From the Pale to the Plains: Are There Jews in North Dakota?

When I tell people that I’m from North Dakota, they invariably ask, “Are there any Jews in North Dakota?” Indeed, in the 1890s there were an estimated 1,750 Jews, but even now there are about 500 scattered around the state, though most are not religious.

Jewish Life in Grand Forks

Winter comes early in North Dakota. I am 10 years old, and bundled in a heavy coat as my father and older brother enter the sukkah of Rabbi Louis Berkal, a soft-spoken Lithuanian in his 30s. There are 30 Jewish families in Grand Forks in 1954; this is probably the only sukkah.

My father, Shmuel Zavil, z”l, an immigrant from Belaya Tserkov, a city near Kiev that was best known as the home of the legendary chazzan Yossele Rosenblatt, chants the brachos in his rich baritone as we make Kiddush and have a piece of honey cake.

Grand Forks, by that time a city of 27,000, was, in terms of Yiddishkeit, in the middle of nowhere. Residents of the city — 120 miles south of Winnipeg and 300 miles west of Minneapolis, on the Minnesota border — were overwhelmingly Scandinavian and German Lutherans and Eastern European Catholics. The Grand Forks shul could barely get a minyan many Friday nights. Only several families kept Shabbos. Intermarriage was rampant.

An elderly frum Jew lived in a basement next to our house and sat shivah because all his sons had married non-Jewish women. My father’s best friend had married a Norwegian woman. I always wondered why my father was lukewarm to us mixing with their children — they weren’t Jewish.

It wasn’t always that way.

In 1890 there were a handful of Jewish farmers and merchants in Fargo, 75 miles south of Grand Forks. Other towns north and west of Fargo had more successful Jewish communities. The city of Devils Lake, west of Grand Forks, had a number of Jewish families. Grand Forks itself had a thriving, 60-member Jewish community of Ukrainian, Polish, German and Romanian immigrants. Many were Chassidim, who davened nusach Sefard.

The Great Northern Railway’s expansion and the possibility of wealth and land ownership attracted young Jews. Merchants — clothiers, grocers, dry cleaners, junkyard dealers, furriers and construction businesses — prospered.

A Community Develops

As the Jewish community in Grand Forks grew, the nearby town of Starkweather was being settled with the help of a European philanthropist, Baron de Hirsch. The 80 Jewish families who were settled there had been given free land by the government, but after a few crop failures they gradually moved either to Grand Forks or to other, larger communities such as Minneapolis and St. Paul.

My own maternal grandfather, Reb Shraga Faivel Goldfarb, z”l, was a member of the Galveston Plan, a project largely funded by New York philanthropist Jacob H. Schiff. The goal was to settle Jews outside of New York, where many immigrants lived in poverty. My Zaide, who was from Warsaw, saw a cowboy on a big horse when the ship debarked in Galveston — and decided that Texas was no place for a Jew. He took the first train to Minneapolis, where he lived out his days with his wife Bracha, a”h, and their three children.

My other Zaide, Chaim, z”l, left Ukraine in 1912, sponsored by a landsman in Grand Forks, but couldn’t send for his wife and five children for 11 years, as war and revolution swept through Europe. Finally, members of the Grand Forks community found the funds to bring them over. My father was 5 years old when Zaide left Belaya Tserkov, and 16 when he arrived in America. They hardly knew each other. Of the five children, only two — my father and my Aunt Bessie, a’’h, made it to America. One sister was thrown off a train by a Russian soldier, and another survived World War II, only to beg her mother — my Bubbe Krene, a’’h — not to contact her again, as it might get her in trouble with the Communists. We have no record of the fate of the other sister.

Like my Zaides, in many families the husband would go to America first, find work, and with the help of committees to assist new arrivals, they would send for the rest of the family. It was a source of anguish for those Eastern Europeans and Germans in Grand Forks and other communities around America, that many family members had been left behind during war and revolution. My mother, Rose, a”h, recounted how German soldiers had harassed her and her mother and two brothers, and how Poles in Warsaw threw stones at them during and after World War I.

With the help of European philanthropists like Baron de Hirsch, more Jewish communities were established in cities along the Great Northern and Northern Pacific railways’ mainline and branch lines, such as Hillsboro, Devils Lake, Williston and Minot, and into neighboring Montana. Jewish peddlers followed the railroads, and when those towns grew, they opened stores that carried all kinds of goods.

