A Jew's Journey into Ohio

Often, when I tell people I have connections to Ohio, even that I am merely planning to visit there, people look at me funny. When I even hint at the idea of actually moving there to live, people laugh. Why would a Jew ever move to Ohio of all places? If you threw a dart at anywhere in the continental US, you couldn't possibly hit a more white bread Mainstream-American place, right? Jews belong in NYC... possibly Long Island, or Miami or LA. Not in Ohio.

Folks are almost relieved when they hear my husband lives there, as if they are more secure having an "understandable" reason for my attachment to such a place.

Now, it is true that Ohio is Pure America. Walking around some of the smaller towns, I saw America unfold at a slow and deliberate pace. VFW halls and many churches. Old men in suspenders and tractor company hats. Kids on bikes making paper deliveries on sun-dappled afternoons. Middle-aged ladies in flowered, cotton dresses chatting under shop awnings spotted with hanging baskets of geraniums. Pickup trucks overflowing with red-faced young men with odd, hog-like expressions. American flags everywhere.

You see, I even got to see it in its full Home Front glory - MIA memorials and "Support Your Troops" banners. Bunting, even. Red, white and blue bunting. I didn't know they still made that stuff. I thought that went out with Taft's campaign.

However, it is a mistake to think of Ohio as ignorant, backwards or even non-Jewish. Though one might not suspect it, Ohio has a long and interesting Jewish history.

The settlement of Jews in America came in layers. Earlier Jewish settlers of colonial times had already established themselves in the major trading colonies of Virginia and Maryland and the Carolinas, as well as colonial New England centers like Albany, Concord and New Rochelle, and moved into the less likely areas of Kentucky and Mississippi. Certainly, in the long history of Jews in America, it is true that New York is a major cultural landmark, along with Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Chicago. In the major waves of Jewish immigration at the turn of the last century, these are the places to which most Jews flocked, only turning to suburbia and the sunbelt in the post-war expansion of the 1950s.

However, Ohio, especially Cincinnati, did have a huge, and often forgotten, role in the development of American Judaism and Jewish culture.

Ohio's Jewish history started in 1817, when the British Orthodox-Jewish pioneer Joseph Jonas settled in Cincinnati. Once a peddler in Philadelphia, Jonas was impressed by what he saw as enormous opportunity in Ohio, and he began a letter writing campaign to convince Jews from England to come join him, starting with his two brothers. Jonas became a successful watchmaker, and managed to establish a thriving Jewish community in downtown Cincinnati, where they started holding regular Jewish services in 1819. Soon, he and the community purchased land for what is now known as The Old Jewish Cometary for $75. In 1824, when the required ten Jewish males could be replied upon, the original Cincinnati Jewish community started the first Jewish congregation beyond the Allegheny Mountains, named the Rockdale Temple (1824 - 1969) of K.K. Bene Israel, which was mostly comprised of British Orthodox Jews.

The second wave of Jewish immigration to Ohio came from Germany, a natural extension to Ohio's already considerable Christian German population. Mostly of the new Reform tradition, these German-speaking Jews settled in both Cincinnati and Cleveland, the latter becoming Ohio's second Jewish congregation, the Israelitish Society, in 1839, under the leadership of Bavarian Jew Simson Thorman and the Jews he managed to lure to Ohio through his own letter writing campaign back home. By 1841, another German Jewish congregation was established, this one in Cincinnati, the Bene Yeshurun congregation. By 1850, Ohio had six Jewish congregations, four in Cincinnati, and two in Cleveland, and these two cities became hubs of Jewish life for the area.

By 1880, Ohio had over 6,500 Jews, and by 1904 there were nearly 50,000, making Ohio one of the largest centers for Jewish life in the United States, after New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois and Massachusetts.

In the late 1800s, Jews formed over 1% of the total population of Ohio. 1,004 Jews from Ohio fought in the American Civil War (1861 - 1865), the largest Jewish Civil War enrollment after New York state, including one Colonial, who had, at the time of his death, been recommended for the rank of Brigadier-General. Nearly 20 of Ohio's Jews have served in the state legislature, and at least two held high office in the federal government.

