This is the sixth in a series of articles designed to familiarize readers with Jewish communities throughout the state.
Wausau — This largest city in north-central Wisconsin and hub of Marathon County (the state’s largest county in area) is “an urban area with a very rural feel,” according to former Milwaukeean Peter Rotter, 40.
“From the center of the city, it’s five minutes to agricultural fields in almost any direction,” said Rotter, an attorney who has lived in the area since 1988. And in truth, according to the Wausau web site, agriculture is the area’s leading industry.
This appears to have influenced the character of one of the state’s smaller Jewish communities. Its headquarters synagogue, Mt. Sinai Congregation (of which Rotter is vice president), actually owned a silo for about a year, said spiritual leader Rabbi E. Daniel Danson, 44. The land on which the about ten-year-old building sits was donated by a local Jewish man whose ancestors had a farm there.
Moreover, the synagogue’s sanctuary was designed to display agricultural motifs in its decorations, such as its stained-glass windows. Even its ark is cylindrical to suggest a silo, said synagogue president Marsha Stella, 49.
This does not mean the Wausau-area Jews are rural or agriculturally oriented. The era of local Jewish farmers passed some time ago. The Jews here now are largely professionals, including a group of physicians working at the nationally famous Marshfield Clinic in Marshfield some 30 miles to the southwest.
Yet both real and stereotypic characteristics of agricultural communities are displayed in the ways various Mt. Sinai congregants described Jewish life in this area in interviews that took place during the congregation’s Purim celebration on March 11.
Big extended family
For one, the community is very close-knit, “like one big extended family,” according to physician’s receptionist Terry Oliver, 51, a native of Merrill, a town about 16 miles north of Wausau. “You know everyone … people go out of their way to help you get to services” and “everybody turns out for bar or bat mitzvah celebrations.”
Indeed, Oliver said that closeness was what attracted her to converting to Judaism when she was 24. “The people I knew who were part of the community … were people I admired,” she said. “And they all accepted me.” She and her husband, Jack, lived in Illinois, Minnesota and Florida at various times; but when they returned to Merrill, she said rejoining Mt. Sinai was “like coming back home.”
Former Chicagoan Zoe Morning, 43, who has lived in Wausau for 15 years, also spoke of how the Jewish community is “very supportive.” When one of her two sons developed a tumor about two years ago, she brought him to the Marshfield Clinic. There, one of the Jewish physicians allowed her to stay at the physician’s home for a few days and another invited her over for Passover.
Sheila Cohen, 50, a native of Cleveland who has also resided in St. Louis, Houston and Indianapolis before moving to Wausau three years ago, also described the community as close-knit.
“In larger cities, you see groups break off within a synagogue,” she said. “You don’t see that here. Young and old work so well together. Old members and new members welcome you.”
Another trait common to agricultural communities: the Jewish community here is widely spread out. Danson estimated that about half the members of the synagogue live “30 to 60 miles away,” not only in Marshfield, but also in Stevens Point and other areas.
“I think we’re the most regionally based of any of the [Wisconsin] synagogues,” said Danson, who has been spiritual leader for 12 years. “As far as I can figure out, we’re the only synagogue that truly encompasses multiple cities as an integral part of the [congregation].”
This obviously imposes some burdens, but the synagogue members appear willing enough to take them on. Cohen said that many of the members travel for an hour to bring their children to the Sunday school for two hours, then travel another hour home. “You wouldn’t see that in larger communities,” she said. “It’s really neat.”
But Danson and the synagogue also travel to the members. Indeed, it almost seems as if Danson is a “circuit-riding” rabbi, akin to the circuit-riding preachers some U.S. rural Christian communities used to have.
Danson teaches Hebrew every Tuesday in either Stevens Point or Marshfield and said that “I’d like to be doing a little more programming in those towns.”
And Cohen mentioned that members of the synagogue living outside of Wausau frequently host the congregation for Shabbat dinners and other events.
Stable population
Another frequent and perhaps stereotypical trait of agricultural communities — stability — certainly applies to the synagogue’s population numbers.
