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    Jewish Community of North Minneapolis
    Jewish Community of North Minneapolis
    Jewish Community of North Minneapolis
    Ebook205 pages52 minutes

    Jewish Community of North Minneapolis

    By Rhoda Lewin

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    The stories of the Jewish community of North Minneapolis are an important part of the rich and diverse mosaic of North Minneapolis history. By 1936, there were more than 16,000 Jew in Minneapolis, and 70 percent of them lived on the North Side. The Jewish Community of North Minneapolis presents an intriguing record of the earliest beginnings of Jewish communities in the city. Through the medium of historic photographs, this book captures the cultural, economic, political, and social history of this community, from the late 1800s to the present day. The Jews in North Minneapolis enjoyed a busy social and cultural life with their landsmanschaften, and shopped together at the kosher butcher shops and fish markets, grocery stores and bakeries, clothing stores, barber shops, restaurants, and other small businesses that had sprung up along Sixth Avenue North and then Plymouth Avenue. Including vintage images and tales of the community-Hebrew schools, synagogues, and social groups-this collection uncovers the challenges and triumphs of the Jewish community.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcadia Publishing
    Release dateDec 5, 2001
    ISBN9781439611081
    Jewish Community of North Minneapolis
    Author

    Rhoda Lewin

    A community volunteer and historian, author Rhoda Lewin has been a columnist for American Jewish World, taught at the University of Minnesota, written articles on the Minneapolis Jewish community for Minnesota History and other publications, and is an elected member of the American Jewish Historical Society's Academic Council.

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      Jewish Community of North Minneapolis - Rhoda Lewin

      work."

      INTRODUCTION

      For those who ask why Jewish immigrants were so successful in America, one answer could be that the Jews’ identification with the underdog, which had been a Jewish dog for centuries, was what led the newcomers to be so innovative and to promote new industries. Others say that the Jew could innovate and invent because his religion told him he was free to question and discard the old ways, and that Jews are stamped with the values that make for success—a love for study and learning, the willingness to save and sacrifice for a future goal, and the courage to take a chance on new ventures.

      In the 1850s, the world was just beginning to industrialize, but almost two-thirds of Europe’s Jews were already working in factories or had mechanical jobs. One-third of them owned little shops or were wholesale merchants, and only three percent were still farmers. In Russia, members of the nobility hired Jews to manage their estates, and Jewish merchants bought and sold the peasants’ crops and cattle. The fledgling Russian clothing industry was almost entirely owned by Jews, practically every tailor and shoemaker was a Jew, and Jews were highly visible in the building trades and in the metal, wood, and tobacco industries.

      But then in 1881, Czar Alexander II was assassinated. His successor claimed that the Jews were the villains and announced that he would force one-third of them to leave the Russian Pale of Settlement, one-third to convert to Christianity, and the rest to die of starvation.

      Although they had to say goodbye, probably forever, to relatives, friends, and the world they’d grown up in, one-fourth of the world’s Jews—more than 3,000,000, most of them from Eastern Europe—were living in the United States by the time Congress passed the Johnson Act in 1924, which virtually closed off immigration and would later make it impossible for thousands of European Jews to escape the Holocaust.

      The journey to America was not easy. Most of them traveled to port cities in overcrowded third-class railroad cars or by horse and buggy. Although the price of steerage passage to America was only $12, many could not afford to buy tickets for the entire family, so a husband would have to leave his wife and children behind, hoping they could get along without him and promising to send money for tickets as soon as possible. When they boarded their ship, they might receive a mattress and, if they were lucky, a towel, a bar of soap, and a life preserver. The price of a ticket also included food, but the food was usually inadequate, often spoiled, and Orthodox Jews couldn’t eat most of it because it wasn’t kosher. As many as eight of them would be crowded into a small cabin or would end up eating and sleeping on the floor in the crowded, smelly, airless quarters in steerage.

