A Shtetl Grew in Bessemer - Southern Jewish Historical Society

26 SOUTHERN JEWISH HISTORY
other life cycle rituals continued, without the stability and inspiration
of a regular rabbi and with the other social and economic
factors that were adversely affecting Bessemer, the younger generation
of Jews left in increasing numbers, thereby making it
difficult for the remaining congregation to support the synagogue
or pay a rabbi. 120 Temple Beth-El never again had a regular rabbi.
The exodus, however, had actually started prior to Gallinger’s
resignation. From the 1940s through the 1960s, many of
Bessemer’s Jewish youth left for college or enlisted in the military
and never moved back. 121 Others, especially women, moved away
when they married. 122 Still others moved from Bessemer to Birmingham
for business and/or the allure of a larger and more
diverse setting with a Jewish populace sufficient to support three
congregations and a Jewish community center. 123 As Jerry Cherner
put it, “Birmingham in the 1950s became more and more a place
for socializing, for trying to meet people, and for participating in
interaction with Jewish people of your same age.” 124 Those who
came of age in Bessemer in the 1920s and 1930s, who raised families
there, and who thus chose to live the remainder of their lives
there, like Buddy Sokol, witnessed the migration of their own
children and felt the angst of watching Jewish life in Bessemer
collapse:
When I came to Bessemer in 1933, there were about thirty-eight
Jewish families. Our temple was successful; we were able to get
our services on a regular basis. But as my family grew up, we
slowly lost men through death, or moving out of town. As our
kids grew up, Murray [his eldest son] went to The University of
Alabama in Tuscaloosa in the mid-1960s, and we got to where in
order to get a minyan we had to ask him and later our other son,
Jerry, to come home from college to make the ten needed. And
so things depreciated enough to where we had trouble even
having a service. Today in the Conservative movement you can
count women in your minyan, but then you couldn’t. So both
Murray and Bruce Weinstein [Hyman’s son] would leave college
on Friday afternoon to be home for services on Friday night.
They didn’t want to come, but because their fathers were so