My Uncle Bill Naiditch, z”l, got his start in the plumbing supply business by peddling plumbing novelties in towns in Minnesota and the Dakotas. His visits to Grand Forks were happy times for me, as he told stories not only of the towns he visited and the Jews he met, but of his boyhood in Russia. When he had his own store in St. Paul and prospered, he supplied us with water heaters and other plumbing necessities.

Jewish Homesteaders

The German Jews of Grand Forks weren’t the first to arrive in what were to become North Dakota and South Dakota. In the early 1880s, Sarah Thal, a German Jew, wrote of the challenges Jewish farmers faced when they homesteaded in Dakota Territory. (North and South Dakota became states in 1889.) As homesteaders, they were granted 160 acres of land free of charge from the federal government, which wanted to settle the West.

The Thals, who had lived in a picturesque, pleasant town in Germany, were lured to Dakota Territory when relatives in Milwaukee sent glowing reports about the opportunities for farmers. In 1893, Sarah Thal and her husband Solomon began homesteading. But first there were rocks that had to be moved, one by one, before crops could be planted — they had been given the worst land.

“We had few neighbors,” Sarah Thal wrote. “Getting mail [transported by stagecoach] was a big event.” Her account describes crop failures, bitterly cold winters, isolation, loneliness, and travel by ox cart and, even sadder, the deaths of women in childbirth. For those women who survived childbirth under primitive conditions, she wrote, “I like to think that G-d watched out for us poor lonely women.” Many homesteaders simply gave up and moved to the towns that had Jewish communities to try to establish businesses.

The best account of the day-to-day lives of homesteading Jews that I found is a memoir by Sophie Trupin. She describes how, during a pogrom, her father, hiding in an attic with her and the rest of the family, decided to leave Russia and become a farmer in America, where he could escape anti-Semitism. Her father, who had never farmed — Jews were not allowed to own land in much of Eastern Europe — set out for North Dakota, where he built a crude farmhouse and started farming, all the while remaining shomer Shabbos and shomer mitzvos.

Her mother was bitterly disappointed when, four years later, she arrived and saw the isolation and bleakness of the land. In time, the former cheese merchant built a mikveh and continually remodeled the house as the family grew. She writes of neighbors getting together at a homesteader’s house for Yom Kippur davening. Years later, her brother went to visit the farm where his family had lived — there was no trace of it, nor of the farms of other Jewish homesteaders.

A Leader Arrives

Despite he community’s growth, the Jews of the Dakota Territories lacked a leader, until the 1891 arrival of Binyomin Papermaster, a Lithuanian Rabbi who had earned his semichah at Slobodka from Harav Yitzchok Elchonon Spector, the Kovno Rav, zt”l. Rav Spector urged Rabbi Papermaster to accept an invitation to serve the Jews of North Dakota.

Rabbi Papermaster’s son, Isadore, who wrote a history of the Jews of Grand Forks about 75 years ago, had this to say about the move:

“To my father, the prospect of going to America was quite exciting. He hated the Czarist government … and remembered his vow that his four young sons would never serve in the czarist army,” a fate their father barely escaped himself.

When Rabbi Papermaster arrived in Fargo, he was disheartened to find that there were not enough Jews to make a minyan. Soon, members of the thriving community in Grand Forks asked him to “try out” for a pulpit position. When he arrived there, he quickly realized that his Yiddish was different from that which the residents spoke. “He had some difficulty in understanding their ordinary conversation, but he decided that if he were going to remain there, he would have to adjust to their dialect and customs,” Lithuanian-born Isadore wrote.

Rabbi Papermaster had arrived for the tryout only a few days before Pesach. Since he had fasted on Erev Pesach, he was eager to start the Seder. He waited for his host to start, but the host wanted the Rabbi to conduct the Seder. Not everyone was happy. “Having been accustomed to Chassidic Sedarim, [the attendees] expected him to be provided with a special couch, white robe, hose, shtreimel and so forth.” But those weren’t his customs. “The older people grumbled … for so wanton a [lack of] respect [for] tradition.”

The next day, Isadore writes, “Rabbi Papermaster repeated to them the promise that he had given to his Rav … that he would never deviate from [halachah] … but in addition to laws there were also customs in Jewish life. … He promised to do his utmost to adjust himself to their ways and practices as were consistent with his knowledge, training and views … These were the principles that guided … his entire career.”

Up to 1891, there was not an actual synagogue in Grand Forks. At a community meeting, it was decided to form “The Congregation of the Children of Israel” near Second Avenue, the Jewish neighborhood of Grand Forks. The Rabbi had brought with him a Torah scroll from Lithuania. “My father was selected unanimously as Rabbi of the new congregation,” Isadore writes, and construction of the synagogue began. Many of the congregants took out mortgages on everything they owned to finance the project.

