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Family Names and their Descendents and Friends: The Jews In MinnesotaW. Gunther Plaut American Jewish Historical Society, N.Y. 1959 Chapter 19 Head of the Lakes Starts on page 132
Duluth, The third largest city of Minnesota, attracted early attention
as a natural port for the distribution of the state’s many resources. The
city’s settlement dated back to 1852, and its rapid development came with the
railroads and the exploitation of rich ore deposits of the Range. At the
close of the Civil War a few thousand people had made their home there along
the shore of Lake Superior. Their community reached across the state line
into Wisconsin, where the town was called Superior. The
character of the Jewish communities in Minnesota was always influenced by a
number of factors: When did the Jews arrive in relation to the rest of the
settlers? What background did the Jewish and non-Jewish residents have? Did
the Jews come with capital, ready to make their start in the relatively high
strata of the mercantile world, or did they come with little, living in the
poorer sections of town, starting in every way from the bottom? But
there is also the personal factor, and for minority groups it looms
especially large in pioneer country. Jewish life in St. Paul took its own
characteristic turn I part because of the Jews who first settled there, the
Austrians, Noahs and Elfelts, Minneapolis had its Rees, and the Range, its
Sax. In this respect Duluth was no different. Julius Austrian had holdings on
the site of the township and for a short time loved in that general area in
its formative days. The first Jew of whose permanent settlement we know came
in 1870. His name was Bernard Silberstein, who was then a man in his early
twenties. He was born in Budapest, Hungary, on March 4, 1848 and in 1856 had migrated
with his family to Detroit. He had married Nettie Weiss in 1870, and since
both he and his bride were enterprising as well as young, they decided to
make their honeymoon trip to the fabled waters of the Great Lake. In May, the
couple arrived in Duluth on the steamer Meter and liked what they saw. The
stayed and opened a dry-goods store. Soon the town expanded, for just then
the first railroad reached the area-an event which Silberstiein managed to
witness: Late in June
1870, (he related) we heard of the arrival of the first train at Thompson. A
construction train carried sixteen passengers from here (Duluth) to Fond du
Lac, from which point we had to follow an Indian trail over the hills on foot
to Thompson. Of the sixteen but four reached the village…the day was hot, and
the climb was hard, but three besides myself stuck to it, and after some ten
hours reached Thompson. Few of the passengers remained at Thompson…The
majority returned with the train. As the years went
by, Silberstein rose to considerable communal prominence. For many years he
served on civic and fraternal boards, as Commissioner of Public Safety, as a
member of the Library Board and of the Park Board; and Duluth credits him
with a large share of the responsibility for the excellence of its boulevard
system. He rose high in the Masonic Order and was one of Minnesota’s earliest
B’nai B’rith; for in 1871 he had already taken out a membership back in his
old home town of Detroit and, in 1921, had the rare joy of having a community
fete him on the occasion of his fiftieth anniversary in the Order. With a man of
such caliber as an early settler, organized Jewish life was likely to develop
quickly as soon as there were enough Jews in the community. However for some
years only a few Jews arrived. What happened to Jewish settlement in
Minneapolis, now happened in Duluth. The Minneapolis Jewish settlement was
delayed because the existing Jewish community in St. Paul acted as a natural
magnet which attracted the earlier immigrants. Similarly, the increasing
Jewish population of the Twin Cities retained many would-be northern
settlers, a development which was characteristic of other smaller minorities
as well. Full scale Jewish settlement in Duluth did not begin until ten years
after Silberstein had first come, and the earliest arrivals were men from St.
Paul; Joseph D. Sattler and Adolph Albenberg (relatives of Solomon Bergman)
and Myer Whitehead. Silberstein himself often went to the Twin Cities. He
joined Mount Zion In the mid-seventies as an out-of-town member-and quite
naturally the new Jewish settlers came under his influence. The 1880’s
witnessed the arrival of Ignatz Freimuth who
went into the general store business and who in later years was connected
with mining activates. In time, “Freimuth” became a familiar name in the
business life of Duluth. A charter member and later President of the Temple,
he also helped to found the Duluth Chamber of Commerce. The roster of
that decade is replete with those typical German family names which
characterized the two older cities farther south: Louis
Hammel, Philip H. Oswald, Jacob H. Winterfield, Sigmund Levy, Henry and Asa Leopold, Philip Levy, Sam and Louis
Loeb, Isaac Bondy, and Ben Heller. There were also families called Van
Baalen and Mondschine. In West Superior lived some younger people like the
three Abrams brothers who had moved north after their father, Emanuel, had
died in Minneapolis. By 1891, there
were enough Jews in Duluth to found a congregation. They called it “Emanuel”
and engaged a functionary named Glueck. The following year, they were
prepared to engage Rabbi David K. Eisenberg, who in turn was followed by
Rabbi Sigmund Frey. On February 26, 1896, the congregation was incorporated,
the same date on which thirty-nine years earlier the first Jewish
congregation in the state had received its charter. Bernard Silberstein was
the first President. Eight years later, the members dedicated their synagogue
and engaged a graduate of Hebrew Union College, Mendel Silber, as their rabbi.
