In the town of Pocomoke (population 8,365) on the Eastern Shore, on a narrow street by the tiny downtown area, sits a small one-room building that is more than 50 years old. It's the Shore's first synagogue, and soon it was followed by others in nearby Salisbury and Easton.
Although several families were instrumental in starting Jewish communities on the Shore, their stories are almost identical. About 100 years ago, several patriarchs arrived from Baltimore and Philadelphia. Some worked as peddlers, others worked as kosher butchers or in similar trades. They settled down, opened businesses and brought their Jewish heritage to new communities.
First in Pocomoke, then in Salisbury and Easton, these Jewish men and their families, maybe 100 people in all, banded together form synagogues and to establish a Jewish way of life for themselves in the small towns. They formed communities that, while small, were strong. Strong enough that although many Jews have moved away, or intermarried, almost all the founding members of the Jewish communities on the Shore have descendants keeping the faith there, such as my family.
For the past few years, I have lived in Washington, and spent some time in Baltimore, New Jersey and Manhattan. But it wasn't until I went to Germany and Eastern Europe - to Munich, Budapest, Krakow, Prague, Moscow - that I found other Jewish students, and communities, most like my hometown. Their stories of growing up Jewish in formerly Communist Eastern Europe are more similar to mine than most other American Jews': places where Jews are a tiny minority in an predominantly Christian area, where few people outside the Jewish community know what Judaism is, where the existence of an active synagogue community often seems tenuous, and where those who are Jewish struggle to define themselves in terms of their religion, what it means to them, and how they want to practice it (or not).
No matter whom I talked to in Europe, however, from high school students to octogenarian rabbis, almost all said they accept their Jewish identity, and often welcome it, as Judaism is at the core of their identity - despite living where there is often pressure to assimilate because the Christian culture is so pervasive. Much like those of us from the Eastern Shore.
I grew up in Salisbury's Jewish community, part of a Jewis heritage in the state with roots that date back to some of the earliest Colonial settlers here. In 1627, Kent Island, in present-day Queen Anne's County, became home to the first English settlement in Maryland. Judaism was represented in the colony at least as early as 1658, the year Jacob Lumbrozo, a Portuguese Jew, was brought to trial under a provision of the 1649 Act Concerning Religion that affirmed freedom of religious practices to all those except "non-Trinitarians," or non-Christians. The case was neglected, however, and thrown out eight days later with the death of Oliver Cromwell, the tyrannical Puritan who was ruling England.
Over the years, the Eastern Shore's population grew and its culture reflected its Native American, European and African-American roots. Jewish culture did not take root until around the start of the 20th century, when Jewish families migrated there. The history of Jewish communities on the Shore is relatively new and it has been painstakingly recorded.
Around the turn of the century, Faivel Heilig and Samuel Feldman moved to Pocomoke and Salisbury, respectively, three years and 30 miles apart. They became leaders of their communities.
Heilig was a butcher and a liturgical singer, or cantor. His niece already lived in Pocomoke.
"She convinced him he was needed here, so he served as a leader and provided kosher meat," said Dr. Barry Spinak, 45, a family doctor who grew up in Pocomoke and now lives in Salisbury. Spinak maintains Pocomoke's small synagogue, and he has extensively researched his family tree, including Heilig, his great-grandfather.
Heilig opened a butcher shop and helped establish a congregation that met first in his house, then in others' on a rotating basis. Some 40 years later, the Jews in Pocomoke could finally afford a full-time rabbi.
In Easton and Pocomoke, one-room synagogues were built in 1947, and about eight years later they lost their rabbis as many synagogue members moved to growing, more prosperous Salisbury, or even to Baltimore.
Feldman left Pottstown, Pa., for Salisbury in 1904 to sell housewares door-to-door. Two years later, he opened a furniture store at the base of the downtown plaza that remained family-owned until my father, Feldman's grandson, David Miller, closed it last year. By the 1920s, half the little wood-andbrick three-story buildings lining the plaza were occupied by Jewish merchants and their wares, from groceries to clothing to pharmaceuticals. During holidays, the men prayed together in rooms above their stores.
Israel Benjamin owned a grocery store downtown. His family lived in rooms above the store for a while. Even after they $H moved, "Daddy used to keep [a Torah, a scroll containing the five books of Moses] above the store," said his daughter Bernice Dattelbaum, a Salisbury resident all her 78 years.
