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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780870135989 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Michigan State University Press |
| Publication date: | 06/30/2001 |
| Series: | Discovering the Peoples of Michigan |
| Pages: | 93 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.30(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Jews in Michigan
By Judith Levin Cantor
Michigan State University Press
Copyright © 2001 Judith Levin CantorAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87013-598-9
CHAPTER 1
Opportunities and Challenges
Early Jewish Fur Traders
In 1761 the first Jew, Ezekiel Solomon, settled in the wilderness of British Michigan, then known as the "Upper Country"—officially part of Canada in those years before the American Revolution. German-born frontiersman Ezekiel Solomon came from Montreal by canoe to Fort Michilimackinac at the northern tip of the lower peninsula—first as a supplier to the British troops and then as a fur trader. He was joined by his partners, fellow members of the Montreal Jewish congregation—Chapman Abraham who came to Montreal from England, and Gershon Levi, Benjamin Lyon, and Levi Solomons, natives of Germany. Within a year, Chapman Abraham had moved to establish himself as a trader at the small settlement of "Fort Detroit," the oldest city west of the Appalachians and another stopover on the trade route from Montreal.
At this time, the British redcoats had just conquered Michigan in the Seven Years' War against the French and Indians, and the native tribes launched an uprising against the British outposts in order to retain control over their lands. Both Solomon and Abraham were captured during surprise attacks on their forts but each managed to survive the massacres. Solomon was taken prisoner by the Ottawas at Fort Michilimackinac, but had the good fortune to be ransomed in Montreal. Abraham was captured in "Chief Pontiac's Conspiracy of 1763" against Fort Detroit, but unexpectedly was released, and thus avoided being burned to death at the stake. His miraculous story is recounted in Stephen Vincent Benet's "Jacob and the Indians."
In one of Solomon's expeditions to Mackinac, documented in a 1770 invoice, he commanded a crew of sixteen French Canadian voyageurs in two "canoes" or bateaux. They carried twenty-eight bales of dry goods including blankets and cotton and linen goods, as well as flour, one bale of tobacco, brass and copper kettles, guns, 1,600 pounds of gunpowder, shot and ball, and 320 gallons of wine, brandy and rum! All this had to be navigated across the rivers and Great Lakes, while handling tricky portages and facing the dangers not only of hazardous storms but also of Indian attacks. He made this rigorous journey repeatedly for several decades.
In the meantime, from as far west as the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, Solomon was licensed to bring furs out for the European market, which was clamoring for the then-stylish beaver hat. Furs were rated along with gold as valuable possessions, and every European dreamed of owning at least a fur hat or cape. Retracing the perilous voyage back across the lakes and rivers and rapids, he carried rich cargoes of furs out to Montreal. Solomon built himself a home within the fort at Michilimackinac to use when he was in Michigan and was an active participant in the life of that community, even contributing to the fundraiser to finance a missionary there. On his death in 1805, Solomon was buried in the cemetery of the Montreal Jewish congregation where he had retained his active membership.
Chapman Abraham chose Fort Detroit as his base of operations, and was bringing a flotilla of five bateaux laden with merchandise across the stormy Great Lakes from Montreal when he was captured by Chief Pontiac in the uprising. In 1768, when Detroit's population under the British flag was about 700, Abraham purchased a house and a lot inside that fort a few years after his fabled escape. During the next fifteen years, before the end of the American Revolution when the population of Fort Detroit was more than tripling to approximately 2,200, he operated a successful business there known as Chapman Abraham and Company. Upon his death in 1783, however, he was buried in the Jewish cemetery of the Montreal congregation. It would be sixty-five more years until a Jewish cemetery, an institution vital to a Jewish community, would be established in Michigan in Ann Arbor in 1848.
Mackinac and Fort Detroit were among the most strategic early trading posts on the Great Lakes, valued by the French, the Indians, the British and the Americans. In fact, despite their formal agreement in the 1783 Treaty of Paris settling the American Revolution, the British refused to relinquish Michigan to the Americans for thirteen more years. Finally in 1796, England lowered the Union Jack over Forts Detroit and Mackinac and Michigan became part of the United States. During the crucial development years of the eighteenth century, the adventuresome Jewish fur traders, Ezekiel Solomon, Chapman Abraham and their three partners, had helped to push back the wilderness of the Great Lakes country and to open up these vast new lands of the continent for settlement. A Michigan historical plaque and an archaeological excavation of Ezekiel Solomon's house at the Michigan State Park at Fort Michilimackinac recount more of this fascinating story.
Michigan Attracts a Jewish Community to Detroit by the 1850s
About a hundred other hardy Jewish traders and pioneers settled in Michigan by the mid-nineteenth century. Among the most intriguing was the folk hero Edward Kanter, who learned the Huron, Chippewa, and Potawatomi dialects—and thus made close friends with the native tribes. If a native leader would come to visit in Detroit, they were known to sit together on the sidewalk outside his business to smoke a peace pipe. The city of Detroit named a street after Kanter, an imaginative community leader who founded the German American Bank in Detroit and was elected to the Michigan legislature. An anti-slavery activist, he was one of the founders of the Republican Party in 1856 in Jackson.