By 1902, most of Ohio's major towns and cities had Jewish communities, including 12 in Cincinnati and 14 in Cleveland. In addition, there were by that time several congregations in the cities Dayton, Columbus, Akron and Toledo (site of one of the largest Jewish populations in the state), as well as thriving Jewish societies in smaller settlements such as Hamilton (Congregation B'nai Israel, est. 1866), Piqua (Anshe Emeth, est. 1858), and Youngstown (which had two congregations, as well as a Lady's Aid Society). Also, by the 1902 Jewish census, nine Zionist societies had been established in Ohio, and there were in existence at least 52 Jewish brotherhood lodges in the state.

Throughout the early history of Jewish life in Ohio, however, Cincinnati and Cleveland remained the major centers of culture, education, social safety networks and religion, as they remained the home of over two-thirds of Ohio's Jewish population.

In 1850, the Bohemia-born Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, now often considered a founder of American Judaism, got into a fistfight with the president of his congregation in Albany, NY. Rabbi Wise had been guilty of (or credited with, depending on your perspective) massive and swift reform of Jewish practice, including the introduction of mixed choirs into Jewish services, as well as family pews and the then-outrageous practice of counting women in the traditionally male-only Minyan. He and his supporters founded a rival synagogue in Albany, and in 1854, he was offered leadership of Bene Yeshurun congregation at the Lodge Street Temple in Cincinnati, where he established what could be considered one of the first major modern American Reform Temples in the US.

Wise served in Cincinnati for 46 years, and became a leading figure in Jewish religious and public life, representing Jews to main stream society, including in meetings with President Lincoln surrounding the infamous General Order no. 11 expulsion of Jews from Tennessee, Mississippi and Kentucky in 1862.

In 1866, Wise founded one of the grandest temples in America, the Plum Street Temple (later re-named the Isaac M. Wise Temple) at 8th and Plum, which is often cited for its architecture. The Temple (above) stands as a sort of time-capsule of German Jewish building design, made significant by the widespread destruction of most similar synagogues in Europe during World War II.

Wise would go on to establish one of the other major landmarks in Jewish American life, the oldest Jewish seminary in North America, Cincinnati's Reform-affiliated Hebrew Union College, in 1875. Before this time, congregations relied upon European-trained cantors, rabbis and teachers. The establishment of a legitimate seminary in America was one of the major benchmarks in the Jewish rootedness in the United States, and the college still trains rabbis, as well as maintains a graduate school in Jewish Studies and other disciplines, and has connections to three spin-off campuses, one in New York (1950), LA (1954) and even Jerusalem (1963).

The further establishment of such organizations as an early association for Hebrew primary education, as well as the major Reform social action league, the National Jewish Charities, solidified the importance of Cincinnati for American Jewish life. Cincinnati thus became the de facto home of Reform Judaism in America, also seeing the creation, again under Wise, of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations in 1873 (later becoming the still-important Union for Reform Judaism, now based out of New York), which acted as an association of liberal congregations in the United States and later spreading across North America. Cincinnati also became home to the Central Conference of American Rabbis in 1889, which was a professional association for ordained Reform rabbis who established informal policy on matters of religion and practice for North American Jews, as well as several European seminaries, establishing a world-wide reputation for Cincinnati's vibrant Jewish community.

Today, Cincinnati has a sizable Jewish population, which continues to change and expand as its organizations still lure Jews in to its society. Although largely considered a WASP land, Ohio has both influenced, and been influenced by, the Jews in its history. As to why people remain largely unaware of Ohio's Jewish history, I cannot say for sure. It is likely another off-shoot of the generalized "New York" assumption, a burden carried by all Jews in North America, especially those of us born in such an unlikely place as Canada.

As for me, something draws me to the place, far and beyond the need to visit there to see my husband. I chuckle at the thought, but could there possibly be a new wave of Jewish settlement in Ohio about to occur, as a Canadian Jew establishes a life and starts her own letter writing campaign to lure new Jewish life to the place?

In any case, even if I never live there in any permanent sense, I am proud to call Ohio my second home, and will continue to patiently explain to people what it is that could make a Jew feel at ease in a land such as this.

Ohio is Pure America, and some of the best America to be found. Ohio is also a part of the Jewish heritage in the New World. I don't know why the two should be mutually exclusive - is it so un-American to be Jewish? One could argue that the continued survival of an immigrant minority community is exactly what America is supposed to be about, right?

And I would be proud to be a part of that. Even if only by spreading the word about such an interesting and neglected history.