I spent last weekend in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, part of my ongoing work with small Jewish communities in the heartland of the United States. I was there for Shabbat and will be returning to lead the High Holy Days.
The gig came about by both word-of-mouth (last year I served Congregation Beth Shalom in Sioux City, Iowa and as one might imagine with small towns, there is considerable overlap of friends and family in a relatively small patch of the Jewish prairie) as well as a new initiative run by my colleagues at the Central Conference of Reform Rabbis that helps match rabbis who like to travel (moi) with small towns looking for clergy support.)
I got to Sioux City, by the way, vis a vis work I have done dedicating memorials to destroyed towns in Belarus. When I had given a pandemic talk on Zoom in mid-2020, I was contacted by a member of the Sioux City community whose ancestors came from the same shtetl as my grandmother — Kopyl — and have since found more landsmen in Sioux Falls as well. “Kol Yisrael aravim zeh l’zeh” — “all Jews are connected,” tradition teaches. How true.
The Mt. Zion Temple community is a warm, tight-knit, deeply caring of one another, and has built strong bonds with the broader Sioux Falls community.
The synagogue is called Mt. Zion Temple and it’s part of a Jewish community that has been in the Dakotas since the late 19th century. The first Jews to arrive in Sioux City were mostly from Germany, arriving to the prairie as part of an early wave of those seeking opportunity in the Gold Rush, utopian movements, homesteading, and then the meat packing, scrap metal and dry goods businesses throughout the state.
If you have not yet read Rebecca Clarren’s The Cost of Free Land, I highly recommend it. It weaves a complex story about U.S. policy toward First Nations, Jewish immigrants, homesteading, and the ongoing issues related to land rights in the United States. For added bonus, you get to learn that Rebecca’s family also descends from Kopyl.
Another helpful volume for those interested in prairie Jews is Robin Doroshow’s Aberdeen, published by the Jewish Historical Society of the Upper Midwest. I hope to visit Aberdeen during the holidays in October.
Besides Mt. Zion Temple there is also an active Chabad in Sioux Falls, two cemeteries, and as I mentioned, a community very much committed to its warmth and care for another and the broader Sioux Falls community.
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Friends on Facebook know that I have launched a fund to support Jewish Life Fellows at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Hillel in celebration of Hillel’s 100th year on the Madison campus. The Madison Hillel, as I have written before, was absolutely essential to my development as a young Jew. Were it not for its director, Irv Saposnik, a dear friend and teacher to me, as well as George Mosse in the history department, I never would be the rabbi I am today. I therefore want to create a Jewish Life Fellows Fund that can help support Jewish students doing meaningful work with other Jewish students on the UW campus.
My goal is to raise $25,000 and I have given the first $1800. I’m about a third the way there and I invite you to help me "pay it FORWARD" by supporting the Jewish future in Madison!
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A few posts back I wrote about the Polish writer Mikołaj Grynberg’s volume of short stories, I’d Like to Say Sorry, But There’s No One to Say Sorry To. A small collection, it took me two weeks to read because I savored each story as if inundated by dream waves of traumatic memory and breathtakingly direct poetry. Wartime Warsaw and and the Holocaust, transmuted to present day Poland, hang over these stories like a burial shroud that peaks above the ground, refusing to be unseen. More lines to draw you in:
“The little boy in glasses who was terrified of Hitler was you.”
“We were reaching the limits of shared language, a semantic void.”
“Those who survived were divided into two groups: those with photos and those with nothing.”
“I’m afraid you won’t be done working on the past by the time the future is done.”
One final note: I’m taking the dive into Stefan Zweig, inspired by Jeremy Eichler’s stunning depiction of his life and death in Time’s Echo. I just finished Journey Into the Past and am now reading The World of Yesterday. More on Zweig next time.