A talk by Jonathan D. Sarna, the Joseph H. and Belle R. Braun Professor of American Jewish History at Brandeis University
Presented November 7, 2010, on the occasion of Congregation Agudas Achim’s centennial
In ascending this pulpit, I am reminded of the story of a Jew named Isaac who miraculously survived the great Johnstown Flood of 1889. Isaac lived a long life, but eventually his time came and he ascended to heaven, whereupon he was immediately admitted. The angel Gabriel welcomed him warmly and informed him that it was the custom in heaven that newcomers deliver lectures about their experiences back on earth. “Very well,’ said Isaac enthusiastically, “I will give a talk on my experiences during the Great Johnstown Flood of 1889.” Excellent, the angel replied. But do please remember, as you are preparing your talk that Noah will be sitting in the audience. As I was preparing my remarks, I too constantly remembered that others far more learned than I am concerning Agudas Achim and Attleboro Jewish history, are sitting in the audience.
Agudas Achim was founded a century ago in 1911. I do not know the precise date of its founding, but it is a safe bet that like many another synagogue it was founded in anticipation of the major fall or Spring holidays (Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur in the Fall or Passover in the Spring) by people who wanted to get together to observe them.
The establishment of a synagogue has, from the very beginning of Jewish life in the Americas, been a marker of community. It announces the presence in town of at least a quorum of Jews – a minyan – and declares that these Jews intend to settle down, form a community, and worship Almighty God according to the traditions of their ancestors.
One of America’s first rabbis, Max Lilienthal, described the process of Jewish community building back in 1847, and many aspects of his description would seem likely to hold true for the establishment of Agudas Achim as well:
“Several years ago a Jew moves out to a small town and lives there at a distance and separated from everything relating to Jews and Judaism. It is not known that he is a Jew; he keeps no Jewish commandment, observes no Jewish ceremony. Some time afterwards one more Jew settles, then a second and a third; the holy season of our New Year and Day of Atonement comes, the people think of God and see in their prosperity how much they have to thank Him for, notice their irreligious life and are ashamed of it. The desire stirs in their hearts to return to God. They count themselves and are ten and are in a position to form a minyan. One proposes that they constitute themselves as a congregation, the others gladly agree and are enthusiastic. . . if five years later one comes to the kind of place where at one’s first visit there had been no trace of a single Jew, one finds an independent, well-organized congregation with a nice synagogue. . . and feels amazed at how quickly and how securely Judaism has taken root in the new Fatherland.”
Attleboro, of course, was hardly a frontier community in 1911. It was incorporated back in 1694. But Jews were latecomers here, as they were in most of New England, including Boston. It is worth recalling that there were synagogues in Cincinnati, Cleveland, Louisville and St. Louis before the establishment of the first synagogue in Boston in 1843. To be sure, there had been a significant Jewish community in Newport, RI in the colonial era, but it declined after the American Revolution (Colonial Newport’s last Jewish resident died in 1822). The Jewish community of Providence dates to 1854. Throughout New England, Jews were latecomers. New England communities tended to be homogeneous and therefore far less welcoming to minorities like the Jews.
There are communities in the United States where Jews enjoy the status of founders and pioneers: think of Savannah and Cincinnati and San Francisco. However, Boston is not such a place, neither is Providence, and neither is Attleboro. Instead, the Jews who arrived in all of these places, including here in Attleboro, helped (better late than never) to make their communities more pluralistic and diverse. They introduced a Jewish dimension into a community that had previously only known Jews from reading the Bible.
The Jews who arrived in Attleboro at the beginning of the 20th century were East European Jews. Some American Jewish communities – like New York – experienced waves of Jewish immigration, beginning in the colonial era with Sephardic Jews from the Iberian peninsula, then a larger wave of immigration from Central Europe (Germany & Poland) in the middle of the nineteenth century, and only then an East European Jewish immigration from Russia, Rumania & Autro-Hungary. Here, as in much of New England, the Jewish community was created by East European Jews alone. It was, for that reason, a much more cohesive community than New York or Cincinnati. The tensions that divided Central and East European Jews from one another in other places were unknown here.
