A Shtetl Grew in Bessemer - Southern Jewish Historical Society

12 SOUTHERN JEWISH HISTORY
remembers “a lot of Orthodox customs, the men sitting on the
right, the women on the left, and the men wearing hats or yarmulkes.”
53 Charlotte Jospin Cohn’s reflections on the services are
of “the whole service [conducted] . . . in Yiddish and Hebrew
[and] . . . most of the men davening, but the ladies who sat on the
other side, who were all mainly American-born, not understanding
most of what was being said.” 54
As has been well documented in American Jewish communities
across the country, the tension between German and eastern
European Jews was great, so much so that one Reform rabbi of
German descent called the neighborhood of his eastern European
co-religionists a “reeking pesthole.” 55 Temple Beth-El experienced
its own version of this division. Milton Weinstein, born in
Bessemer in 1907, maintains that there were philosophical and
theological differences within the synagogue: “The Reform Congregation
owned the temple in the beginning. The Orthodox
rented an upstairs room in a building in downtown Bessemer and
held services there. The Reform Jews either died or moved out of
Bessemer, and the temple became the property of the Orthodox
Congregation somewhere in the late 1920s.” 56
The Bessemer Story offers a slightly different account. After
Rabbi Hirsch’s one-year tenure ended in 1917, “a new Orthodox
group developed within the Congregation and eventually broke
away from the Reformed [sic] group which was never officially
declared Reformed [sic]. The Orthodox group met for four or five
years above some stores on Second Avenue. Charles Weinstein
[Milton’s father] was their lay leader. After some five years of independence,
the groups reunited.” 57
The Bessemer Story’s account appears more credible because
Milton Weinstein was just a boy at the time of the break and because
of documented patterns of the development of Jewish
congregations in other small cities. Generally, in towns where
German Jewish communities were already established, eastern
European Jews, who usually identified themselves as Orthodox,
would establish separate “subcommunities” upon their arrival
and would organize congregations “that functioned alongside
preexisting assemblies,” mainly because they were uncomfortable