Rabbi Papermaster would travel among the farms and towns to conduct weddings, brissim and other simchos. Times were difficult for many of the Jewish settlers. Sometimes he would not get paid for performing a bris or a chasunah. On one trip, for a bris, he found the family could not afford to pay him. Selflessly, he bought supplies to help them. When he visited outlying settlements that weren’t served by the three other Rabbis in the state, he brought siddurim, tefillin and matzos for Pesach. Meanwhile, he would shecht to help provide them with kosher meat during the long winter. His generosity extended to helping peddlers become shopkeepers, co-signing notes to help them expand their businesses.

Rabbi Papermaster’s priorities included chinuch. It wasn’t long before he started a cheder in Grand Forks to serve his growing congregation. “On summer days, with the windows open, one could hear the voices of the children singing in the cheder the Shir Hashirim, the maftir or the portion of the week.” That cheder was still around in my day:

I am walking home with my brother Morley on icy streets in 30-below-zero weather after spending 90 minutes learning Hebrew and other subjects from one of several Rabbis — Holocaust survivors — who came to Grand Forks for short periods after Rabbi Berkal left to Winnipeg. We went to cheder two times a week after long days in public school. Our parents insisted that we get some kind of Jewish education. But it would be many years before I knew what a Gemara or a Mishnah is. Too often we are the only students who showed up.

An accomplished shliach tzibbur — he didn’t want to be called chazzan — Rabbi Papermaster often would plead for the congregation’s welfare for all five services of Yom Kippur. “He went into Ne’ilah with a fresh reserve power and strength that the congregation always marveled at,” Isadore writes.

For Sukkos, “the entire congregation would gather in the Rabbi’s sukkah. … Early in the afternoon of Shemini Atzeres, everyone would gather at the Rabbi’s [sukkah]. Then the whole group would move on to the shul officers’ [sukkos], until they reached the synagogue for bidding for honors and hakafos.”

Motzoei Shabbosos “were always evenings of pleasure in the early days,” Isadore Papermaster recalls. “The men would gather to sing chassidic songs and dance their chassidic dances. Each one would compete with one another in performing their special Rebbe’s favorite song, just as they had done in the shtetls and cities of Eastern Europe.”

Meanwhile, Rabbi Papermaster developed friends from across the religious and political spectrum. He endured little, if any, bigotry. He was a force among Orthodox Rabbis from large communities around the Midwest, and endured Reform and Conservative clergy, his son writes. “He didn’t have a bad word for anyone. When he died, in 1934, he took the heart of the community with him.”

Even before Rabbi Papermaster died, my Bubbe became alarmed at the Americanization — with all its blemishes — of young members of the community. She sent my Aunt Bessie to live with a frum family in Minneapolis — my other Bubbe and Zaide (of Galveston fame), who had a daughter named Rose. In time, Bessie made the shidduch between Rose Goldfarb and Sam Glicken, my parents, who were married for nearly 50 years.

There were eight Conservative clergymen who served the community from 1934 to 1970, according to Victor Lieberman’s brief history of Grand Forks Jews. In the early 1990s, Lieberman writes, the synagogue became affiliated with the Reform movement. To accommodate its Conservative members, their prayer book is used during the week, but on High Holidays, they use the Reform book. The synagogue hasn’t had a full-time leader since 1970.

Anti-Semitism

There were bigots in Grand Forks. The Ku Klux Klan, violent and racist men in white sheets, held at least one rally in Grand Forks. The Klan hated Catholics, blacks and Jews. But the Klan didn’t have the franchise on hatred. My father, who worked for the Great Northern Railway, endured terrible anti-Semitism, even though, as a union official, he saved many of his co-workers from being fired for drunkenness and worse. Despite the anti-Semitic taunts, when he retired, hundreds of men showed up for his retirement party.

I’m walking home from school with my best friend. Out of nowhere he calls me a derogatory name. I punch him in the face, he punches me. I was certain he had heard it from his Scandinavian parents. Another friend’s father, a Norwegian, banished me from their house. On [non-Jewish] holidays, my parents kept me inside, fearing that I might be the target of the imaginary Cossacks they brought with them from Russia and Poland. Battered by their lives in countries where pogroms were rampant, their mantra was “shah!” if we spoke too loudly, lest our non-Jewish neighbors hear us.

