MEITES' HISTORY OF THE JEWS OF CHICAGO

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H.L. Meites' classic History of the Jews of Chicago was first presented to the public at a meeting of the Chicago Historical Society on May 19, 1924, the year of its original publication. This invaluable work contains nearly 900 pages of illustrated entries about individuals, organizations and buildings in Chicago from the early 1800s to 1924. A small supplement was added to the book's second edition published in 1927.

Meites, an immigrant from Odessa, Russia, loved his adopted city and wanted to document the Jewish contribution to Chicago's success. He begins his history with the pre-Civil War Jewish settlements along Clark and Wells Streets in what is today downtown Chicago. In 1840, Jews also bought land in what is now northwest suburban Schaumburg in an unsuccessful attempt to settle there. During the Civil War, the Jewish community, numbering less than one thousand, were able to raise a company of soldiers in two days, immediately after the call for volunteers from President Lincoln.

Meites talks about Abraham Kohn and his family, merchants who had originally set up business in Massachusetts. They soon discovered that they had settled in a colony of Christians who, convinced that the end of the world was at hand, had little interest in purchasing anything from anybody. So the Kohns moved to Chicago. Abraham Kohn's daughter later married the architect Dankmar Adler, son of Liebman Adler, an avowed abolitionist and the German-speaking rabbi of Chicago's first Congregation, Kehilat Anshe Ma'ariv, K.A.M. In 1861, Abraham Kohn, then president of K.A.M., presented Abraham Lincoln, on the eve of the newly elected president's departure for Washington, with an American flag inscribed with a Hebrew quotation from the Book of Joshua "Be strong and of good courage."

From the Civil War to the Great Fire in 1871, Jewish immigration to Chicago increased markedly. These immigrants were primarily Jews from small towns or villages in Germany, many of them merchants who set up shops and founded the first Jewish hospital, along with synagogues and early charitable institutions.

Then came the Great Fire of 1871, in which a number of congregations lost their buildings and many merchants saw their stores go up in flames. K.A.M temple at Wabash Avenue and Peck Court survived the fire, while everything immediately north of it burned to the ground. Meites says that the Reverend Ignatz Kunreuther, the first rabbi of K.A.M, always insisted that it was his prayers that had saved his congregation. He offered no explanation of why those prayers hadn't saved the B'nai Sholom synagogue across the way, but it was suggested by a wag of the day that "It was probably because Kunreuther's prayers were in accordance with Minhag Askenaz [the German prayerbook] while B'nai Sholom's prayer book was Minhag Polen [the Polish one]." However, the K.A.M. temple was destroyed in a smaller but still disastrous fire three years later.

It was after this second fire that Jews began to cross the Chicago River and settle along Canal Street. The Mariampoler Congregation, whose synagogue was in ruins, crossed the river and became the first Russian-Polish congregation to be established in what was to become a large new Jewish community on Chicago's West Side as immigrants poured in from Eastern Europe in the latter part of the nineteenth century.

With the arrival of these Eastern Europeans came all the social problems that beset poor immigrants. Meites does not dwell on the perennial German-Russian Jewish tensions, but writes at great length about the charities set up to help aid West Side Jewry. Over and over again, the name of Julius Rosenwald appears as the benefactor of West Side institutions.

Meites deals briefly with the labor movements that emerged from the turmoil of the West Side; he was not equipped, he said, to deal with them in depth, and in fact he had little interest in the working classes. His chapter on the Jewish unions — the Cloakmakers Union, the Cigar Makers Union, and the Carpenters Union — is informative, but skimpy. He does attempt to dispel the apparently widespread notion that Jews were heavily involved in the Haymarket riot. In early May, 1886, August Spiess, one of the Haymarket anarchists, addressed the largely-Jewish Cloakmakers Union, headed by Abraham Bisno. On May 4 nearly 400 Jewish strikers began a march to the Haymarket area, where female Loop factory workers planned to join them. However, the strikers were intercepted by the police, who broke up their march by clubbing them. It was only later that day when the strikers were meeting to discuss the police action, that a worker rushed in to tell them he had just read in a German paper that "an anarchist had exploded a bomb" at the Haymarket.

Meites calls himself the first "card-carrying" Zionist in Chicago, and some of the most valuable research in his book concerns the founding and activities of the Zionist organizations where, by 1900, the Knights of Zion had taken over the leadership of the city's Zionist movement. He includes an...