A speech delivered at the Temple Emmanuel Chelsea Jewish History Exhibit by Norman H. Finkelstein on April 19, 2009
Let’s face it. There are two kinds of people in the world: those who grew up in Chelsea and those deprived souls who did not. We really believe that the Chelsea experiences and connections that bond us are so special they could not be duplicated anywhere else. And you know what? We are right. Chelsea is not just a defined geographic space, but a state of mind. Yet if we step back a minute to examine the history of Jews in America, our Chelsea story is but a microcosm of the larger American Jewish experience, but with our own distinctive differences.
Although Jews have been part of the American fabric since 1654, the first known Jew in Chelsea, Nathan Morse, doesn’t appear until 1864. By 1890 there were 82 Jews, the vanguard of the “great wave” of immigrants from Eastern Europe. Between 1881 and the outbreak of World War I in 1914 nearly two million Jews freely abandoned the grinding poverty, anti-Semitism and pogroms of Russia and Eastern Europe to seek new lives in America. By 1910, the number of Jews in Chelsea had grown to slightly more than 11,000 or one-third of the total population. The numbers would probably have been larger had it not been for the Great Chelsea Fire of 1908 which dispersed many Jewish residents to other localities while destroying both the recently opened Elm Street and nearly completed Walnut Street shuls. Even so, by the 1930s Jews constituted nearly one-half of the city’s population.
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The following article is from a monograph written for the Jewish Historical Society of the North Shore in 1982 by Stephen G. Mostov, Ph.D.
The Jewish community of Lynn in 1885 was remarkable only for its lack of development. There had been Jews in America for over two hundred years, and by 1880 the national Jewish population exceeded 230,000. Yet no more than twenty-five families had ever found their way to Lynn. Lynn’s “first” permanent Jewish resident — a Russian immigrant named Simon J. Weinberg — settled in 1855, and opened a dry goods store. Weinberg was later joined by a nephew and brother-in-law. A few other Jews filtered into Lynn during the 1870s and early 1880s, so that by 1885 the total Jewish population was about fifty.
Solomon Wysanski, nephew of Simon J. Weinberg, stands in front of his dry goods store on Market Street in Lynn, c. 1870.
Few Jews settled in Lynn or other New England towns prior to 1885 for the same reasons that most other European immigrants also stayed away. Either Jews settled in Boston to be part of its large, insular Jewish community — where they felt comfortable socially and religiously, and could find work through friends and relatives — or they headed westward in search of greater economic opportunities. In the first systematic survey of the nation’s Jewish population, taken in 1876, it was estimated that there were 7,000 Jews living in Boston, but only 1,500 in the rest of Massachusetts. This contrasted with larger Jewish populations in states such as Ohio, Illinois, and even California, which were considerably farther away from the immigrants’ ports of entry.
During the 1976 American Bicentennial, the Jewish Historical Society of the North Shore was founded as a non-profit volunteer organization. Its purposes are:
We are funded in part by the Jewish Federation of the North Shore.
