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    Maine's Jewish Heritage
    Maine's Jewish Heritage
    Maine's Jewish Heritage
    Ebook175 pages36 minutes

    Maine's Jewish Heritage

    By Abraham J. Peck and Jean M. Peck

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    According to historian Benjamin Band, the first record of a Jew in Maine concerns Susman Abrams, a tanner who resided in Union until his death at 87 in 1830. Historical records beginning in 1849 also tell of a small Bangor community that organized a synagogue and purchased a burial ground. But it was not until the late 19th century that Jewish communities grew large enough to establish multiple synagogues, Hebrew schools for boys, kosher butcher shops, and Jewish bakeries. Eventually there were Jewish charitable societies, community centers, and social clubs across the state. Now, 150 years later, Jews serve every Maine community in every possible capacity, free from the barriers of social or religious discrimination. This book honors the accomplishments of Maine's Jewish residents.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcadia Publishing
    Release dateSep 18, 2012
    ISBN9781439634578
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      Book preview

      Maine's Jewish Heritage - Abraham J. Peck

      number.

      INTRODUCTION

      Within the long sweep of American Jewish history, several overarching themes have emerged that characterize the three-and-a-half centuries of Jewish life in the United States (1654–2006): a belief in the promise of America; faith in the pluralistic nature of America; a quest for economic and professional success; and a commitment to the survival of the Jewish community.

      Although never more than 10,000 strong, Maine’s Jewish community has always reflected these particular themes. Maine Jewry has sought to balance its American social contract, the notion of being a good American, with the understanding that it was part of a holy community, whose essential purpose was to be a light unto the nations. Beginning in the 1840s, a small number of Jewish peddlers, tailors, and dry goods merchants from German-speaking lands came to Bangor, the Queen City. By 1849, they had established a synagogue and a cemetery. Neither the peddlers nor the synagogue remained very long, and both were gone by the late 1850s.

      For those few German Jewish immigrants and those who began to come to Maine from Eastern Europe in the 1860s (many of them to escape from the oppression of Czarist Russia), the state seemed a reassuring haven. When Portland celebrated its centenary on July 4, 1886, Barnard Aaronson, designated to speak for the small Jewish community of the time, observed, We number sixty families, and over the majority portion being of the middle or poorer class, yet content with their lot . . . The form of religion is Orthodox, and yet [we] are thoroughly liberal in thought and action. In looking back at the 20 years since the great Portland fire of 1866 had attracted a group of Jewish merchants and peddlers to help the city’s efforts in rebuilding, Aaronson could only find a positive relationship to his Christian neighbors: our city fathers have in the past fully merited the good will and affectionate esteem in which they are held by us.

      Aaronson’s optimism was not an illusion. Unlike Jewish life in Europe, where Jews were by far the most visible and persecuted minority over a 2,000 year period, Jews in Maine could be comforted in the knowledge that other groups, especially Roman Catholics, often stood ahead of them as victims of religious and sometimes racial intolerance.

      That good will and affectionate esteem belied the fact that for nearly a century, many places of lodging and certain social clubs were closed to the Jewish community of Maine. A kind of 9-to-5 atmosphere existed even between Jewish and non-Jewish business and professional partners, and neither group was eager to cross the lines of social interaction after the close of the business day.

      The contentment and optimism of which Barnard Aaronson spoke were reflected in the fervent pursuit of study, learning, and pious synagogue worship, a piety that earned Portland Jewry the nickname of The Jerusalem of America, or The Jerusalem of the North, a designation that could also apply to the Orthodox communities of Bangor, Lewiston, Biddeford, and Old Orchard, among others.

      The Jews who came to America from the various parts of the Russian Empire in the years between 1882 and the early 1920s, nearly 2.5 million of them, came with a certain chip on their shoulders. They carried little nostalgia for the blotte shtetlach (villages filled with mud streets) they had left, but those who came with a desire to keep Judaism alive, as they knew it in the Old Country, were prepared to beat back any efforts to change what they had always known and believed. Religious change came slowly to the Jewish communities of Maine and the Conservative movement did not develop until the late 1940s, and the Reform movement not until the

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