JUDAICA - Wisdom In Torah

altimore
prises that relied on the labor of husbands, wives, and children.
Pushcart peddlers and small shopkeepers reigned on Lombard
Street, East Baltimore’s bustling marketplace. Other entrepreneurs
ranged well beyond the Jewish community. Lithuanian
immigrant Jacob Epstein built the Baltimore Bargain House
into a multimillion dollar wholesale business. The peddlers he
sent out on the rail lines emanating from Baltimore became
small shopkeepers and founders of Jewish communities from
Pennsylvania to North Carolina. Louis *Blaustein and his
son Jacob began selling kerosene door-to-door in 1910; their
American Oil Company became one of the country’s largest,
pioneering the drive-in filling station. In less spectacular ways,
many of Baltimore’s East European Jews established successful
businesses by the 1920s and began to exhibit an upward
mobility that would extend in the coming decades despite reversals
during the Great Depression.
Immigrants from later waves of Jewish migration also
started low on the economic ladder, as door-to-door salesmen,
cabdrivers, technicians, and the like. Coming from the
upper professional levels in Germany, Iran, and the Soviet
Union, most suffered a difficult loss of status, but their educated
backgrounds helped many to advance. In the post-
World War II era, Baltimore Jews increasingly gravitated to
the professions, although business remained an important
economic activity.
Religious Life
Abraham Rice would no doubt have been surprised to learn
that Baltimore hosted the highest proportion of Orthodox
Jews of any large American Jewish community at the end of
the 20th century. The internationally known Ner Israel Rabbinical
College and other highly regarded Orthodox institutions
combined with Baltimore’s relative affordability to enable
the Orthodox community to attract new members from
New York and other cities. But all branches of Judaism have
been well represented in Baltimore. Jewish religious life has
been marked by innovation as well as devotion to tradition,
conflict as well as cohesion, and by leaders whose actions influenced
the course of American Jewry.
With nationally prominent rabbis heading its congregations,
Baltimore in the mid-19th century became the battleground
of conflicting religious ideologies. The Baltimore Hebrew
Congregation (incorporated as Nidchei Israel), the city’s
first, was established in 1830 by around 20 Jews of German and
Dutch extraction. For the next 60 years, traditionalists and
reformers clashed within the congregation or split off from
it. Some German immigrants founded Har Sinai as a Reform
counterpoint in 1842 and constructed America’s first building
specifically created as a Reform temple in 1849. Congregation
Oheb Shalom formed in 1853 as a midway alternative to Baltimore
Hebrew’s Orthodoxy and Har Sinai’s radical Reform.
Its first rabbi, Benjamin *Szold, found himself in a bitter feud
with Har Sinai’s fiery Rabbi David *Einhorn shortly after arriving
in Baltimore in 1859. Meanwhile, Baltimore Hebrew continued
its slow but sure movement away from traditionalism.
Rabbi Rice left in 1849 and two years later founded Shearith
Israel, which upheld German-Jewish Orthodoxy for decades
and remained an Orthodox congregation into the 21st centiry.
In 1870, Baltimore Hebrew’s remaining traditionalists,
led by the Friedenwald family, split off to form the Chizuk
Amuno Congregation. By the early 1900s, Baltimore Hebrew
and Oheb Shalom had joined the Reform movement, while
Chizuk Amuno became a founding member of the Conservative
movement’s United Synagogue of America.
Amidst all the Sturm und Drang among the Germans, a
small congregation named Bikur Cholim opened in 1865, the
first congregation in Baltimore to follow the Polish style of
worship. As East Europeans began to trickle in, small landsman-based
congregations sprang up, mostly in East Baltimore.
Dozens of these shuls were established over the next several
decades. Two of the most influential, B’nai Israel (founded by
Lithuanians in 1873) and Shomrei Mishmeres (founded by
Volhynians in 1892), took over the imposing synagogue buildings
on Lloyd Street built by Chizuk Amuno and Baltimore
Hebrew, respectively, after those congregations relocated to
more upscale neighborhoods. A second phase of East European
synagogue development began in the early 1920s when
the first American-born generation founded several congregations
in northwest Baltimore, including Beth Tfiloh, one of
the nation’s first “synagogue centers.” In ensuing years, small
immigrant shuls either merged into larger synagogues or disappeared.
By 1999 Baltimore hosted more than 50 synagogues,
representing every branch of Judaism.
Jewish Education and Philanthropy
Innovation has been a hallmark of Jewish education in Baltimore.
The first known community Hebrew school opened as
early as 1842, and community-operated schools such as East
Baltimore’s Talmud Torah flourished from the late 1880s to
the 1940s. Samson *Benderly, the father of modern Jewish
education in America, started his revolutionary experiments
in Baltimore in 1900 and the city benefited from his direct influence
until he left for New York in 1910. In 1917 Rabbi Avraham
Schwartz of Shomrei Mishmeres founded the Talmudical
Academy, the first Jewish day school outside of New York. In
the late 20th century, a dramatic rise in Jewish day schools (16
by 2004) gave Baltimore one of the largest day school populations
in the nation. The two institutions of higher Jewish
learning have been *Baltimore Hebrew University, founded
in 1919 by Israel *Efros, and the Ner Israel Rabbinical College,
founded by Rabbi Jacob I. *Ruderman in 1933.
Baltimore Jewry’s long tradition of philanthropy and
mutual aid started with the United Hebrew Benevolent Society,
founded in 1834. Two key institutions, Sinai Hospital and
the Levindale Hebrew Geriatric Center, also date back to the
1800s. Some charities established by German and Americanborn
Jews in the late 19th century focused on helping poverty-stricken
East European immigrants. East European Jews
started their own aid societies shortly after their arrival, and by
the first decade of the 20th century, two parallel philanthropic
98 ENCYCLOPAEDIA JUDAICA, Second Edition, Volume 3