The Pluralism Project -- Judaism in the Boston Area

Introduction

The early history of the Jewish tradition in Boston is the history of individuals. It begins with a Sephardic Jew named Solomon Franco, a merchant who is said to have arrived in 1649. The court pronounced it would "allow the said Solomon Franco, the Ye Jew, six shillings per week out of the treasury for ten weeks for his subsistence till he could get his passage into Holland." It seems he was invited to leave the Puritan colony! On the whole, strangers were "warned out" of Puritan Boston; this included Baptists and Quakers as well as Jews. There is evidence of a few other Jews in colonial Boston, the most well known of whom was Judah Monis, an Italian Jew who settled in Cambridge and published A Grammer of the Hebrew Tongue "for the use of the students at Harvard College at Cambridge, in New England." For this work, Monis received an MA from Harvard in 1720 and was hired to teach Hebrew in 1722, apparently shortly after his public conversion to Christianity in the Common Hall of Harvard. While the relationship of his conversion to his employment is not clear, according to New England's first "comparative religion" writer, Hannah Adams writing in 1817, "Before he could be admitted (to teach) it was rendered necessary by the statutes that he change his religion." The pamphlet, published on the occasion of his baptism, states that Monis delivered an address at the event entitled, "The Truth, the Whole Truth, and, Nothing but the Truth." Whatever he thought of the "truth," Monis continued to observe Sabbath on Saturday for the rest of his life.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century there were a number of prominent individual Jewish citizens of Boston. For example, Moses Michael Hays (1729-1805), a Portuguese Jew, lived on Hanover Street, was a neighbor of Paul Revere, and would have occasionally had a minyan - a group of at least ten Jewish men - for prayer at his home. His nephews, Abraham and Judah Touro, were prominent Boston philanthropists, making substantial donations to the Massachusetts General Hospital, the Bunker Hill monument, and many other charitable institutions.

It was with the German immigration of the 1840s that Boston gathered a Jewish community large enough to give rise to Jewish religious institutions. The high holy day services of Rosh Hashanah were observed in 1842, meeting at the home of Peter Spitz, at 5 Wendell Street in Cambridge. In 1843, the minyan at Spitz' home organized Ohabei Shalom, "Lovers of Peace," Boston's first Jewish congregation. The first Jewish burial place was secured in 1844 in East Boston. In 1852, the members of Ohabei Shalom built the first synagogue on Warren (now Warrenton) Street, in downtown Boston. The synagogue eventually became three congregations. When a group of Polish immigrants arrived, dissension arose in the congregation, perhaps more social than ideological, and a small group of the original group broke away to form another congregation. Both synagogues then had the name Ohabei Shalom, at least until 1854 when Judah Touro died in New Orleans, leaving $5,000 in his will to Ohabei Shalom. When both congregations claimed the donation, a judge awarded it to the original congregation, and the splinter group took the name Adath Israel. In 1858, some of the new Polish families left Ohabei Shalom and started Mishkan Israel, the successor of which is today's Conservative temple, Mishkan Tefila in Chestnut Hill.

All three temples continued to grow and flourish and, indeed, are landmarks in Jewish Boston today. In 1863, the "original" Ohabei Shalom purchased a church building on Warren street which it occupied for 23 years. When the congregation finally outgrew this building, moving to Union Park Street in 1887, the old "Warren Street Shul" building remained and is now the Charles Playhouse. In the late 1920s Ohabei Shalom moved from Union Park Street to its present site on Beacon Street in Brookline, an imposing building seating some 2,000 people.

Adath Israel, founded by German Jews in the first breakaway group, held services on Pleasant Street in the South End, where in the 1870s the famous Rabbi Solomon Schindler struck out on a path of innovation and liberalization that was part of the emerging Reform Judaism. Schindler's changes included mixed seating of men and women, a choir and organ, and English language worship -- even on Sundays. Schindler breathed the air of Boston's liberals and Unitarians, but was too liberal for his own congregation and was replaced by Charles Fleischer in 1893. In 1907, this congregation moved to a fine domed and pillared building on Commonwealth Avenue, a building which is now Morse Auditorium of Boston University. When the congregation moved again in 1928, it was to a new property on the Riverway where Temple Adath Israel stands today, with its striking sanctuary built in 1973.

