B’nai Israel Synagogue and Montefiore Cemetery: A Jewish Community on the Great Plains

B’nai Israel Synagogue, designed by DeRemer and DeRemer and completed in 1937. National Register of Historic Places photo by Steve C. Martens

In the mid-to-late 1800s, Jews escaping religious persecution and mob violence — pogroms — in eastern and central Europe came to the United States. Many stayed in big cities such as New York, Philadelphia and San Francisco; others settled in small towns and the countryside across the West.

The Dakota Territory drew them for several reasons:

• Advertising that the Great Northern Railway had spread through Eastern Europe;
• the Montana gold mines — some stopped on the way and stayed;
• the chance to start a small business;
• and, for people who had lived through antisemitic violence and discrimination, the promise of safety in rural places.

Farm colonies that failed

Two aid groups — the Jewish Agricultural Aid Society (JAAS) and the Jewish Agricultural and Industrial Aid Society (JAIAS) — helped the newcomers find security and work, founding Jewish farming colonies:

Most failed. Few of the settlers had farmed — most had been barred from owning land in the countries they came from — and they faced rocky soil, harsh weather, deep poverty and isolation from any larger Jewish community. Many turned to peddling or clerking in small stores around the region. Some did well and moved up to bigger stores in Minneapolis, Denver and Chicago; several stayed in the territory and made their way to Grand Forks.

A congregation in Grand Forks

By 1891 Grand Forks had 60 Jewish families and several single Jewish men:

• many from Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire;
• others from Romania and Galicia (southeastern Poland);
• five or six families from Germany.

All were Orthodox, but they spoke different Yiddish dialects and pronounced Hebrew differently — and all were eager to make new lives in America. In 1891 they founded the Congregation of the Children of Israel — B’nai Israel in Hebrew.

William Budge, a local politician and the town's postmaster, gave the congregation a lot near the Great Northern tracks, in a busy neighborhood of Jewish homes and businesses. Congregants mortgaged their homes and peddling wagons to build a wood-frame synagogue there. It cost $3,000 (about $107,000 in 2024), seated 300, and was finished in time for Rabbi Benjamin Papermaster, who had come from Lithuania, to lead Rosh Hashanah services in autumn 1892.

Rabbi Benjamin Papermaster in Grand Forks, 1916. Jewish Museum of the American West

Montefiore Cemetery

Budge also gave land for a consecrated Jewish cemetery. Its first recorded burial was in 1888, though some unmarked graves may be older. It is named for Moses Montefiore, the revered British Jewish philanthropist, and it carries the community's burial customs and beliefs onto the North Dakota landscape:

• an iron fence sets the consecrated ground apart from the larger non-Jewish cemeteries nearby;
• inside it, tall evergreens stand for perpetual life and screen the graves from the street;
• grave markers vary in style, symbols and language, reflecting the varied backgrounds of the people buried there;
• descendants and visitors leave pebbles and small stones on the markers — a sign they came, and a way to protect and honor the souls there.

The 1937 synagogue

Forty-five years after the first synagogue, the congregation built a new one in a modest Art Deco style, designed by the father-and-son architects Joseph Bell DeRemer and Samuel Teel DeRemer.

The building has separate spaces for worship, education and social life. Its women's balcony mattered to an Orthodox congregation, and it is still there — although B’nai Israel now follows Reform Judaism.

Listed, and still in use

In October 2011 the synagogue and the cemetery were listed in the National Register of Historic Places (reference 11000745). Together, the 1888 cemetery and the 1937 building trace more than 130 years of a Jewish community's social, spiritual, cultural and civic growth in North Dakota. The second synagogue showed the congregation's strength and staying power, its members' Americanization, and their acceptance by their neighbors.

Grand Forks's was the oldest and once the largest urban Jewish community in the state. Both the synagogue and Montefiore Cemetery are still in active use.

Further reading

• Steve C. Martens and Peg O’Leary, "B’nai Israel and Montefiore Cemetery," National Register of Historic Places nomination (2011), National Archives.
• Tobias Brinkmann, "Between Vision and Reality: Reassessing Jewish Agricultural Colony Projects in Nineteenth Century America," Jewish History 21:3/4 (2007).
• Isadore Papermaster, History of the North Dakota Jewish Community (1959), manuscript, North Dakota State University.
• J. Sanford Rikoon, "The Jewish Agriculturalists’ Aid Society of America: Philanthropy, Ethnicity, and Agriculture in the Heartland," Agricultural History 72:1 (Winter 1998).
• Lois Fields Schwartz, "Early Jewish Agricultural Colonies in North Dakota," North Dakota History 32:3 (October 1965).

Sources

Based on "Building Community on the Great Plains: B’nai Israel Synagogue and Montefiore Cemetery," National Park Service, part of the series "National Register and National Historic Landmarks Celebrate Jewish Heritage Month" and drawn from the National Register nomination by Steve C. Martens and Peg O’Leary; a work of the United States government in the public domain. The article spells the region "Galacia"; it is Galicia. Three recent photographs of the cemetery and the sanctuary, credited to a private photographer, are not reproduced.