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Rendering of a typical fort on the shores of the Great Lakes.
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Class photo from the 1904 graduating class of Detroit Central High School.
Hastings Street, circa 1920s.
The Great Adventure
The Promise Of Freedom
The Entrepreneurial Spirit
ore than a century after the 1654 arrival in New Amsterdam of
the 23 Jews who were fleeing the threat of the Inquisition in
Brazil, fur trader Ezekiel Solomon from British Montreal arrived
in 1761 at Fort Michilimackinac in Michigan. The following year, his partner
Chapman Abraham arrived at Fort Detroit. Solomon, along with his partners,
were the first known Jews in Michigan.
Unlike other Jewish immigrants, these adventurous Jewish pioneers
were not fleeing persecution or poverty, but instead were pursuing the
opportunities of the fur trade — a trade based on supplying Parisians
and other Europeans with the latest fashionable beaver hats, capes and
coats.
Paddling 75 days by voyageur canoes along the Great Lakes waterways
from Montreal to Michigan, Solomon and Abraham experienced raging
storms, rapids, portages and even capture by the Native Americans in
Chief Pontiac's Conspiracy of 1763. Solomon and Abraham and their
company of traders carried in cargoes of needed supplies for the
British army, returning to Montreal with immense loads of furs to be
shipped across the Atlantic.
So full were the great canoes, that the French voyageurs hired to be
paddlers were required to have short legs to leave the most room for
the precious goods!
Despite the dangers, both Solomon and Abraham established themselves
in these pre-Revolution British communities in Michigan, building homes
within the respective forts and remaining for many years — going back
and forth to Montreal with their cargoes each season. Back in Montreal,
they attended services at their congregation, Shearith Israel, where they
remained members.
The success of these cosmopolitan Jewish traders depended on good
relations with the Native Americans, despite their earlier wartime captivity.
Stephen Vincent Benet described their perilous ordeal in his narrative
poem "Jacob and the Indians."
Historians credit these hardy Michigan Jewish fur traders with pushing
back the wilderness and helping to extend the American frontier. Their
place in history has been commemorated on historic plaques issued by
the Michigan Historical Commission.
ven before the treacherous pogroms began in Eastern Europe in
the 1880s, Jews in Germany and Bavaria were being singled out with
repressive laws that prevented them from attaining a higher education,
owning land or allowing more than one in a family to marry.
Imagine then the appeal not only of the promised ideal of America — that
all men are created equal — but of the first written guarantee of religious
freedom in the new country as stated in 1787 in the Northwest Ordinance,
which covered the territory of Michigan. The adventurous immigrant who
would uproot himself to come to a new land of equal opportunity was often
even more attracted to Michigan, wilderness that it was, because of its
commitment to a heritage of religious freedom.
The Jewish immigrant family above all valued education as the entry ticket
to "becoming a real American." Early on, by 1858, Michigan was offering
free public education through high school — and Jewish families took full
advantage of that opportunity. Furthermore, while American colleges in the
East mostly remained private, the University of Michigan opened its doors
early in the 19th century and, by the 1870s, was already graduating sons
of immigrant Jewish families.
Before the end of the century, U-M graduating classes included Henry
Butzel, who became Chief Justice of the Michigan Supreme Court; and Moses
Gomberg, award-winning head of the U-M Department of Chemistry; as well
as distinguished women destined to become community leaders.
Moreover, in the more crowded city of Detroit, the forerunner institution of
Wayne State University was established by 1869. So, during the height of
mass immigration, sons and daughters of Michigan Jewish immigrants were
able to get the higher education needed to become leading citizens and enter
the professions as teachers, sockal workers, doctors, lawyers and more.
Appreciating their freedom, the Jews of Michigan became active in the
anti-slavery movement of the mid-19th century. Rabbi Leibman Adler of the
Beth El Congregation was a spirited abolitionist preacher. Despite federal
laws prohibiting helping escaped slaves, Jewish citizens such as Mark
Sloman and Emil Heineman secretly participated in the Underground Railroad,
assisting the runaway fugitives across the Detroit River to freedom in Canada.
Moreover, a uniquely high percentage of Jewish men and boys throughout
Michigan enlisted in the Union Armies, fighting in all the bloody battles of the
Civil War. Attracted by its spirit of freedom, many Jewish Civil War veterans
from other states came to settle in Michigan.
ncreasing oppression and poverty in Russia-Poland resulted in an
enormous increase in immigration. Detroit Jewry grew from 1,000
Jews in 1880 to more than 30,000 in the 1920s.
For the untrained, ill-clothed, accented foreigner, the challenge of earning
a living for his family was daunting. The immigrants already had shown
determination and stamina in uprooting themselves from Europe, surviving
the long ocean voyage often in steerage class and finding their way
across the countryside to Michigan. Relying once more on those same
personal resources, the newcomer often put a pack of goods on his back
and struck out as a peddler — the ultimate entrepreneur.
Forested with white pine and with valuable copper mines in the Upper
Peninsula, Michigan offered opportunity. With the support of his wife, the
peddler set out to make a living selling "necessaries" to the workers in
the lumber and mining camps all through the state. While lumber barons
set artificially high prices for goods to keep their workers indebted to
them, the Jewish peddler provided competitive prices and earned respect
for "breaking the back of the company store."
The Jewish peddler followed the lumber and mining camps not only all
across Michigan's lower peninsula but even into the snowy wilderness of
the Upper Peninsula, eventually settling down to open shops and stores
and to establish an extensive Michigan network of Jewish communities
and synagogues.
By 1895, 10 Jewish shopkeepers in Detroit met to organize the Hebrew
Free Loan Association to help the newcomers get started. Members collected
a nickel a week from each man to be able to loan $5 to a new immigrant
to purchase merchandise to sell. It cost $15 to get a horse and wagon.
More than a century later, this self-help organization is still in existence,
helping today's people in need to become self-sufficient.
Traceable in the timeline from the original Hebrew Free Loan
Association until today, the Michigan Jewish community is a role model as
it continues to organize to respond to the changing needs of its poor, its
sick and its youth; to provide education and recreation; and to support the
State of Israel.
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