Meanwhile Mishkan Tefila moved to Oswego Street in the South End and, after several moves and incorporation of many Eastern European Jews, built Temple Mishkan Tefila on Elm Hill Avenue in Roxbury in 1925. This granite building, with its broad staircase and columned portico, provided a truly monumental anchor for the large Conservative Jewish community in Roxbury and Mattapan for over twenty years. When the congregation began to move to the Newton and Chestnut Hill area, a new modern synagogue was built on Hammond Park Parkway in Chestnut Hill.

The Reform movement had its roots in Germany and took its distinctive form in the German Jewish population in the United States, emphasizing assimilation and change in response to the times. Among its strongest leaders was Rabbi Isaac Meyer Wise, whose call for an English-language American prayer book led to his Minhag America (1857) and eventually the Union Prayer Book (1894). His vision of a college for training American rabbis led to the founding of Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati (1875).

In the 1880s this largely German Reform population, well on its way to assimilation in Boston, met with a major challenge. The pogroms in Russia and Poland sent another great movement of Jewish immigrants toward the United States. During these years, Boston's Jewish population leapt from 3,000 in 1875 to about 20,000 in 1895. The Russian Jews who arrived in the United States in the late 19th century scarcely recognized the Reform Judaism they encountered in America as Judaism at all. And liberal leaning "Yankee" Jews who loved Emerson as much as Maimonides were put off by the old-world Judaism brought by the immigrants. There was suspicion and rejection on both sides. In 1882 one boatload of Russian Jews was sent back to Russia and another group landed in the "poorhouse" for lack of any support by the local Jewish community. Finally the successful and, by now, largely assimilated community of German Jews faced the reality and needs of the new Jewish immigrants and organized the American Federation of Jewish Charities to assist their new Jewish cousins in the process of settling and flourishing in the United States.

By the late 1920s, 80 percent of American Jews were from Eastern Europe. The Judaism these immigrants knew and brought with them was from a culture and era very different from that of post-Enlightenment Germany and America. In contrast to Reform, their traditions were Orthodox. When some of these immigrants in the first and second generation began to move away from the Old-World orthodoxy, they did not move as far as the Reform tradition, but generated a middle-way that became known as Conservative Judaism, which today constitutes the majority of the American Jewish community.

Of the many neighborhood synagogues where Orthodox congregations from Eastern Europe gathered, the most venerable survivor is the Vilna Shul on Phillips Street on Beacon Hill. As in other synagogues or shuls, people often gathered from their old-country region or city, in this case the city of Vilna, Lithuania. They formed an informal group in 1898, bought a former Baptist church for a meeting house around the turn of the century, and then purchased the Phillips Street property in 1919 to build what became known as the Vilna Shul, a fine brick building with an outstanding stained-glass Star of David. By the 1980s the old Vilna Shul congregation had virtually disappeared, but a non-profit corporation, the Vilna Center for Jewish Heritage, began working to preserve the building as a tribute to the rich heritage of Boston's early Eastern European Jewish immigrants.

At the turn of the century, the North End was a lively mixture of both Jews and Italians. The year 1905 saw the founding of the Jewish Advocate, a publication which continues today. By 1910, there were 80,000 Jews in Boston and seven Yiddish newspapers. By the 1920s, the growing Jewish population had gradually moved out of the North End to Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan, where "triple-deckers" housed their burgeoning numbers. Blue Hill Avenue in Mattapan was the center of Jewish Boston for fifty years until the "flight" to affluent suburbs began in the 1960s. The period from 1968 to 1972 was a time of turbulence and tension in Mattapan, as the African-American population rose dramatically with low-interest loans designated for African-American home-ownership. The still testy relations of African-Americans and Jews in Boston were forged in the heat of these years. By the late 1970s, the majority of Jews had moved to Brookline, where today the strip between Beacon and Commonwealth Avenues on Harvard Street provides something of a center for Jewish Boston, but nothing like Blue Hill Avenue in Mattapan had been. And that imposing granite structure of Temple Mishkan Tefila was given by the Conservative Jewish community to the Elma Lewis School for the arts.

