Moving in and Moving Up: Early Twentieth-Century Detroit Jewry

Abstract

“I came to Detroit from New York in 1913. In New York, I worked nights and slept on a park bench. I had a cousin in Detroit who told me to come because there were many jobs. When I came to Detroit, he helped me rent a room on Benton Street and I started to peddle. After two years, I saved enough money to bring my wife and three children from Russia. I rented a small house where we could live on Oakland near Hastings Street, and stayed in Detroit.” 1 So begins Nathan Kaluzny’s story. It replicates that of many of the city’s eastern European Jewish immigrants. When he arrived in Detroit, the Jewish population numbered 34,000 in a city of 676,575 and consisted of two groups: German Jews and their descendants, who arrived before 1870, and Eastern European Jews, primarily Russian, who had arrived after 1880 and by 1913 made up 75 percent of the total.2 Divided by religious differences, as well as economic and social status, late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Detroit Jewry consisted of these two distinct communities.3 Although a few solitary Jewish traders passed through Detroit in the eighteenth century, none of them remained for long and it was not until the mid-nineteenth century that the city contained sufficient Jewish settlers to establish a community and synagogue. Most of these Jews had been born in Germany, primarily Bavaria, and emigrated due to repressive legislation limiting Jews to a narrow range of occupations and an increasing level of anti-Semitism. Nearly 200,000 German Jews immigrated to the United States from 1820 to 1870. Though German Jewish immigration before 1860 consisted primarily of young, single men this was not always the case for Detroit. Many of Detroit’s German Jewish immigrants came to the city from other places in America and