USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > Growth and achievement: Temple Israel, 1854-1954 > Part 2
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This was the year when the respectable citizens of Boston, gathering in a mob, assaulted the Court House to rescue Anthony Burns, a fugitive slave who was seized under the Fugitive Slave Act for return to his master. The Massachusetts Legislature almost unanimously passed hostile resolutions against the Kansas-Nebraska Bill. This was followed by a meeting in Worcester of Garrisonian abolitionists to advocate that Massachusetts withdraw from the Union in order to be free from the contagion of association with states where slavery was legal. Certain of the great preachers of Boston who had fought for liberal religious thinking - Theodore Parker, James Freeman Clarke, Octavius Brooks Frothingham - and other leaders of the community, were so preoc- cupied with the Kansas and the slavery agitation that they had little time to give to merely local affairs. Yankee-
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Early Milieu and Growth
land was moving towards a radical free soil stand, and the irresistible conflict over slavery.
The anti-slavery crusade was but the dramatic expres- sion of the reform impulse that moved a generation. Boston was the center of the reform movements of the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Secularized, the Puritan conscience was dedicated to the salvation of society. By 1804, liberal religionists captured Har- vard, and by the 1850's the clergymen who really counted were either Unitarians or progressive Congre- gationalists. These clergymen, together with interested laymen, agitated for equal rights for women and the abo- lition of war, prison reform and the public school, tem- perance. So far reaching was the spirit of the "age of newness" that, at Brook Farm, some of Boston's most gifted sons and daughters set up a model community in the hope that others would revolutionize their way of life and follow suit. To Carlyle, Emerson wrote that any- one on the streets of Boston might produce from his pocket a project for a new world.
Material expansion kept pace with expansion in thought. The Back Bay improvements begun in 1849 were being pushed forward, and the South End was de- veloping. By the 1850's, Boston, which earlier had been a commercial and financial center without industry, was industrialized. The city was one of the largest boot and shoe markets in the world, while its railroad builders were leaders in the field. As in the past, Boston money continued to finance enterprises outside the city.
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1854 - Boston and its Jews
Concurrent with material advancements and reform ferments was a population change of vast importance. Up to the Revolution and down to the 1840's, the Hub did not have a considerable influx of immigrants of non- English stock. Although from the earliest days, French, Irish, Spanish, Jews, and many other people had from time to time made Boston their home, the city remained an Anglo-Saxon, Puritan community. As it grew rich and important as a commercial market, it attracted the youth from rural New England to increase its popula- tion, and it remained almost untouched by continental European immigration.
As the fourth decade of the nineteenth century brought the great famine to Ireland, and political unrest and hard times to continental Europe, large numbers of immigrants sought refuge on these shores. In the 1840's, 1,713,251 immigrants came to the United States - a number that exceeded the total number of new- comers who had come in all the years after the Revolu- tion up to 1840. As the fifties began, it was apparent that even this figure would be exceeded. Thus, in 1851, immigration was 379,466; in 1852, 371,603; in 1853, 368,645. For the first time, a significant number of Irish and continental European immigrants were attracted to settle in Boston. Among them were Jews, the Jews who founded the Boston Jewish community.
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Early Milieu and Growth
II
The earliest record of a Jew being in what is now the United States is not in the record of the coming of the . twenty-three Jews to New Amsterdam in 1654, but in a record of the Great and General Court of the Province of Massachusetts Bay of 1649. Solomon Franco, a Jew, arriving on a Dutch vessel, proposed to settle in Boston. In order to obviate the danger from having a living Jew in their midst, the Government paid him, out of the Co- lonial Treasury, to leave the province. This, too, in the face of the fact that the Puritans as well as the Pilgrim fathers, turning with special reverence to the Old Testa- ment for guidance, planned and prayed to establish their colony after the model of ancient Israel. In 1641, they formulated "The Laws and Liberties of Massachusetts" after "the modell of the Judiciall laws of Moses." It well may be said that while Jewish ideals were a dominant influence in those early days, there was no welcome for Jews.
Inhabitancy was a privilege to be had only by consent of town authorities, for an inhabitant immediately be- came invested with rights, responsibilities, and land. Moreover, in Massachusetts, as in the other colonies, the early settlers brought with them from Europe the politi- cal dogma and practice that state and church were in- separably united. No one enjoyed political rights unless he was a member of the dominant church. Dissenting
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1854 - Boston and its Jews
Protestants as well as Jews and Catholics were outsiders. In 1631, the Great and General Court of Massachusetts Bay "ordered that henceforth no man shall be admitted to the freedom of this Commonwealth but such as are members of the churches within the limits of this juris- diction."
