Salisbury’s Beth Israel Congregation

The Beth Israel Congregation Within Salisbury was once a thriving Jewish Community along the Eastern Shore. Within this brief presentation, learn more about this community’s founders, as well as the previous areas of which were considered to be just as rich in Jewish culture. Furthermore, discover why the Salisbury Beth Israel Congregation is no longer as lively as it was once before, though it still thrives to this day.

Hello, my name is Jabez Nelson, and today I’ll be presenting to you information relating to Salisbury’s Beth Israel Congregation. So, a little bit about me. I’m a third-year undergraduate student. I’m currently studying psychology with a concentration in industrial organizational psychology. Most of this research, or all of the research that I’m actually presenting to you today was done under the John Mitchell Junior Program. So before getting into the Beth Israel Congregation in Salisbury, we have to understand what the Jewish hub was before Salisbury. So, that was actually going to be Pocomoke, Virginia, as it was the biggest area where Jewish people are actually going to along the Eastern Shore in the late 1880s. So, many of the Jewish families have initially moved to Pocomoke, including the Finkelsteins, Klaffs, Fines, Glasses, Millers, Rodbells, and Heiligs There are other Jewish families that were also starting to take residence within different cities along the Eastern Shore, such as in Pennsylvania and Maryland. By the early 1900s Sam Feldman was actually one of these people, so he moved from Pottsville, PA, to Salisbury in 1904. He’d actually owned a furniture shop so he was taking it to Salisbury, actually setting it up to like live there permanently. As well as Israel Leon, AKA, “I.L.” Benjamin, who arrived in 1915 from Exmore Virginia. He was also a store runner, but his store was clothes, so he’s here running a clothing store. So these two men, both Jewish, they decided to found the Beth Israel Congregation in 1925, though it wasn’t actually known as the Beth Israel Congregation at the time, it was only known as the “Kehelas Israel”? Which meant the “Community of Israel” in Hebrew. The first President of the foundation was also I.L Benjamin, but I believe that Sam Feldman was also on the board, so he was also there, like helping consistently throughout all of the time I.L. was also present. Moving along to 1939, the congregation meetings were usually held within the second story of a store between Main Street and Camden Street. This was kind of a step up from what they were doing before because they had been going from house to house originally, as they didn’t actually have an official meeting place or building. But this all changed in 1951, when the first, official synagogue building was actually built. As this was happening, membership at the time was also going up exponentially as well as the Jewish population in Salisbury. I believe there were 75 Jewish families in the congregation around this time, which is way more than there are currently, unfortunately, as the modern day Beth Israel is a relatively small congregation. Since many of the families ended up migrating away to various metropolitan areas such as Baltimore, DC and Ocean City, this is the modern day building. By the way. On the last slide we saw that was the building that was first built in 1951, I believe. But the moving away from the Salisbury community primarily happened due to the conflicting viewpoints amongst older and younger members within the church back in the. Late 1980s, as I learned from the person I did an oral history interview with, Andrew Karten as well as the passing away of many of the original members. Yeah, it was very sad, but”¦ Throughout this entire process, I actually did a lot of searching through digital databases such as Ancestry and Newspapers trying to find out like more about each of the digital members of in the community that I was assigned. That also included me clipping different materials and transferring materials in the base camp. I also read through a lot of Jewish history literature. And of course, I had to contact the actual organization Beth Israel Synagogue. And I actually had scheduled the oral history interviews and the once those were done I just transcribed those oral history interviews. But yeah, that was basically all of my research so far, and I’m still doing more trying to like wrap everything up, but I’m looking forward to seeing what you guys have also done so, thank you.