From the beginning of the congregation placed itself into the Reform camp. As
in the Twin Cities, its spiritual direction was influenced to some degree by
the early arrival of East European Jews. In St. Paul, the development from
Orthodox tradition to the first stages of liberal Judaism had taken some
twenty years. In Minneapolis the span was only two to three years. In Duluth
the initial stage was missing: there was no gradual development from
Orthodoxy to Reform. In all three communities social diversification played
an essential role: Reform developed strongly and change became more rapid as
heterogeneous Jewish elements appeared in the population. Where
diversification occurred comparatively late (as in St. Paul) a change in
ritual and philosophy occurred slowly; where it came before the older Jewish
community was fully settled (as in Minneapolis), the change from Orthodoxy to
Reform came quickly and almost suddenly. Where, as in Duluth, there was no
significant interval between Western and Eastern immigration, the Western
Jews turned at once to Reform. For in Duluth, settlers from Eastern Europe
came only a few years after the first substantial contingent of German Jews. During the
eighties the Russian pogroms had brought the first Eastern settlers to
Duluth. There were Mose Polinsky and Samuel Oreckovsky, whose large families
soon became an important factor in the community. There were the Karons and
the Kaners, both with large families; the William Goldsteins and Isaac
Abrahamson; there were Max Zalk, Israel Oreckovsky and Joseph Polinsky. From
these early settlers and their children came much of the philanthropic and
religious leadership of Duluth’s next seventy years. In the middle eighties, another Russian
family arrived whose contribution to Jewish life became outstanding. This was
the family of Isaac Cook and his wife, Ida. They had come from Litvinovka,
Lithuania, and were related to the Mark family in St. Paul. Shortly after
their arrival they became the spark plugs in the organization of the
tradition-oriented section of the community. "Father was a Rabbi (wrote their
daughter). He knew nothing about business. Mother was the business woman in
Europe, as were many mothers whose husbands were students. Father immediately
looked around for a few Orthodox Jewish families-where services could be held
in our home on Fridays and Saturday mornings-our living room not only became
a synagogue, but a meeting place for immigrants during the first few
years...Father had been asked from the New York Immigration office to take
charge of all new-comers to Duluth. He held that office until he died, in
February, 1901. The Cooks' great interest was the
establishment of a sound Hebrew school. After some difficult early years the
Moses Montefiore Hebrew School began to flourish. A half century later, a
grateful community gave expression to its gratitude for one of the founders
and changed the school's name to Ida Cook Hebrew School-to remember an
unusual woman whose one hundredth birthday it had celebrated in 1943, on one
of Duluth's most memorable occasions. The oldest Orthodox synagogue in Duluth
was Tifereth Israel (Splendor of Israel) which was founded between 1892 and
1893. It's lay founders were Russian Jews, led by Jacob (Yankel) L. Levine
and Louis Cohen, and its first rabbi was Odessa-born Joseph Shapiro. The Orthodox Moses Montefiore
Congregation (part of which later developed into the Talmud torah, and
another part of which became Adas Israel Congregation) was the home of the
Lithuanian Jews and came into existence before the nineties were over, with
Isaac Cook and Joseph Polinsky in the chief positions of leadership. A third
traditional synagogue, B'nai Israel, was founded soon thereafter. Socially and religiously, East and West
stood apart in Duluth as they did in the Twin Cities. Occasionally, an
Eastern Jew like Jacob Zien would bridge the gap and join the German
Reformers. In any case the gap was narrower in Duluth than father south in
the older communities, and the organization of a B’nai Brith lodge in 1897
became dramatic proof of it. Bernard Silberstein, personifying the German-speaking element, became President, and
Isaac Cook, representing the Eastern Jews, Vice President. Neither St. Paul’s
nor Minneapolis’ lodges had at that time lost their Western character. In
fact, probably neither of them had any East European members before the turn
of the century. To be
sure, the Duluth experiment was short-lived. Perhaps it was as yet too early
for type of communal unification. The lodge did not survive. Not until 1904
was it reorganized as Covenant Lodge No. 569. Meanwhile, the Russian Jews had
found another outlet for their fraternal needs and had by 1900 founded Duluth
City Lodge (No. 133) of the Order of Brith Abraham (=OBA). But while similar
lodges in comparable communities were Yiddish-speaking, the Duluth chapter
spoke English, thereby making the ultimate transition from OBA to B’nai Brith
much easier. At
the new century got under way, Duluth’s Jewish population grew to between
1,300 and 1,500 souls. There were now four congregations: Adas (Adat) Israel
(with hebrah kaddishah, or burial society), B’nai Israel, Tifereth Israel and
Emanuel; and three of them had spiritual leaders: Israel Teplitz at Adas, Maurice
Lefkovits at Emanuel, and Jacob Halpern at Tifereth. There were two
cemeteries; there were charitable organizations, an educational group, three
social clubs and four lodges. The Zion Society spearheaded the jewish
nationalist movement in the city. By
this time, Duluth was farther along the path of communal unification than
Minneapolis and St. Paul. There were only a few German Jewish settlers who
held social and economic pre-eminence. Jews in both camps soon reached
comparable economic positions, and while social leadership remained with the
German group for some years, its number grew smaller and marriage between the
groups became more and more frequent. Furthermore, since Emanuel’s Rabbi
Maurice Lefkovits was a Zionist, the emotional responses of most Jews to the
insistent voice of nationalism were undivided. Of the three major Minnesota
communities which saw the development from a unitary to a dual Jewish
community structure, Duluth was the first to foreshadow the ultimate third
step: the reunification into one single Jewish community. In Duluth, this
happened within ten years after its complete social diversification had been
achieved. Minneapolis would follow suit, while St. Paul, whose split into two
parts had been the longest in coming, was also the last to overcome it. Submitted by Karen Alpert
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