The history of Jews in Milwaukee began in the early 1840s with the arrival of Jewish immigrants from German-speaking states and the Austro-Hungarian empire.
[5][6] Due to an influx of immigrants from Central Europe fleeing discrimination, poverty and pogroms, the Jewish community increased from 70 families in 1850 to 2,074 in 1875.
[9] By 1925, the Jewish population in Milwaukee had grown to 22,000, which was eleventh largest concentration of Jews in the United States at the time.
[8] Secondary waves of Jewish immigrants came to the city in the hundreds after the rise of the Nazi party in Germany in the 1930s and the end of the Soviet Union in the late 1970s into the 1990s.
[10] Jews in Milwaukee became heavily involved in entrepreneurship in various industries, such as grocery stores, clothes-making, recycling, meatpacking and manufacturing.
The Jewish Vocational Service, the first rehabilitation agency in the United States to help veterans retrain and find jobs, opened in 1938.
[12] A 2015 study by the Center for Urban Initiatives and Research at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee estimated that there were approximately 25,800 Jewish people living in the Greater Milwaukee area in 2011, which is 1.8% of the general population.