In spite of anti-Jewish restrictions, from 1649 onward there was hardly a time when there were not Jews in Boston. Never very many, none prominent in the com- munity life, and more often only transients, or those who moved on elsewhere when they found no great oppor- tunity here. The family of Moses Michael Hays is sig- nificant for their being exceptional. There is a tradition that about the year 1830 some Algerian Jews settled in Boston, but they did not remain.
The 1840's mark the beginning of a Jewish commu- nity in Boston. Jews came at a time of economic expan- sion. New England merchants were sending their mer- chandise to the new Western cities of Chicago and Cleveland, St. Louis, Savannah, and Memphis, to be distributed through the local territory. To these new trade centers also went the Yankee lad, who previously was initiated in business through peddling. This left a vacuum in New England, which Jewish peddlers filled. Arriving in New York from Germany, Austria, and Po- land, young Jews started in American life through itiner- ant trade. With the passing of the Yankee peddler, they came North, to settle in New England and Boston. Bos-
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Early Milieu and Growth
ton directories reveal that, in addition to peddlers, Jews functioned as tailors, jewellers, watchmakers, furriers, cigarmakers, shoemakers, and provision dealers.
We do not know the precise number of Jews living in Boston in the 1840's. For some, they were terribly in- conspicuous. In 1849, the usually observant British Con- sul at Boston, Thomas C. Gratton, wrote that, "Boston does not, I believe, contain one individual Israclite." Similarly, Mrs. Louisa Crowninshield Bacon, a Boston Brahmin, writing of her youthful days, recalled: "There was also one Jew, a thin old man with a close white beard who wore large silver-boned spectacles. His name was Aaron and he was said to be a very worthy character. I think he worked for some small provision market." In 1849, Temple Ohabei Shalom numbered 120 families, and Chevra Ahabath Achim, one hundred families. The latter congregation was short-lived.
Temple Ohabei Shalom, founded in 1842, was the first Jewish organization established in Boston. It was a modest beginning by a small group of humble men - peddlers, capmakers, clerks, and shopkeepers - who had not, in all probability, been unstirred by the religious re- vivals which were at the time agitating Boston. They built no synagogue, but held services in a rented "upper room" on Washington Street where, in 1844, the Epis- copal City Missionary recorded the presence of forty congregants. In 1844, Boston's Jews established their first burial ground. In 1851, Ohabei Shalom purchased
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1854- Boston and its Jews
for $3,417.23 a plot of land on Warren (now Warren- ton) Street for a synagogue. With the help of contri- butions from their Christian neighbors, a fund of some seven thousand dollars was raised, and Boston's first synagogue was erected and dedicated on March 26, 1852.
What sort of welcome could the Jews expect? The legal disabilities against non-Congregationalists had dis- appeared by the end of the seventeenth century, and in 1833 church and state were formally severed. But in 1854, the Know-Nothing Party, a nativist movement, was at its height. Massachusetts elected a Know-Noth- ing governor in that year. Two decades earlier a mob had burned the Charlestown Convent.
It is here that we touch the character of the Know- Nothing prejudice - it was anti-Irish Catholic. By the 1850's, the Irish were sufficiently numerous to threaten, so it was thought, the Yankee way of life. The Brahmin Boston Society for the Prevention of Pauperism com- plained of a "vast influx of foreign pauperism, ready- made and hatched abroad, combined of the worst and most intractable elements, constituting such a social pest. .. . " Anti-Irish, some Bostonians were also anti- Catholic, as had been their anti-Popery forefathers who, in 1647, had enacted a law: "No Jesuit or spiritual or ec- clesiastical person ordained by the Pope or See of Rome shall henceforth come into Massachusetts. Any person not freeing himself of suspicion shall be jailed then banished. If a second time, he shall be put to death."
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Early Milieu and Growth
Important differences separated Irish peasant from Boston Yankee. The latter, in the midst of the great reform movements of the day, believed, in the words of Edward Everett Hale, that "all things are possible to one who believes." The Irish, desperately poor and rudely uprooted from their native land, were fatalists. More than that, they were scornful of Yankee reform notions. They were hostile to liberal religion and the public school; and they sneered at abolitionism as "Nigger- ology." Unlike Yankee reformers, they were against the revolutions of 1848. Throughout the period they ques- tioned the basic assumption of the liberals that America must sweep away institutions that made for inequality.