To ensure their children's education and Jewish upbringing, th merchants hired I. Moffit in 1923. Moffit, an Eastern European immigrant, spoke little English but taught the children Hebrew.
"We'd sit around the dining room table and we'd read Hebrew and when we talked he rapped us across the knuckles," said Sam Seidel, 75, one of Moffit's first students. "When we were bar mitzvahed it was like being delivered."
It was difficult to obtain kosher foodstuffs, like the matzoh necessary to celebrate Passover, or kosher candles for holidays, made with wax cleansed of any ingredients from pigs or other non-kosher animals.
In the early 1920s, it took seven hours - there was no Bay Bridge - to drive from Salisbury to the closest kosher groceries in Baltimore. The route took motorists around the Chesapeake Bay by going north from Salisbury through Kent and Cecil counties.
Dattelbaum's father, Israel Benjamin, was one of a handful of men who slaughtered his own chickens in his back yard. For Passover in the 1920s, Dattelbaum and Feldman's daughter, Marjorie, were sent to a local farm to bring home fresh milk, warm and unpasteurized, that met Passover's strict dietary laws. Even as late as the 1970s, buying kosher food meant a trip to Baltimore or Philadelphia.
There were so few Jews on the Shore that nearly all of their notable accomplishments were firsts. Seidel was the first Jewish schoolteacher in Wicomico County in 1946, and in 1966, the first Jewish elected official, winning a seat on the Salisbury City Council.
Seidel said that when he began teaching, his religion was viewed more as a curiosity than a problem. The questions he was asked were exploratory but cautious. "I'd laugh at their subtlety, but I guess I passed muster." His acceptance was assured, he added, when he coached the school basketball team to the state championship games, in 1950 and 1951.
Spinak had a harder time growing up in Pocomoke. In grade school, he was bullied by his peers because he was Jewish, and as a teen-ager he had trouble finding work, and was able only to do odd jobs for his father.
"I could never get a job and it was pretty clearly because of anti-Semitism. But it was still a nice place to grow up. I don't think the [anti-Semitism] was really any worse then being in a city. At least here I knew who I was dealing with. Growing up in the '50s on the Shore was a very peaceful way of life. Nobody locked their doors," he said.
And often, religious communities worked together. Feldman wa instrumental in forming Salisbury's Jewish community, along with Benjamin. He also helped spearhead the drive to build a synagogue, but he died in 1951, the year construction began. S. Franklin Woodcock was not Jewish, but he was a friend of Feldman's and made a large donation to the building fund. A stained- glass window by the synagogue's entrance bears Woodcock's name.
"I had friends who were Roman Catholic and Baptist," said Dana Corn, whose childhood in the 1950s and 1960s was divided between Pocomoke and Salisbury. "We all went to each other's places of worship."
Although the Shore's Jews were a minority, many seemed comfortable with their heritage.
"We always knew we were Jewish," said Debbie Yanoff, who lives in Rockville but grew up in Pocomoke. "We always maintained those values."
Many self-described "old-timers" bemoan the lack of constancy among congregants, the tendency of the young to flee the Shore for bigger cities, and an intermarriage rate about equal to that nationwide, approaching 50 percent. And many have left the Shore.
Marlene Feldman, 44, lives in Cambridge where she, her husband, Phillip, and their children are the only Jewish family. She grew up in Baltimore and had a strong Jewish background, but she was forced to turn to a correspondence course to teach her children about their religion. "If anything," she said, "living in Cambridge has made us more practicing."
Few Jewish families live in Pocomoke. The synagogue is open for the High Holidays of Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur in the fall. Those who grew up there often return to spend the holiday together.
"Families come from D.C., from North Carolina, various relatives of people who are here. On the first day of Rosh Hashanah, there are 40 or 50 people," Spinak estimated.
Some drive more than an hour from Delaware and the Eastern Shore of Virginia to attend services and social functions at Beth Israel in Salisbury or B'nai Israel in Easton. About seven years ago, Bat Yam, a Reform temple with less stringent religious practices, opened in Ocean City. It attracts many from Salisbury and beyond, such as Marlene Feldman and her family.
"All over the world, nothing is like this," Dattelbaum said of her hometown synagogue.
And while Yanoff is too ensconced in her life in Rockville to think seriously about leaving, she said it might be nice, someday, to live again in the small town where she grew up, a place still home to family that gives her a sense of peace and relaxation whenever she returns.
Anne Miller is the researcher in The Sun's Washington bureau.
Pub Date: 5/10/98