Jews in Minnesota

The Mount Zion Women's Sisterhood modelling the ideal Jewish home in 1949. 

A sign placed outside of Mount Zion as a part of a black-Jewish dialogue program, simultaneously protesting against Apartheid and the persecution of Jews in the Soviet Union. 

Although Jewish presence in North America goes back well before the nineteenth century, two waves characterize the large part of Jewish immigration, including to Minnesota. Jews had long been important minorities within predominantly Christian societies in Europe and Muslim societies in the Mediterranean and Middle East.  Enlightenment modernity brought the possibility of fuller Jewish citizenship in German, French, and English societies and many embraced modern transformations within Judaism known as Haskalah.  But Jews were also forcibly reminded of their outsiderhood, in the Dreyfus Affair (1894-1906) in France, organized pogroms in Eastern Europe and Russia and, ultimately the twentieth century’s Holocaust.  Immigration to the United States meant for many Jews a fuller throated embrace of their religious freedom; but life in the U.S. was hardly immune from anti-Judaism, a Christian critique of Jews and their religion, or the racialized bigotry of anti-Semitism that could often go hand in hand.¹ 

In a first major wave of immigration, roughly one quarter million largely middle-class German speaking Jews immigrated to the U.S. between 1820 and 1880. Only about 1,000 of those settled in Minnesota by 1880, but they founded important early congregations, Mt. Zion Temple in St. Paul in 1856, a Minneapolis congregation that what would become Temple Israel in 1878, and, Temple Emanuel in Duluth in 1871. 

In a second wave of Jewish immigration, between 1880 and 1924, roughly 2 million mostly Yiddish speaking and largely working class Eastern European Jews arrived in the U.S. In In 1882, 200 Jews fleeing persecution in Eastern Europe arrived at the St. Paul depot, their settlement supported by the region’s established Jewish community.² Many attended the Sons of Jacob synagogue founded by Polish Jews in the 1860s. In Minneapolis, Orthodox Jews founded Adath Jeshurun in 1884. Duluth’s sizeable Jewish community in the last decades of the 19^th century was largely of Eastern European heritage. A group of Lithuanian Jews founded the orthodox Adas Israel synagogue in the 1880s; a group of Russian Jews founded Kofereth Israel in 1893. The latter congregation, later known as Tifereth, voted to join the Conservative Movement in the 1940s, and later merged with Emanuel to form today’s Temple Israel in Duluth.³