How did the first Jews get to Attleboro? Ruth Fine Handy, whose family arrived here in the first decade of the 20th century, has recounted her family’s history on the Fine Farms website. Her grandparents, she reports, came from a small village on the border of White Russia and Lithuania. They eked out a living on a dairy farm. As economic conditions in Russia deteriorated and violence against Jews increased, they, like over two million other Jews, decided to come to America, the goldene medinah, the golden land of opportunity. As happened in many cases, the male breadwinner—later known as Grandpa Fine—came first. He became a house painter in New York. Immigrants who had no experience in tailoring or cigar-making or other urban professions, often went into semi-skilled professions like house painting. It was easy to learn, did not require knowledge of English, and in a fast-growing, dirty city like New York, there was no shortage of work. A diligent laborer who scrimped and saved, could soon make enough to bring over his wife and children to join him. So it was with Grandpa Fine. In an impressively short amount of time, he was able to send them all tickets. After an unusually harrowing voyage, his family joined him in New York.
“My grandfather,” Mrs. Handy reports, “opened a little candy store and later a grocery store on the Lower East Side. He continued to work as a painter while my grandmother tended to the store and the children. [This pattern was quite common.]
[She continues,] “An unfortunate accident in 1903 changed the course of their lives. As my grandfather was boarding an open streetcar with his painter’s tools, the conductor started the trolley, throwing him to the street. His left hand was crushed under the wheels of a passing cart and the index finger and part of the ring finger had to be amputated. He was no longer able to hold a paintbrush so he had to give up his trade. For this injury the railroad insurance company paid him $800 [equivalent to almost $19, 000 in today’s money] three years after the accident.
“The Jewish Agricultural Society of New York located a farm in Attleboro, Massachusetts and the family—there were five children now—moved to their home, sight unseen. [In other words, they used the settlement money to buy a farm.] Fate, once again, had taken my grandfather back to the land.”
The Jewish Agricultural Society was an organization that deeply believed in removing Jews from big cities and settling them on the land. Like many at that time, it considered productive farming to be the highest and most noble form of work. It also believed that settling Jews on the land would counter antisemitism by proving that Jews were no less able to work with their hands than anybody else.
We have no record of why the Fines came to Attleboro rather than settling in New Jersey or Connecticut like most other prospective farmers did. But I do have my suspicions. At about this time, the Jewish Agricultural Society discovered that one of its agents, in collusion with various brokers, had sold farms to the Society’s clients at greatly inflated prices in return for large commissions [Davidson, Our Jewish Farmers, p.31]. [If you thought that only our generation had been crafty enough to invent shady property dealings, now you know the rest of the story.] Many of the properties sold to immigrants, like the one sold to the Fines in Attleboro, turned out to be much less than advertised, filled, as this one was, with stumps and stones and rickety buildings. The Jewish Agricultural Society eventually obtained partial refunds for the cheated buyers—I hope that the Fines were among them—but by then many of the immigrants had settled down and did not want to move again. That, of course, was true of the Fines. They worked incredibly hard and, over time, turned Fine Farms into one of the finest farms in Southern New England. Most unusually, the farm remains in the family three generations later, testifying both to the hard work and to the success of these early immigrants. Hyman Fine Elementary School, incidentally, is named for Ruth Fine Handy’s father who, in addition to developing the farm, was a longtime member of the school board. Ruth herself is a graduate of Brandeis University. [I have to mention that, it is in my contract.]
The Fines arrived in Attleboro at a most opportune moment, for their arrival coincided with great economic improvements here in Attleboro. Joseph Finberg, another Russian immigrant who settled about this time (probably a little earlier) established Finberg Manufacturing Company, which made jewelry. The jewelry industry was a venerable one here, but his jewelry focused on new markets. Finberg, who came to this area in the late 19th century, eventually sold his company and went on to become a banker and a significant communal leader, active in Jewish and non-Jewish charities alike. Like Hyman Fine, he too has a school named for him (testimony to the important role Jews played in general education). He also became active in the camping movement, both through the YMCA and by helping to support Camp Avoda. [That pattern of involvement in both the Jewish community and the larger community has been characteristic of Attleboro’s Jews down to the present.]