Ernestine L. Rose was another extraordinary abolitionist activist. Daughter of a rabbi from a small town in Poland, she was a social reformer who visited Detroit in 1846 while on a national lecture tour. Rose belonged to a select group of American crusaders who, by the mid 1800s, were speaking out not only against slavery and child labor and for free public schools, but already were advocating for the civil and property rights of women. Rose addressed the Michigan House of Representatives, then located in Detroit, on the subject of women's suffrage, sixty-five years before the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution granting women the right to vote. So effective was the presentation of this self-educated Jewish immigrant woman that the legislature passed a resolution praising her eloquence and stating that "the agitation on the subject of women's suffrage in Michigan began with Ernestine Rose." She is currently recognized in the Michigan Women's Hall of Fame.
By the 1850s, there were sufficient numbers, especially in Detroit, to form a Jewish community. With its commercially valuable location on the river connecting two of the great lakes leading westward into the continent, Detroit had grown to a city of approximately 20,000 with a population of fifty-one Jews. More than half of these Jews were German-born, but already one was from Poland, and two adults even had been born in America.
At that time, Jewish people were leaving Germany and coming to America—hoping to make a better life in a new land with guaranteed rights—because of harsh discriminatory laws against them in Bavaria and Prussia, In Bavaria Jews were not allowed to become citizens and only the oldest son in a Jewish family was allowed to marry, thus limiting the number of families. Where they could live, their business opportunities, and their education were all restricted. They were forbidden from most professions and had to pay additional special heavy taxes.
Encouraged by the spirit of the American Revolution as well as the French Revolution, many Jews joined the 1848 Revolution in Germany to bring about the liberal changes that were so needed there. A number of these progressive-minded individuals not only were from established families but some already had received higher educations. When that German revolution failed, those who had supported it found it necessary to emigrate from their homeland for their own safety. Consequently, many of the young, independent, and highly educated German Jews struck out to reestablish their lives in the world's first modern democratic nation—the United States of America.
Why Michigan?
Detroit, or another Michigan town, was frequently not the first stop for the Jewish immigrants from Germany; yet, Michigan had several advantages that eventually attracted these progressive freedom-loving people.
First, the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which was written when Michigan was still a territory, remarkably had included the new United States of America's first written guarantee of basic civil liberties, particularly the freedom of religion. The ordinance stated: "No person ... shall ever be molested on account of his mode of worship or religious sentiments." Furthermore, the ordinance banned slavery from the territory almost eight decades before the Thirteenth Amendment. This early piece of American federal legislation laid the foundation for the protection of fundamental liberty that later was adopted in the Bill of Rights. The precedent-breaking Northwest Ordinance also stated that "schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged." Fifty years later when Michigan progressed from territory to statehood in 1837, the provisions of the Northwest Ordinance, including a Bill of Rights, were considered so important that they were specifically included in the original Constitution of Michigan. This reinforced a great tradition of freedom in the state.
In addition, the University of Michigan, one of the nation's first public universities, was the country's largest public university by the time of the Civil War, with an enrollment of 1,200 students. Because it offered studies in law, medicine, and the liberal arts, and admitted women by 1870, the University of Michigan was certainly an attraction to immigrant families who dreamed of a higher education for their children. Furthermore, the Michigan Constitution provided for public instruction and, by 1860, the Legislature approved of tax-supported free public schools through high school, a landmark achievement at that time. Michigan indeed held promise for the Jewish immigrant in search of the American dream. American Jews regarded the non-sectarian, religiously neutral, universal public school as the essential key where their children could become fully integrated citizens and get the education to take advantage of this land of opportunity. Public school encouraged students to become "real Americans."
Furthermore, the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825 was the critical development that opened up travel to Michigan. Michigan sent agents to New York to spread the word about the shortcut in transportation and to lure new residents here. Using the canal as well as the newly-improved inland waterways, plank roads, and railroads as far as Chicago, the resolute Jewish immigrant now could more easily get to this frontier area from the crowded Eastern seaboard cities. For the sum of ten dollars, he could travel on the horse-drawn barges of the Erie Canal and then transfer to one of the numerous lake steamers between Buffalo and Detroit. The journey was not without risks, however. In Mark Sloman's diary, he reports that his wallet with a total of twenty-dollars was stolen near Albany, New York—so that he had to walk the rest of the way to Michigan! Once in Michigan, the German Jew joined other Germans, who made up the largest single foreign-born group in the state.
The first priority for the new arrival was to earn a living, which demanded the utmost of hard work and initiative. Even before the Civil War, many Jewish immigrants became the ultimate entrepreneurs, putting packs on their backs and striking out as peddlers–a pattern that would be repeated with successive waves of newcomers. They brought sundries and supplies to fellow German farmers and their wives throughout the state, people with whom they shared a common language and background. Expansion of their businesses naturally followed, first with the purchase of a horse and wagon, and then with the opening of general and dry goods stores. From these modest beginnings, usually with the participation of the whole family, some of Michigan's prosperous commercial enterprises evolved. In 1850 Detroit's census of the fifty-one Jews reveals a peddler and ten merchants, as well as two cigar makers, a blacksmith, grocer, one physician, and even the eccentric but prominent portrait painter, Frederick Cohen.
