Name a Wisconsin village, town or small city that thrived at any time during the 19th or 20th centuries, and most likely a Jewish resident was contributing to that growth. Other Jews contributed to larger society after leaving small-town Wisconsin.
I can’t allow this second annual Jewish American Heritage Month (May 2007) to pass without kvelling about 12 of those influential Jews.
Wisconsin’s first prominent Jew was both a scion of the Franks, an important colonial Jewish family, and a church elder. John Lawe (1779-1846) paddled into Green Bay in 1797 at age 17 to clerk for his fur-trading uncle, Jacob Franks (Wisconsin’s first Jew).
Lawe took over the business in 1813, when Franks left his business, wife and children behind for Montreal. Lawe was a successful trader, landowner and mill operator. He was appointed a Brown County associate judge in 1818 and served in the 1836 Wisconsin Territorial Legislature. With the nearest synagogue in Cincinnati, he joined a Green Bay church.
Lawe’s death came a year after John Mayer Levy (1820-1910) arrived in the fledgling river town of La Crosse. The London-born son of German Jews is considered La Crosse’s first permanent white settler.
He made and lost a fortune in mail delivery, real estate, construction and by owning hotels, a dock and warehouses. He hosted the town’s first religious services – ecumenical – and served as mayor from 1860-61 and 1866-68. He also was a founder of Congregation Anshe Chesed and the La Crosse B’nai B’rith lodge.
As in La Crosse, German Jews formed a Reform congregation in Appleton. The town’s first rabbi, Hungarian immigrant Samuel Weiss, was fired in 1882 because of his Old World ways. But he’s best remembered as the father of Erich.
You may know Erich (1874-1926) by his stage name, Harry Houdini, an escape artist, illusionist and arguably the most famous entertainer of the early 20th century. He stopped in his hometown in 1904, telling the Appleton Crescent that he visited the room above a store on College Avenue where his father had an office and “where I used to get my spankings.”
The Crescent reporter who interviewed Houdini was Edna Ferber (1885-1968), who would win a Pulitzer Prize in 1924 for her novel “So Big.” She also wrote the popular Emma McChesney stories and books including “Showboat” and “Giant.”
Ferber lived in Appleton as a teenager and young woman, the daughter of merchants. Her autobiography “A Peculiar Treasure” (1939) recalls Appleton’s Temple Zion as “a neat and dignified building in a good residence section of town.
“It was a frame building, double-porches, with stained-glass windows, a charmingly proportioned pulpit complete by the ark and its twin seven-branched candlesticks.” You still can see it at 320 N. Durkee St., now home to Wahl Organbuilders.
Athlete and artists
The predominance of German Jews in Wisconsin was finished by 1900 except in Milwaukee. Jews from Russian and Eastern Europe began arriving in significant numbers in the early 1880s.
Among them was a Russian teen who would become Wisconsin’s most well-known Jew during the Roaring Twenties.
Solomon “Uncle Sol” Levitan (1862-1940) entered Wisconsin as a pack peddler in 1881. Six years later, he opened a general store in New Glarus. The yeshiva-trained Levitan led services at the Monroe Orthodox synagogue. He moved to Madison in 1905, succeeding as merchant and banker and rising in the ranks of the Progressive Party.
Uncle Sol served as state treasurer from 1923-33 and 1937-39, the first Jew to hold statewide elected office in Wisconsin. A Sheboygan elder, the late John Alpert, recalled Levitan campaigning among Sheboygan Jewry ca. 1930, speaking Yiddish.
Wisconsin’s most successful small-town Jewish athlete was Morrie “Snooker” Arnovich of Superior, an All Star outfielder in 1939.
Arnovich (1910-1959) was one of several Superior Jews to play for the Superior Blues minor league baseball team. In a major league career from 1936-41, he played for the Philadelphia Phillies, Cincinnati Reds and New York Giants, and had a .287 batting average.
After serving in World War II, he failed to stick with the Giants in 1946. He briefly played and managed minor league baseball before returning to Superior, where he married, co-owned a sporting goods store, refereed pro basketball and was president of Superior Hebrew Congregation.
Arnovich wasn’t the only Jew to leave Superior for fame if not fortune. Esther Bubley (1921-1998), became one of the country’s leading photojournalists in the 1940s and ‘50s. Born in Phillips, Wis, her father owned a tire store. The family soon moved to Superior, where a teenage Esther made and sold photos.
After college in Minneapolis, she moved to Washington, D.C., in 1941. She developed a realistic style photographing regular people – sailors, bus passengers, boardinghouse residents, teens. She shot photo essays for Ladies’ Home Journal and had photos in Life, Look and Women’s Day magazines.
Another Wisconsinite who worked in visual media was Lester O. Schwartz (1913-2006), longtime artist-in-residence at Ripon College. His abstract paintings have been displayed at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago and galleries nationwide. Born in Manitowoc, Schwartz told me that he was pleased to have failed at working in his family’s aluminum foundry.
He owned a farm just outside of Ripon where he displayed his large metal sculptures in addition to paintings. A 2001 documentary, “Lester Schwartz: In His Own Words,” has been aired on Wisconsin Public Television.
Another metals maven was Lewis E. Phillips, who bought an Eau Claire cookware foundry in the 1930s and turned one of its new products, the Presto® Pressure Cooker, into a national phenomenon. He renamed the company National Presto® Industries in 1942.
Phillips founded the L.E. Phillips Charities in 1941. It has funded many health and educational organizations and the city’s Temple Sholom. Several buildings bear his name, including the L.E. Phillips Memorial Public Library and the L.E. Phillips Planetarium at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire.
Meanwhile, in Sheboygan, a community once known as “Little Jerusalem,” Sylvia Barack Fishman grew up as the daughter of Rabbi Nathan Barack. One of America’s leading Jewish scholars, Fishman is professor of contemporary Jewish life in the Near Eastern and Judaic Studies Department at Brandeis University and co-director of the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute.
Her books include “Double Or Nothing? Jewish Families and Mixed Marriage,” and “A Breath of Life: Feminism in the American Jewish Community.”
Scholarly, too, is Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.), who was born in Janesville in 1953. Feingold received a degree from Oxford University as a Rhodes scholar and earned a degree from Harvard Law School.
Feingold served in the State Senate from 1982-92. In 1992, he won election to the U.S. Senate, where he has become known as a principled maverick, pushing for campaign finance reform and opposing the Patriot Act and the U.S. war in Iraq.
He lives in Middleton and is a member of Beth Hillel Temple in Kenosha. The congregation is led by his sister, Dena Feingold, a fellow Janesville native who 25 years ago became Wisconsin’s first woman rabbi.
A good list, no? May you shepen nachas from your Wisconsin landsmen and landswomen.
Andrew Muchin is director of the Wisconsin Small Jewish Communities History Project, a program of the Wisconsin Society for Jewish Learning, Inc.
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