Non-Jews who knew the jewelry trade also were transforming this community in the early 20th century. Numa Guyot immigrated from France and used his experience as a craftsman to enter the jewelry business, making the component parts (“findings”) that are assembled into jewelry. Then the L.G. Balfour Company opened up in 1913 and within a short time captured a near monopoly on fraternity and sorority rings. These companies attracted many new workers to Attleboro. Before long, Attleboro began calling itself “the jewelry capital of the world,” and in 1914 it reincorporated as a city.
Jews formed part of this ebullient new city—not a hugely important part to be sure, but one significant enough to encourage them, in 1911, to establish this synagogue. The name that the small group of 21 founders chose, Agudas Achim, carried an important message. The Hebrew means roughly “a society of brothers” or a fraternal union. Large numbers of East European Jewish synagogues in America carry this name – including the old immigrant synagogue in Newton, where I live. (The full name of Newton’s Adams Street Synagogue is Agudas Achim Anshei Sfard.) The name reflects a realization on the part of immigrant Jews that they needed to bind themselves together if they were to preserve Judaism in America. Even if they originated in different European communities, with different customs and traditions and ideas, they needed to bind themselves together as an “Agudas Achim”—a fraternal union—if their faith was to survive. The Talmud, (like the American Federalist Papers), warns against the danger of many factions (agudot agudot) in a community. Its ideal is community that works harmoniously like a family. To be sure, most American synagogues did not manage to live up to that ideal. Many an “Agudas Achim” through the years broke apart or experienced schisms, or simply shut down. [Same is true of Ohabei Shalom, the first synagogue in Boston (1843), which means Lovers of Peace. The name was more wish than reality: it experienced schism after schism.]
Here in Attleboro, I am certain that there were also many disagreements and differences—that is what makes this a Jewish community, we love machloket and disputation—but what makes this congregation unusual is that 100 years later, this congregation is still an Agudas Achim—it is still one family. Somehow, notwithstanding what I am sure are many tough moments, you have managed for a full century to continue to bind yourselves one to another, and not to break apart. This is no small achievement: I hope that you can continue to live up to your congregation’s lofty name for many more years and centuries to come. Many a larger congregation could learn from your wonderful example.
The development of the Jewish community in Attleboro, after the establishment of Agudas Achim, resembles what we know in many Jewish communities. For example, there was an enterprising Jew named Max London (he was also a founder of Agudas Achim) who founded a department store. He had begun his American career as a peddler, advanced to a small clothing store, and through skill and luck and lots of hard work he eventually transformed that store into one of the city’s best known commercial establishments. Department stores like Max London’s changed the face of America over the past 150 years, and a disproportionate number of them were owned by Jews—think of Macy’s and Gimbel’s and Bloomingdale’s and Riches and Kaufmann’s and Neiman Marcus. These department stores were great democratizers. They made fashions and other goods available to all Americans, at fair prices and often for credit. They made it possible for families here to enjoy many of the same luxuries known to families in New York and Boston and California. Along with catalog shopping, pioneered by a Jew named Julius Rosenwald at Sears, stores like Max London’s made it possible for people who lived anywhere in the country, including Attleboro, to feel part of one large, nationwide consumer market.
Attleboro suffered during the depression years, and so did its Jews. The jewelry industry did not weather the depression well, and those in small communities tended to suffer more than those in big cities. Then the war came, and lots of young men went away. Some discovered worlds that they had never known before—Florida, California, the so-called sunbelt—and when they returned from overseas they moved away permanently. Others used their GI benefits to go to college. That may well have been the case with Ernest Rotenberg, who after the war attended Colby and Tufts, went on to BU Law School, and became a sought-after lawyer. After 25 years practicing law, he became an award-winning, nationally known judge, first justice of Bristol Probate Court.