Michigan's First Congregation: Beth El
With a small community thus settled in Detroit, twelve Orthodox or Traditionalist men meeting at the home of Isaac and Sarah Cozens in 1850 formed the first Jewish congregation in Michigan, calling itself Beth El (House of God). Since a minimum of ten is required by Jewish tradition to have a congregation for public prayer, this new organization met that need in the young community. The new group hired a rabbi and, as was typical, this spiritual leader served the young community in a variety of ways—as a religious teacher, as the cantor (singer), as the official who performed all the traditional ritual functions (including acting as the ritual slaughterer for kosher meat), and on request as a judge to settle disputes within the community.
Following a pattern that is characteristic even today of small Jewish communities that are just getting organized, this congregation soon rented a room in which to meet. They then raised money to set up a school for the religious instruction of their children and to purchase land for a cemetery, a section adjoining Detroit's historic Elmwood Cemetery. Beth El next formed a society that cared for the sick and gave financial assistance to the poor, in addition to attending to the traditions regarding the burial of the deceased. Before long, a "Ladies Society for the Support of Hebrew Widows and Orphans" assembled to sew and to care for widows and children in need. A whole self-help social order was established within this small pioneer congregation—a response to the Biblical moral tradition and a carryover from the traditional organization of European Jewish communities.
The Jewish tradition of organizing for assistance to those in need and for service to the community became highly developed as the numbers of immigrants increased and the needs rose dramatically. The Beth El model of the self-help society to care for each other was duplicated in the subsequent congregation, the Shaarey Zedek Society, as well as in other Jewish communities throughout the state, and most notably in the 1899 establishment of the United Jewish Charities of Detroit.
Although the Beth El congregation originally was formed by the Orthodox, by the 1860s a German-born Reform movement in Judaism appealed to many members of the congregation who already had become quite Americanized. Businessmen Simon Heavenrich and Magnus and Martin Butzel encouraged the national leader of the Reform movement, Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise of Cincinnati, to visit Beth El while on a tour. Soon there was considerable interest in introducing a more Americanized service and making innovations in the religious practices—innovations such as a choir, eliminating separate seating of men and women, and prayers in English.
Traditionalists organize Shaarey Zedek Society, 1861
As often happens when two religious groups have irresolvable differences of opinion, a split occurred. When the Traditionalists saw that they could not stem the tide toward Reform in Beth El, seventeen of them withdrew in 1861 and organized the Shaarey Zedek (Gates of Righteousness) Society. As in the original Beth El, the pattern of development included hiring a spiritual leader, teaching the children, organizing for care of the needy, and opening a cemetery. In 1862, Con gregation Shaarey Zedek established Detroit's first all-Jewish cemetery—Beth Olem—miles from the center of town, "way out in the country," on one-and-a-half acres of land in an area now known as Ham tramck. Eventually, this neighborhood became highly industrialized, however, and the walled grassy oasis of sacred graves that is the Beth Olem cemetery is unique in that it now lies surrounded by the parking lot of the General Motors Cadillac Motor Car plant.
Shaarey Zedek had purchased its first house of worship from the former St. Mathews Colored Episcopal Church on Congress and St. Antoine Streets in the early 1860s. But with an enlarged membership, in 1877 Shaarey Zedek laid the cornerstone for the first building in Michigan to be built specifically as a synagogue. Up to this time, all places of Jewish worship locally had been in buildings that were remodeled for synagogue use. In the impressive patriotic Fourth of July ceremonies before a large crowd of Detroit's citizens and addressed by the mayor, it is significant that the dignitaries deposited in the new synagogue's cornerstone the constitutions of the United States and of Michigan—the legal cornerstones of democracy, of religious freedom, and of separation of church and state. In addition, in 1913, Congregation Shaarey Zedek was one of the charter organizers of the Conservative movement in American Jewry, a moderate middle group that incorporates selected changes in the tradition while maintaining its traditional basis.
By 1861, therefore, Detroit saw the foundations laid for one of the leading Reform temples in America—Temple Beth El (1850), and for one of the leading Traditional (now Conservative) American synagogues, Congregation Shaarey Zedek. Both have roots dating to 1850 and both are still among the largest and most active congregations in the country. Throughout their long histories, both congregations have included local, state, and national leaders in their membership.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Jews in Michigan by Judith Levin Cantor. Copyright © 2001 Judith Levin Cantor. Excerpted by permission of Michigan State University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction.................... 1
I. Opportunities and Challenges.................... 3
II. A Statewide Presence.................... 23
III. A New Era of Industry.................... 41
IV. World War I and its Aftermath.................... 49
V. The Second World War and Its Legacy.................... 61
Sidebars....................
"Bridge at Mackinac".................... 36
Myra Wolfgang.................... 46
"A Tribute to Hank Greenberg".................... 59
Medal of Honor.................... 63
Notes.................... 69
For Further Reference.................... 77
To Locate Jewish Communities in Michigan.................... 82