In time, Irish Boston and Yankee Boston would learn to live with each other. The Know-Nothing Party dis- appeared as quickly as it had arrived. The wiser heads noted that there was room for the Irish in an expanding economy. And there were Bostonians who remained faithful to the idea of the melting pot. January 2, 1854, in the year of the Know-Nothing governor, the Boston Herald defended the first appointment of "foreigners" to the police force. A Concord philosopher at home in Boston - Ralph Waldo Emerson - wrote: "The energy of the Irish, Germans, Swedes, Poles, and Cossacks, and all the European tribes, and of the Africans, and of the Polynesians - will construct a new race, a new religion, a new state, a new literature, which will be as vigorous as the new Europe which came out of the smelting-pot of the Dark Ages. . . . "
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1854 - Boston and its Jews
It was in this spirit that native Bostonians greeted the appearance of the Jewish community in their midst. All religious Boston, not merely the Jews, hailed the dedica- tion of Temple Ohabei Shalom's synagogue in 1852. The Reverend Cyrus A. Bartol preached to his fashionable West Boston Church: "There is something fine and ad- mirable even in the humble circumstances of such a spectacle. The courageous and cheering rearing, upon a close street, in a low quarter of the city, of that small synagogue - that a few might worship the God of their Fathers, in the way of their Fathers," prompts the ques- tion of whether we practice our religion with such ear- nestness as theirs. Similarly, the Mayor of Boston and "other prominent citizens" attended the dedication of Temple Adath Israel in 1854, whose members had seceded from Ohabei Shalom.
Unfortunately, all early records of Ohabei Shalom and Adath Israel have been lost, so that we cannot tell just what happened to cause a split in Ohabei Shalom and the formation of a new congregation. It is probable that the split derived not from theological differences, but from ethnic conflict between the German and the Polish elements, each insisting on leadership and control of synagogue affairs. A newspaper report of the dedication of the new synagogue on Pleasant Street supports this explanation. The Daily Evening Traveler noted that the nearly sixty congregants were mostly "seceders from the first Jewish Synagogue established in this city, in which
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Early Milieu and Growth
they say the Polish Jews (whose ceremonies are some- what different from theirs) obtained the preponder- ance."
III
Temple Israel was founded when Boston led the way in the New England Renaissance. The period was char- acterized by growth, experimentation, and discovery, by the creation of a liberal literature, liberal religions, and lib- eral institutions. It was foremost a period of democratic aspiration in which reformers succeeded in extending rights and privileges to disadvantaged classes. Contem- poraries called their age the "age of newness," for they were less concerned to obey than to transcend the past.
The secession of 1854 from Ohabei Shalom, although it did not lead immediately to Reform ritual and theol- ogy, was an altogether characteristic expression of the times. It was also prophetic. A feeble but bold infant undertook, with abiding faith, to exercise the American right to worship God according to its religious con- science. The men of '54, in founding Temple Israel, now the second oldest existing congregation in Massachu- setts, prepared the way for the creation of liberal, Ameri- can Judaism. That Judaism preserves ancient idealism and truth unfettered by outworn or transitory ritual - a living religion for free Americans.
CHAPTER THREE
Congregational Life: 1854-1954
I
n 1854, Adath Israel counted twenty-five members; in 1954, 1472 were on its rolls. The interven- ing century tells an interesting tale.
Although the names of the members - Ehrlich, Hyne- man, Nordenshild, Strauss, Wolf, Bendix, Morse, Des- sauer, Dreyfuss, Bacharach, Herkules, - suggests a gen- erous preponderance of Deitchuks, Adath Israel com- prised a mixed multitude in its early years. A membership list for 1864 documents the tradition that Algerian or North African Jews had settled in New England's lead- ing city. Isaac Edrehi and Joseph Almosnino were clearly of the Sephardic tribe. It seems likely that Isaac Edrehi was related to Israel Edrehi, prototype of the Spanish traveller in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's Tales of A Wayside Inn. In 1861, a Dr. Delbange lectured at the synagogue, for which he received the somewhat reluctant fee of three dollars. Jacob Norton, listed in the Boston
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Early Milieu and Growth
Directory as a "furrier and presser of straw hats" and an avid student of masonic history, and William Gold- smith, "jeweler and optician," both charter members of Adath Israel, each claimed to be the first of the sons of Jacob to arrive in Boston, in 1837. Norton came from Posen, German Poland, by way of England, Goldsmith, directly from the kingdom of Bavaria.
