Jewish "Iron Rangers": Jewish Settlement on Minnesota's Iron Range

Abstract

Jewish "Iron Rangers"Jewish Settlement on Minnesota's Iron Range Marilyn J. Chiat (bio) I. Introduction A small red brick building stands on the corner of 4th Avenue and 5th Street South in Virginia, Minnesota. On the day of its dedication, April 8, 1910, the front page of the local newspaper, The Virginia Enterprise, featured a photo of the building and an article describing it as a beautiful, well-built temple that cost approximately $10,000, a goodly sum for the time.1 Constructed for the town's small Jewish community, the temple was given the name B'nai (sons of) Abraham. Beautifully restored and rededicated in 2010, the building, now known as the B'nai Abraham Cultural Center and Museum, is used for a variety of community events and houses a permanent display of photographs, artifacts, and other material documenting the history of the Iron Range's once-vibrant Jewish community. The recipient of a Minnesota Preservation Award in 2019, B'nai Abraham is the only surviving visual evidence of the Range's Jewish settlers who, in the face of many challenges, were able to maintain their faith and its traditions, while adapting to life as "Iron Rangers." At one time the Range was home to over one thousand Jews who organized congregations in four towns: Chisholm, Eveleth, Hibbing, and Virginia. This essay traces the history of their founders who established homes and opened shops on the Range's developing main streets. It recounts the challenges facing them, including their interactions with their neighbors in what was and still is Minnesota's most diverse religious and ethnic region. The uncertain economy of the Range also had an impact on the Jewish community. As the demand for iron ore began to diminish in the 1950s, so too did the region's population. Many young people left to seek [End Page 1] their fortune elsewhere, including Robert Zimmerman, a.k.a. Bob Dylan, whose maternal great-grandparents, Lyba and Benjamin Edelstein, were among the Range's earliest settlers. The departure of members of Dylan's generation spelled doom for the Jewish community and its synagogues. By the 1980s only one synagogue survived, B'nai Abraham, and its doors closed a decade later. Jews no longer have a presence on the Range.2 Long before iron ore was discovered in northeastern Minnesota, the land was covered with a verdant forest of white pine and home to Native peoples living off its bounty. By the early nineteenth century, as the nation began to expand westward, cities like Chicago and St. Louis were developing, and lumber was needed for construction. Fifty years after timber cruisers first discovered the region's vast forest, the land was reduced to tree stumps, revealing the red earth that lay below its surface.3 Minnesota's pine forests were gone, but the region soon contributed a second natural resource to the building of America, iron ore. Geologists were aware of the region's lode, but it was not until the development of the modern blast furnace in the 1850s that iron could be economically transformed into steel. Soon after, speculators and explorers began to stake out claims for mining rights, first on the Vermillion Range, opening in 1882, and ten years later on the larger and more productive Mesabi Range. Laborers, skilled and unskilled, were needed. Among the first to arrive were experienced mine operators, often Scandinavians, and Cornish miners from the mines of Michigan. Recruiters in impoverished regions of eastern and southern Europe found a ready supply of unskilled laborers seeking a ticket to the "promised land." By 1910, the Range's total population was 77,655, representing twenty-five different ethnic and/or national groups, each carving out a place in the region, in hopes it would be their "bridge of gold" to a better life. Finns were the dominant nationality, then Slavs and Italians, and following them, Swedes, Norwegians, and a diversity of others including Jews.4 The Iron Range was representative of the nation's "mosaic" celebrated in a speech delivered by former Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey in 1972: "Some see the United States as a vast melting pot where our particular ethnic traditions...