History of the Jews in Cincinnati

The history of the Jews in Cincinnati occupies a prominent place in the development of Jewish secular and religious life in the United States.

Cincinnati is not only the oldest Jewish community west of the Allegheny Mountains but has also been an institutional center of American Reform Judaism for more than a century.

[1]: 271 The first known Jew to settle in Cincinnati was Joseph Jonas, an English emigrant who arrived in the city via Philadelphia in 1817.

[2] Jonas, a young man, decided to leave his home in Exeter, England, with the avowed intention of settling in Cincinnati.

On the High Holidays in the autumn of 1819, these four men, together with David Israel Johnson of Brookville, Indiana (a frontier trading-station), conducted the first Jewish service west of the Appalachians.

This man, who had not been known as a Jew, when he felt death to be approaching, asked that three of the Jewish residents of the town be called.

The few Jews living in the city at once proceeded to acquire a small plot of ground to be used as a cemetery and buried him there.

There were not enough settlers to form a congregation until the year 1824, when the number of Jewish inhabitants of the town had reached about twenty.

[citation needed] On January 8, 1830, the Ohio General Assembly granted the congregation a charter whereby it was incorporated under the laws of the state.

Contributions were even received from Portsmouth, England, from where a number of Cincinnatians had emigrated, and from Barbados in the West Indies.

The first benevolent association in Cincinnati was organized in 1838 with Phineas Moses as president: its object was to assist needy coreligionists.

With its supplement in German, Die Deborah, The Israelite was the only bilingual Jewish publication in the United States.

[5] In 1951, the UAHC (now called the Union for Reform Judaism) moved its headquarters to the demographic center of American Jewry in New York City.

Wise served as rabbi of the B'ne Yeshurun congregation till the day of his death, March 26, 1900, being succeeded by his associate, Louis Grossmann.

Each of these congregations conducted its own religious school, and there were also two free religious schools; one holding its sessions in the schoolrooms of the Mound Street Temple (B'ne Israel), and the other, conducted under the auspices of the local branch of the Council of Jewish Women, meeting at the Jewish Settlement.

One of these congregations enjoys the distinction of having petitioned overseas halakhic authority Rabbi Naftali Zvi Yehuda Berlin regarding the appropriate manner in which to inaugurate a Torah scroll in the synagogue.

Night classes for various English and industrial branches of study were a feature of the work of the Jewish Settlement.

All the relief and educational agencies joined their forces in April 1896, and formed the United Jewish Charities.

The United Charities also granted an annual subvention to the Denver Hospital for Consumptives and to the local Jewish Settlement Association.

The Jews of Cincinnati participated actively in civic life and filled many local positions of trust, as well as state, judicial, and governmental offices.

Henry Mack, Charles Fleischmann, James Brown (Ohio politician), and Alfred M. Cohen were elected members of the State Senate, and Joseph Jonas, Jacob Wolf, Daniel Wolf, and Harry M. Hoffheimer served in the State House of Representatives.

Jacob Shroder was judge of the court of common pleas for a number of years, and Frederick S. Spiegel held the same position as of 1902.

Nathaniel Newburgh was appointed appraiser of merchandise by President Cleveland during his first administration, and Bernhard Bettmann was collector of internal revenue since 1897.

Lewis S. Rosenstiel, a grandson of Frederick A. Johnson—the first Jew born in the city, was the founder and chairman of Schenley Industries and was the nation's largest distiller for half of the twentieth-century.

In the late 1800s Jewish Russian immigrant David Kadetz settled in Cincinnati, and offered his flair for cooking at the renowned St. Nicolas Hotel.