Seemingly, the founders of Adath Israel were among the more prosperous of Boston's Jews. It was no light matter or petty generosity to abandon the newly con- structed Ohabei Shalom building, the cemetery and its privileges, and Judah Touro's pending legacy of five thousand dollars (Touro died in New Orleans in 1854; his bequest was apparently contested but in vain). Yet the moral triumph belonged to the secedents. They re- tained the Sefer Torah, a gift of Mrs. Charles Hyne- man, the shofar, and the congregation's small account book. This was the very shofar, originally purchased for ten dollars and still in the possession of the congrega- tion, to which Rabbi Solomon Schindler later referred in his tribute to Jacob R. Morse:
Our young friend, ... a virtuoso on the cornet, under- stands how to draw tones from the instrument which would astonish our ancestors, and when the day will ever dawn on which the great trumpet will be sounded, he will have the best chance of being elected to the glorious position of jubilee cornetist.
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Congregational Life: 1854 -1954
The dedication of the new synagogue building on September 15, 1854, the eve of the High Holidays, caught the attention of Hub newspaperdom. Reported The Boston Traveler:
Yesterday afternoon a small but very neat looking church or synagogue, erected by Messrs. Powell and McNutt for the German Jews in Pleasant Street near Marion Street . . . was duly consecrated according to the peculiar and interest- ing ceremonies of that remarkable nation. The church sits a little back from the street and is capable of accommodating some two hundred persons. It is so constructed that the worshipper sits facing toward the East, the direction of Jeru- salem. The females are seated in a gallery surrounding three sides of the church, being scrupulously separated from the males. On both sides of the only aisle are lamps which are kept burning during the service. The singers stand in front of the minister with their hats on, and neither the minister nor the congregation are uncovered during the ceremonies.
The synagogue was described as being crowded. Pres- ent were "a mayor" and other prominent citizens. The dedication services began with the singing of the psalm, "Lift Up Your Heads, O Ye Gates." Mr. Moses Ehr- lich, first president of Ohabei Shalom and the president of the new congregation, opened the doors of the ark containing the sacred scrolls. A procession, led by Moses Ehrlich, Rabbi Joseph Sachs, and Rabbi Max Lili- enthal of New York, then advanced down the single aisle bearing the Scrolls of the Law, as the choir sang "How
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Early Milieu and Growth
beautiful are Thy Tents, O Jacob." The choir followed with "Hear O Israel," and the scrolls were placed in the ark. Dr. Lilienthal then recited a prayer followed by a sermon "spoken in broken English but fully under- stood." Rabbi Sachs closed the services by pronouncing a benediction in German.
The cemetery was for a long time "the most impor- tant adjunct of the congregation." Their full youthful energies devoted to the acquisition of a firm economic foothold in the new land, immigrants inevitably neg- lected the amenities of social intercourse and the joys of religious fellowship. But death was a more insistent creditor. In 1860, within a year after the purchase of land for a cemetery in Wakefield, the congregation, which had dwindled to seventeen members, swelled to fifty. That year Joseph Rosenfeld, aged seventeen, be- came the first to be interred in the new burial ground. Congregational records reveal that, in a less medically advanced age, a ruthlessly high mortality incidence pre- vailed among children.
The fiscal affairs of the congregation, as conveyed in the Minutes of the early years, breathe an air of order, moderation, and prudence. Many months were to elapse between the recommendation urging the pur- chase of new curtains and appropriation of the req- uisite sum of fifty dollars. The donation of shulchen covers and chupah dress covers by the Phillips and Meinrath families respectively added appreciably to
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Congregational Life: 1854 -1954
Adath Israel's reserves of sacred linen. "Green trees" decorated the synagogue on Shavuot but the committee did not indulge this enthusiasm beyond the expenditure of five dollars. The expenses for the special services commemorating the passing of Abraham Lincoln in April, 1865, were itemized as follows: ten dollars for ad- vertising services in the Boston Herald and Journal; $13.75 for thirty yards of "cottons" for draping the syn- agogue, draping flag, and portrait; and three dollars for decorating expenses.