      It took at least a week to cross the ocean, and when they finally arrived at Ellis Island, or Galveston, or some other port of entry, some were sent back to Europe because they couldn’t pass a physical exam, or didn’t have enough money to live on until they found jobs, or because the young man who was supposed to pick up his immigrant bride-to-be for a marriage arranged by a shadchan didn’t show up.

      Many of those who were permitted to stay were welcomed at Ellis Island by German Jews, who had begun coming to the New World in the 1840s. Many of them were already very successful businessmen, and they engaged in philanthropic farming by offering the tired, dirty, hungry newcomers free railroad tickets to the Midwest, where they said they were sure to find work. Others came to the Midwest because they already had friends or family there, or because they’d seen advertising booklets circulated throughout Europe by the Canadian Pacific Railroad advertising prairie land for sale as the richest soil in the world, or the Northern Pacific Railroad, promising jobs and temporary housing for newly-arrived immigrants. By 1924, when the Johnson Act effectively closed off immigration to the United States, there were 40,000 Jews living in Minnesota, most of them from Eastern Europe.

      Family members and friends gathered to mourn another victim of a pogrom, the anti-Jewish riots and killings that sometimes destroyed whole villages in Eastern Europe. Harry Lerner’s father, on the far right, left for America, the Promised Land, a few years later where his children, and now his grandchildren, would indeed fulfill the American dream. (Courtesy of Harry Lerner.)

      One

      JOURNEY TO THE NEW WORLD

      DESTINATION MINNEAPOLIS

      East European Jewish immigrants came to Minneapolis because relatives were already there, because it was the spot on the railroad where their money ran out, because Minneapolis was rumored to be a rich lumber town where there was money to be made, or perhaps because a sack of flour they’d seen in Vitebsk, Russia, said Pillsbury Company, Minneapolis, Minnesota—and there had to be jobs in a town where mills produced flour that traveled all the way to a Russian shtetl! Others had seen booklets like Minnesota: The Empire State of the New Northwest, published in 1878, which invited them to exchange the tyrannies and thankless toil of the Old World for the freedom and independence of the new, and promised that in Minnesota they would find unparalleled opportunities . . . good schools and churches, healthy climate, pure water, and happy, intelligent, and prosperous people. The state’s Immigration Board also sent agents to tap the incoming flow of immigrants in Quebec, Milwaukee, Chicago, and New York, and port cities in Sweden and Germany, urging them to come to Minnesota because it was such a healthy place to live that their death rate was only half the rate for the entire United States, and they would be sure to find jobs, as well as lofty hills, graceful slopes, verdant nooks, crystal streams, limpid lakes, innumerable pleasure resorts, boating, fishing, and outdoor sports, which would make them physically and mentally stronger, purer and nobler!

      As many as 40 percent of the newcomers arrived penniless, having spent all their money just to cover the cost of passage. And, of course, their job prospects were poor, because they could not speak English and knew nothing about America except what they’d read or heard. When the first 200 Russian Jews arrived at the St. Paul Railroad depot on July 14, 1882, the community was shocked at how hungry, dirty, and impoverished they were, but Minnesota Governor Lucius Hubbard, St. Paul Mayor Edmund Rice, the City Council, and the Chamber of Commerce quickly offered emergency aid and housed them in a temporary tent city on St. Paul’s West Side. Many of the German Jews and second- and third-generation American Jews who had begun coming to the Minnesota Territory in the 1840s were already successful businessmen and civic leaders, and they helped the removalites find jobs and places to live.

      In Minneapolis, members of B’nai B’rith, a men’s club organized by German Jews and volunteers like insurance agent Joseph Schanfeld, an immigrant from Romania, and medical student Max Seham, who would later become chief of staff at Minneapolis’s Mt. Sinai Hospital, were getting up as early as 5:00 a.m. to meet the trainloads of immigrants that began arriving on a daily basis. One of their assignments was to make the rounds of local factories where, if a worker hadn’t shown up, they could place a new arrival in the job. They placed about 25 per month this way, and B’nai B’rith and other community groups also provided many of the newcomers with food and other necessities, and a place to live until they were ready to be on their own.

      The newcomers also saved money to

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