The Transformation of a Rabbi, A Synagogue, and Vermont’s Religious Landscape, 1944-1952:
The Impact of Max B. Wall, U.S. Army Chaplain in WWII and Rabbi of Ohavi Zedek Synagogue, Burlington, Vermont.
Little Jerusalem
1/1/2014 | 1h 1m 29s
Video has Closed Captions
In the late 19th century, Jews from neighboring villages in rural Lithuania settled in Burlington, Vermont, a bustling port amid countryside that reminded them of home. Archival images and interviews with descendants of the original settlers capture the history of a community that enriches the culture of Vermont to this day.
Individual Jews may have been in Vermont as early as the 1850s, particularly in the southern part of Vermont, like Poultney.
- A Jewish congregation is first recorded in Poultney, Vermont in 1867, in a minutes book (“Pinkas.”)
- German Jews may have been in Burlington, Vermont as early as the 1870s.
- Ashkenazic Jews came in large numbers from Lithuania, Poland, and Belarus in the 1880s.
- Another group of German Jews arrived in Burlington, Vermont in 1910.
Burlington: The Burlington, Vermont Jewish community was formed by a number of Jewish families who came from Cekiske, Lithuania, in the 1880s (Tsaiykishuk in Yiddish)7 and transplanted their shtetl8 traditions, ceremonies and social mores to Burlington in a small geographic area called Little Jerusalem (from 1880-1940). The archivists of the community, based upon oral interviews, print articles, and sociological research have concluded that the Burlington shtetl may have been the longest surviving Jewish shtetl-like culture in the country based upon the insularity of the Burlington Jewish community and its remote location.
Publications
Samuel Gruber’s Jewish Art and Monuments posts on Vermont (blog). “From the Archives.” “Little Jerusalem, Burlington’s Jewish Community” PBS. Public Broadcasting Service, January 1, 2014.
Samuelson, Myron, The Story of the Jewish Community of Burlington, Vermont, (“With much about the Jewish Community in the State”) (Self-published, 1976).
Strogoff, Lottie P. The Other America, A Story of Life in Vermont at the Turn of the Century, Dvora Press, Brandeis University (1970).
Simon, Howard, Voices of the American Jewish Experience, Jewish Times, (Houghton Mifflin Company 1988). (Some Burlington Jews share their memories in the chapter titled “The American Shtetl.”)
Anderson, Elin L., We Americans: A Study of Cleavage in an American City [Burlington, VT] (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1937; reprint, New York: Russell & Russell, 1967).
Philip Rubin, “My Jewish Village in Vermont,” The Jewish Spectator, January 1949
— “Small City and Small Town Jews,” Congress Weekly, February 1952
— “Boyhood in Vermont,” Jewish Frontier, January 1954 (describing the Burlington Jewish Community as the last surviving Jewish shtetl in North America).
— “City Ghetto and Rural Shtetl, The Jewish Spectator, December 1954
— “Singing Boyhood, The Jewish Spectator, May 1955
Feuer, Lewis S, and Mervyn W. Perrine. “Religion in a Northern Vermont Town: A Cross-Century Comparative Study.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 5, no. 3 (1966): 367–82. .
Schine, Robert. “‘Members of This Book’: The Pinkas of Vermont’s First Jewish Congregation.” American Jewish Archives Journal, 02, 60, no. 01 (2008): 51–98.
Bougerie, Gabrielle. “University of Vermont.” UVM National Register North Street Burlington Vermont Statement of Significance. April 1996. Accessed January 13, 2021.