Synagogue president Stella, a public school teacher who has lived in Wausau for 25 years, said that the synagogue’s membership fluctuates between 85 and 100 units. The tendency of members’ children to move away seems to be balanced by new families arriving, she said.
Which is not to say there have not been changes in the community’s history. Mt. Sinai Congregation was founded in 1914 and used to be headquartered in downtown Wausau. Moreover, it was founded as a Reform congregation, switched to Conservative in the 1940s and switched back in the late 1960s-early 1970s, according to Danson.
Even if the synagogue’s population remains stable, the overall Jewish population, including the unaffiliated, may have fluctuated. The American Jewish Yearbook 2000, published by the American Jewish Committee, estimates the total Jewish population of the area in and around Wausau — including Stevens Point, Marshfield, Antigo and Rhinelander — to be about 300, up from 240 reported in the 1990 yearbook.
Still, there is a visible contrast between the “steady state” of the synagogue and the apparently rapid growth of the Wausau general community. Members said that when the synagogue moved to its present location, it was surrounded by empty fields. Today, there are many more buildings around it and new ones are going up.
Hard to be Jewish?
The character of the relationship to the general community is the one topic on which those interviewed seemed to disagree.
Zoe Morning flatly said that “It’s difficult to be Jewish in Wausau” because the non-Jewish community “does not understand what it means to be Jewish. They regard it as another form of Christianity. They just don’t get it.”
Morning, an eighth-grade English teacher, said that the public schools’ choir concerts invariably include “singing about Jesus” and the staff members don’t understand why local Jews find this objectionable. She also said she recently graded a paper from a student that addressed her as “You dumb Jew” — though she said that may be an influence from the animated cable TV show “South Park.”
But while other synagogue members acknowledge that such points of tension exist, they say the relationship with the non-Jewish community is very good.
Martha and Michael Trevino, who came to Wausau about 18 months ago from El Paso, Texas, said they encountered far more open anti-Semitic hostility there than they have in Wausau. Martha said she has found “more respect” from non-Jews in Wausau and that teachers have gone out of their way to help her kids avoid eating treife.
Rotter said he has “a strong sense that a lot of people are glad to have a Jewish population and a synagogue here.” Danson agreed, citing as evidence “the tremendous number of visits from church groups. It’s not just the pastors and priests in the area who bring their kids here, but even more striking are visits from … towns with no Jews.”
“People in schools and churches and the community chamber of commerce really value having a synagogue in the region,” Danson continued. “It’s one of the things they would describe as part of the quality of life.”
As for the general level of difficulty in being Jewish, that can be “as easy or hard as you want to make it,” according to Michael Trevino.
Keeping kosher can definitely be a problem. Sheila Cohen makes frequent trips to Milwaukee — usually leaving at 5 a.m. on a Sunday — to stock up on kosher food, which she keeps in extra refrigerators and freezers. “It’s not easy. You have to plan ahead,” she said.
Intermarriage definitely exists, including among synagogue officials. But “It is important to note that the intermarriage rate is no more or less a phenomenon here than anywhere else,” said Danson.
And it certainly can be difficult to grow up Jewish in the Wausau area when there are very few other Jewish kids in one’s classes. “It’s difficult to be different in any situation,” said Lisa Stella, 17, a senior at Wausau West High School and daughter of the synagogue president.
She said she has never experienced harassment, but has encountered ignorance among classmates and teachers and the general presumption that everybody is Christian. “In history class, the teacher will say something about Christianity and say, ‘We all know about this,’ and I’m, like, ‘What?’”
Yet overall, most of the Jews interviewed echoed Rotter’s sentiment that Wausau “is a wonderful place to live and be Jewish.” Moreover, although Jewish kids raised there tend to leave, Stella reports that many of them do stay Jewish, and some have become Jewish community professionals, though “we don’t have a rabbi from here yet.”
The first one just might be her daughter Lisa, who said she is considering the field after having been active in the synagogue youth group and teaching at the religious school. She will go to the University of Wisconsin-Madison next year and is planning on studying international relations and Hebrew.
In meeting other Jewish professionals, “I seemed to see a light in these people that I don’t see in others,” she said. “I thought maybe I could find it in myself if I took on a Jewish profession.”
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