Other local Jews, like their counterparts throughout the country, became doctors, accountants, journalists and yes professors. Opportunities opened up for Jews, particularly as quotas and antisemitism declined in the postwar years. Many Jews took advantage of those opportunities—even if that meant leaving the community where they had been raised.
The postwar years witnessed significant changes in American Judaism, and although I have not studied this in detail, I sense that Agudas Achim was buffeted by those changes. The Conservative movement in Judaism was the fastest growing movement by far in those days, and many a once Orthodox congregation joined that movement, and introduced mixed seating (which supporters called family seating and opponents called promiscuous seating) into its worship. They abandoned the separation of men and women and the old women’s gallery.
By the early 1950s, about half of all Conservative congregations had also introduced the bat mitzvah ritual for girls as a counterpart to the bar mitzvah initiation rite for boys. Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan had performed the bat mitzvah for his daughter, Judith, back in 1922, but it was only in the postwar era that the bat mitzvah took off. More than anybody recognized at the time, the bat mitzvah ceremony opened the door to women’s greater participation in Jewish religious life, in tandem with their changing status in society generally.
In the 1960s, Jewish feminists pushed for greater changes in the role of women in Jewish life. In 1968, the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Seminary opened and became the first rabbinical seminary to admit women on an equal basis to men. Four years later, the Reform movement ordained America’s first woman rabbi, Sally Jane Priesand. Two years after that, the first Reconstructionist woman rabbi was ordained, Sandy Sasso. In 1985, the first Conservative women rabbi was ordained, Amy Eilberg. Initially, congregations hesitated to hire women rabbis, and those women who were hired spent a good deal of their time talking about what it meant for women to be rabbis. But as time passed, and the number of women rabbis reached 100 and then 200 and then 500, the revolution that had transformed the role of women in Judaism, bringing new excitement and involvement on the part of women to diverse aspects of Jewish religious life, gradually became normative. The arrival in Attleboro, in 2001, of Rabbi Elyse Wechterman signaled that the bonds of brotherhood here at Agudas Achim had broadened to embrace women as equals. In this, as in so much else, Agudas Achim shows that it has managed to grow and change with the times. That, of course, is the real secret to this congregation’s longevity.
So at a time when American Jews are worried about issues of continuity and survival, the history of Agudas Achim has much to teach us. For a full century, this congregation has succeeded in binding the Jewish community of Attleboro together. Where so many other Jewish communities in the United States have fragmented and factionalized, Agudas Achim has remained true to its name. Against all odds, and in the face of great religious and social changes, Agudas Achim has pursued Jewish unity. Through the years you have learned to compromise, to eschew extremes, to find a middle ground. Would that all Jews—and all couples—could learn those same lessons.
At the same time, I admire the fact that this congregation has never been a prisoner of its own past. Your leaders understood that the Judaism championed by this congregation’s founders was not necessarily suited to their children. Of course, a sense of tradition, a healthy respect for congregational culture, is important to any house of worship. But slavish observance of tradition, without regards to the needs and interests of a new generation, can be fatal to a congregation’s ability to survive. For all that I love history, it is clear that synagogues need to look forward, not just backward. Agudas Achim, through the years, has managed to do just that.
Finally, this congregation seems to have learned over its 100 years of history, that stable rabbinic leadership matters. It is wonderful to see a rabbi entering her tenth year in this pulpit. Historically, I can tell you that there is a one-to-one correspondence between leadership stability and a synagogue’s success. Just as long and happy marriages between couples produce healthy and vibrant families, so long and happy marriages between rabbis and congregations produce committed and vibrant Jews. So I want to wish Agudas Achim and Rabbi Wechterman many, many more happy years together—as we say, to 120!
The pursuit of communal unity, forward-looking thinking, leadership stability—these are some of the great lessons and values that all of us can learn from the 100-year history of Agudas Achim. They are important lessons for us to remember on this wonderful centennial anniversary, and they are important lessons that anyone interested in the future of the American Jewish community might profitably study and ponder.
Congratulations and thank you very much!