Boston's Jewish community includes the whole range of the tradition from Orthodox and Hassidic congregations to the many more informal Havurot, including Havurat Shalom in Somerville and Am Tikva, a gay and lesbian Havurah. Boston's Reform synagogues include the still-thriving heirs of Ohabei Shalom and Temple Israel as well as newer congregations such as Temple Beth El of the Sudbury River Valley and Temple Beth David of Canton. The oldest Conservative congregation is, of course, Temple Mishkan Tefila, now in Chestnut Hill. Other conservative congregations include Kehillath Israel on Harvard Street in Brookline and Temple Beth Shalom on Tremont Street in Cambridge. Orthodox congregations include the Bostoner Rebbe's Congregation Beth Pinchas and the Talner Rebbe's Beth David, both in Brookline.

The Jewish life of Boston includes a wide variety of political, educational, cultural, and social groups: the New Jewish Agenda, a leftist, progressive political organization; the Workmen's Circle, a socialist-oriented Yiddish culture group; "One Generation After," for the children of Holocaust survivors; and the Zamir Chorale, a singing group, to name a few. Brandeis University, the first Jewish-sponsored university in the country, was founded in 1948 and named in memory of Justice Louis Brandeis, the Boston lawyer who, in 1916, became the first Jew appointed to the bench of the Supreme Court. The Brandeis campus is also home to the American Jewish Historical Society which chronicles the Jewish experience in the United States.

Educational institutions have reflected the growth in the Jewish community in Boston over the past century and a half. During the initial growth of Boston's German Jewish community, Harvard University admitted its first Jewish students. By the time of the 250th anniversary of the College in 1886, it is estimated that there had been only about a dozen Jewish graduates. However, the burgeoning diversity of late-nineteenth-century immigration, especially the large numbers of Catholics and Jews, had an impact in university enrollments in the early-twentieth-century. For example, by the beginning of the twentieth century, with the arrival of Russian Jewish students, a Menorah Society was formed at Harvard University. One of the founders was Horace Kallen, who became well known for his incisive writings on cultural pluralism. Yet a climate increasingly hostile toward immigration threatened Jewish advances in American universities. Culminating with the federal immigration quotas in the 1920s, anti-immigrant fervor spread to universities like Harvard, where many were concerned that "American boys" were losing out to Jewish immigrants in admissions. The Jewish percentage of the freshman class had risen from 7 percent in 1900 to 21.5 percent in 1920. In the early 1920s faculty and student debate raged over a proposal by President Abbott Lawrence Lowell to limit the number of Jews at Harvard. To its credit, the faculty soundly rejected the plan, but a new application form, more explicit about ethnicity, was introduced giving rise to suspicions of a de facto quota.

Through the last thirty years, however, Jewish life at Harvard has been vibrant and growing. Today it reflects the full spectrum of Jewish tradition and practice. Harvard Hillel had its first informal meetings in Phillips Brooks House in the 1940s, until a home was purchased in 1947 at 5 Bryant Street in the Francis Avenue area of Cambridge. Here Hillel flourished for over thirty years. In 1979, a procession led by the Torah scrolls and Rabbi Ben Zion Gold marked the official move to new quarters closer to the center of University life -- the new Reisman Center on Mt. Auburn Street. In 1994, the old Puritan university where Judah Monis converted to Christianity saw the dedication of a striking new center for Jewish life: the Rosovsky Center, named for Harvard's eminent Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Henry Rosovsky.