The close double-entry bookkeeping of the early years (the funds in the Adath Israel treasury sank to a slim $5.25 in 1862) of necessity cast the rabbinic office in a pallid light. Versatility rather than incandescent elo- quence or erudite learning was the prime requisite for filling the roles of reader, teacher, shohet, and secretary to the Board of Trustees. The annual compensation to Rabbi Shoninger for this multiple role rose from a scant two hundred dollars in 1856 to four hundred fifty dol- lars in 1862 to eight hundred fifty dollars in 1868; a forty dollar bonus was attached for services as secretary. The more imposing credentials of Rabbi Solomon Schindler merited a more respectable salary of fifteen hundred dollars in 1874.
II
For many years the congregation was composed al- most wholly of shopkeepers. At first the proportion of
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Early Milieu and Growth
peddlers was high. But very soon, itinerant trade led to more lucrative and respectable highways of commerce. The building of the synagogue in 1854 already gave evi- dence of more extensive mercantile pursuits. Largely wholesalers and retailers of clothing, shoes, dry goods, trimmings, cigars, jewelry, watches, and optical goods, there were also some tailors and grocers among them. By the 1870's and 1880's many had become solidly rooted in the Yankee business community, although as yet only the Hecht family had settled in the fashionable Back Bay.
"Enterprise and push," the secret of Ferdinand Abra- ham's proficiency, were among the ingredients contrib- uting to mercantile success. Edward S. Goulston, to- bacconist, the brothers Peavy, wholesale clothiers, Jacob Hecht (Boston's Jacob Schiff) and his brothers, finan- ciers, and Abraham Shuman of "Shuman's corner" (Washington and Summer Streets), department store merchant, were especially prominent. The Morse brothers, Leopold and Godfrey, were the first to enter politics. Leopold Morse was elected to Congress in 1876 as a Democrat from a predominantly Republican district. Godfrey Morse, the first Jew born in Boston to be graduated from Harvard College, was a member of the School Committee and President of the Boston Common Council in 1883.
The changed economic and social status of Temple Israel's members and the appearance of the second gen-
O
Temple Israel, Columbus Avenue and Northampton Street
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Congregational Life: 1854- 1954
eration led to changes in the conduct of services, which had been traditional until the 1870's. Certain of the congregants wanted an American service, but the call for Reform was by no means unanimous. Rabbi Solo- mon Schindler's introduction of family pew, organ, choir, and new prayer book, drove fifteen of the con- gregation's forty members to resign. Schindler, how- ever, proved effective in recruiting reinforcements among the unaffiliated and among the newcomers from other cities who had been attracted to Boston in the post- Civil War years.
Adath Israel, soon to be known as Temple Adath Is- rael, now found the narrow, wooden, yellow-painted building on Pleasant Street unworthy of the aspirations of its members. In 1885, a new structure was com- pleted on the corner of Columbus Avenue and North- ampton Street, an attractive section of the South End. Romanesque in style and similar to Richardson's Trinity Church, the exterior of the building was made of Phila- delphian brick with brownstone and terra cotta trim- mings. Built at a total cost of fifty thousand dollars - the organ alone was valued at 7400 dollars - it was a long stride from the simple four thousand dollar frame structure on an unfrequented by-street. The Reverend Dr. Gustav Gottheil, Rabbi of Temple Emanu-El of New York, delivered the keynote address at the laying of the cornerstone. Chosen by Emanu-El for his mas- terful command of the English language, his lecture
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Early Milieu and Growth
perhaps gave impetus to the adoption of the English sermon the following year (the congregational Minutes, however, were taken down in English as early as 1876).
In the early years, charitable activities were circum- scribed by the relatively small demands made upon the congregation by its own members. When during the Civil War, the United Hebrew Benevolent Society was formed to alleviate the economic distress of the poorest among Boston's sixteen hundred Jews, it was natural that it should originate in the Pleasant Street synagogue of its founder, Jacob Hecht. Calls for relief were also heard from distant parts, though it must be said, often without response. In October, 1865, a dispatch arrived from Jerusalem detailing the misery wrought by an epi- demic of cholera and famine. In 1866, the congrega- tion called a special meeting in response to a report that twenty-two shipwrecked co-religionists had been landed in Boston and were in need of aid.
Although Lina Hecht, better known as "Aunt Lina," organized the Hebrew Ladies' Sewing Circle in 1878 to supply the poor with clothing and blankets, it was not until the onset of the mass migration of the 1880's that the charitable resources of well-to-do Jews were ex- tended. Then Adath Israel led Boston Jewry in practical religion. Edward Goulston, ex-President of the syna- gogue, expressed the sentiments of the older established residents upon the dedication of the Hebrew Sheltering Home in 1892.
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