here,” she said. “But it’s not overt — and that’s what’s so cool about it.”

Lawrence Powell, a historian at Tulane University, has called the Jewish experience in New Orleans “unusual even by Southern standards.”

Here, Touro Synagogue, the oldest Jewish congregation outside the former 13 American colonies, holds an annual “Jazz Fest Shabbat” to coincide with the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. This year, it featured a jazz band and an interracial gospel choir.

At Touro’s business office, Mark Rubenstein introduces himself with two business cards. The first identifies him as the temple’s executive director. The second identifies him as a member of the Krewe of Orpheus (he is vice president), a large carnival club that parades in the streets on the Monday before Mardi Gras.

Carnival, Mr. Rubenstein explained, has evolved into a secular tradition, at least when it comes to the street parades.

“Southern Jews are very good at coming up with work-arounds,” he said.

Since 1991, a bar band called the New Orleans Klezmer All-Stars has explored the parallels between funky black parade rhythms and Eastern European wedding music.

In the late 1990s, during one particularly uninspiring football season, local poet Andrei Codrescu remembers watching with astonishment as a rabbi marched through Jackson Square with a handful of congregants. He was playing “When the Saints Go Marching In” on the shofar.

Then there is the food. Although some Jews keep kosher, everyone seems to have a joke about the lure of a local cuisine.

For those who do keep kosher, there are two restaurants. The best known, Kosher Cajun, serves a mock shrimp po-boy made with fried Alaskan pollack. During Mardi Gras, it makes its own “king cake,” the traditional ringed pastry with symbolic ties to the Jesus birth story.

According to the federation, about 150 new Jewish households have relocated to the city since Hurricane Katrina.