But there were gentiles who cared about their Jewish neighbors, too. One of them is Kenneth Dawes, now a retired professor at the University of North Dakota who frequently lectures about the early history of the Jews in Grand Forks. He relates the story of how his mother wanted to rent an apartment owned by Rabbi Papermaster. “But I have five children,” she told him. “Children need a place to live, too,” he said, and let her rent the apartment. Dawes, who lived across from us, vividly remembered our family when I called him this year for historical information.

North Dakota Today

I left North Dakota in 1963 to attend the University of Minnesota. By then, the B’nai Israel Synagogue had become a Conservative house of workship — a compromise between German and Eastern European Jews. I remember one Rosh Hashanah, when on the second day the frum chazzan dragged out the services well into the afternoon, to the outrage of the German Jews. The deal struck by the German Jews was to finish services by noon, unfortunately, so they could open their stores. Reform doesn’t hold by two-day yom tovs.

And now?

Rabbi Yonah Grossman and his wife Esti arrived in Fargo seven years ago to spread Yiddishkeit to the 50 or so families in the region and the estimated 500 Jews throughout the state. The Chabad shluchim are pioneers in a sense. They volunteered to go to Fargo, where the only traditional synagogue held its last High Holiday services in 2000. “We came with a list of names of Jews, and have tried to meet with all of them.” While there are no daily minyanim — the community is overwhelmingly Reform and supports an established synagogue — they feel that they are making a difference by connecting Jews with their roots. They offer classes during the week and community Shabbos meals. They also travel to Grand Forks for an occasional Shabbos to connect with that community. For Purim, they had Megillah readings in Fargo, Grand Forks, Minot and Bismarck. More than 60 people heard the Megillah — many, perhaps, for the first time. The Grossmans were sent out to Fargo by Chabad’s Upper Midwest director, Rabbi Moshe Feller.

When Rabbi Feller was a bachur in the 1950s, he stopped by our house in Grand Forks to try to convince my parents to send my brother to yeshivah, a suggestion that went nowhere, since my brother fled with his baseball buddies when he saw Rabbi Feller and another bachur.

Rabbi Grossman, who is originally from Long Beach, California, grew up in one of the best climates in the country. “Now I’m trying to warm up Fargo’s Jewish community.”

Shalom Orenstein, now a Chabad Rabbi, is the great-great-grandson of Rabbi Papermaster. “I knew about him when I was growing up — my grandmother still lived in Minot and Devils Lake and told stories about him,” he says.

When Rabbi Orenstein’s father became a baal teshuvah, it was only natural for his son to go to yeshivah. As a bachur, he was one of scores of Chabad yeshivah students who visit far-flung outposts to find Jews and encourage them to connect with their roots. “There is a small group of Jews in Minot [in the north-central part of the state] who get together Friday nights for dinner. One of them is on the way to becoming frum.”

Orenstein, 23, who is now in kollel in Crown Heights, traveled to Grand Forks last year, where he conducted a Seder. Fewer than 10 people attended. Outside of the Orthodox community, there are several others who try to provide Jewish connection and awareness in Grand Forks as well. Ben Garwood, president of the temple there, which has about 25 member families, says, “We haven’t had a resident Rabbi since 1970, but we have a bar or bat mitzvah once a year or so.” There have been no weddings at the synagogue in the past 20 years.

Reminiscences

Time has a way of shaping memories, both good and bad, and despite the downsides of growing up in Grand Forks, I also have fond memories.

The shofar-blowing contests for those of us who were AWOL from Sunday school, and how my older sister Gladys tried to control our Sunday school class as a half-dozen jokers held sway.

The annual chevrah kaddisha dinner, prepared by women in the community. It was the social highlight of the year.

My bar mitzvah, when everyone in the community came — as they did for all simchos. After Shabbos davening, the long kiddush began with l’chaims — and progressed to a table groaning with schmaltz herring, cold cuts and a dozen salads that reflected the cuisines of Eastern and Western Europe. At times like that, despite their differences, I think everybody in the community liked and respected each other.

Rabbi Berkal’s sonorous tenor when he led Shabbos and Yom Tov services.

Long Shabbos afternoons in the summer when we and a few other families visited Rabbi Berkal’s home for tea and pastries.

My mother preparing gefilte fish from scratch and salting a chicken on Thursday nights. My Bubbe’s onion pletzl.

How I followed my Zaide around his house — holding the back of his tallis so it wouldn’t get dirty when he davened. Wonderful memories.

In Minot, the synagogue has closed. A local doctor has taken the Torah into his home and offers services for residents who want to say Kaddish. That’s a far cry from the High Holidays at the turn of the century when the Grand Forks shul attracted more than 300 Jews, hungry for the Yiddishkeit they had known in the shtetls of Europe.