A BRIEF TIMELINE OF JEWISH BALTIMORE Illustrated from the Collections of the Jewish Museum of Maryland
1845 The Lloyd Street Synagogue
Built in 1845 by Baltimore Hebrew Congregation in East Baltimore. Centrally located between Jewish population centers in the downtown area and Fells Point, the Lloyd Street Synagogue was the first synagogue in Maryland. Today it is the third oldest surviving synagogue building in the United States.
1849 Har Sinai Congregation
Har Sinai Congregation builds the first Reform temple on the American continent. Originally located on North High Street in East Baltimore, the building is unfortunately no longer standing.
1859 Rabbi Rice Resigns Rabbi Abraham Rice resigns from Baltimore Hebrew Congregation, dismayed by his congregants’ growing religious laxity. He famously wrote to his mentor “My mind is perplexed and I wonder whether it is even permissible for a Jew to live in this land.”
Two years later, Rice founds a small, strictly Orthodox congregation at his home, which will eventually grow into Congregation Shearith Israel.
1853 Oheb Shalom Congregation
The Oheb Shalom Congregation is founded by up-and-coming German immigrants as a midway alternative to Har Sinai’s radical Reform and Baltimore Hebrew Congregations continued (yet increasingly fractious) Orthodoxy.
1853 Baltimore & Ohio Railroad
The completion of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad through the Appalachian mountains to the Ohio River opens up vast western markets to Baltimore entrepreneurs, expanding the city’s economy and offering opportunities to Jewish wholesale and retail merchants.
1855 Rabbi David Einhorn
Reform Rabbi and firebrand David Einhorn of Bavaria arrives to lead Har Sinai Congregation. He conducts a heated feud over issues of liturgical reform with moderate Benjamin Szold of Hungary, hired in 1859 as rabbi of Oheb Shalom.
1858 Moses Hutzler
Moses Hutzler moves his general store from East Baltimore across town to Howard Street, joining dozens of small dry goods dealers – including many fellow German Jewish immigrants – in the city’s emerging retail center near Lexington Market.
1865 Bikur Cholim Congregation
A portent of things to come: Bikur Cholim Congregation is founded, the first in Baltimore to follow the Polish style of worship.
1867 North German Lloyd
The North German Lloyd Steamship Line joins with the B&O Railroad to boost shipping links between Baltimore and Bremen. The ships transport Maryland tobacco and lumber to Germany; on the reverse trip they carry Europe’s major export to the New World: immigrants.
1868 Hebrew Hospital and Asylum
The Hebrew Hospital and Asylum opens in East Baltimore, its name later changes to Sinai Hospital.
1870 Chizuk Amuno Congregation
Traditionalist at Baltimore Hebrew Congregation who can no longer keep Reform at bay break off to form Chizuk Amuno, a traditional congregation. Chizuk Amuno becomes the founding congregation of the Conservative movement. In 1876 they build the last great German Jewish synagogue in East Baltimore. Located on Lloyd Street just a few steps from Baltimore Hebrew.
1882 Jacob Epstein
Seventeen year old Lithuanian immigrant Jacob Epstein starts the Baltimore Bargain House, which he grows into one of the nation’s largest wholesale dry-goods operations. Through Epstein’s influence, Jewish peddlers and shopkeepers settle throughout the South, establishing a strong retail presence and numerous small communities.
1886 Joel Gutman
Baltimore’s first great modern department store is opened on Eutaw Street by Joel Gutman, a German Jewish immigrant with 30 years in Baltimore retailing. Two years later, Hutzler Bros. opens the city’s second grand emporium on nearby Howard Street, solidifying the area as Baltimore’s downtown retail shopping mecca.
1889 Henrietta Szold
Henrietta Szold, 29 year old daughter of Rabbi Benjamin Szold, befriends members of the Hebrew Literary Society, a group of Russian Jewish intellectuals. Together they open the Russian Night School to teach English and help Americanize the immigrants of East Baltimore.
1890 Madison Avenue Temple
With economic success enabling German Jews to move “uptown,� Baltimore Hebrew became the first congregation to leave East Baltimore. After selling the Lloyd Street Synagogue to a Lithuanian Catholic parish, it settles into the imposing Madison Avenue Temple in the fashionable northwest Baltimore neighborhood of Eutaw Place.
1890 Hebrew Friendly Inn
The Hebrew Friendly Inn and Aged Home is founded. It will evolve into Levindale, the Baltimore Jewish community’s primary facility for care of the elderly and disabled.
1897 Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein moves to Baltimore, where her parents had grown up in the German Jewish community, and enrolls in the Johns Hopkins University Medical School. She lives in Eutaw Place until 1902 when she departs for Europe and a celebrated literary career. Her debut novel Three Lives (1909) is set in a "fictionalized Baltimore."
1898 Workman’s Circle
The Baltimore branch of the Workman’s Circle is founded. The group provides sickness and death benefits to members, holds lectures, operates a library and Yiddish school, and serves as a forum and catalyst for labor activism.
1903 Henrietta Szold & NYC
Henrietta Szold moves to New York City, where she becomes part of the national Jewish intellectual scene working as an editor, writer, and translator.
1904 The Great Baltimore Fire
Much of Baltimore’s business district is destroyed by fire; rebuilding is swift.
1905 Shomrei Mishmeres After 15 years as the Church of St. John the Baptist, the Lloyd Street Synagogue once again becomes home to a Jewish congregation, Shomrei Mishmeres. Its spiritual leader, Rabbi Avraham Schwartz, becomes known as the "chief rabbi" of the Orthodox East European Jewish community. Shomrei Mishmeres occupies the Synagogue until disbanding in the 1950s.
1905 Henry Sonneborn & Co.
Henry Sonneborn and Co. builds the largest men’s clothing factory in the world at Paca and Pratt Streets.
1909 Jewish Educational Alliance
The Jewish Educational Alliance (JEA) is founded as a merger of the Daughters of Israel and the Maccabeans. In 1913 it moves into its longtime home at 1216 East Baltimore Street. Generations of Baltimore Jews participate in the JEA’s social, cultural, educational, and athletic activities until the building closes in 1951.
1910 Jacob & Louis Blaustein
Baltimore’s Jacob and Louis Blaustein begin selling kerosene door-to-door; their American Oil Company will become one of the country’s largest, pioneering no-knock gasoline, the visible gas pump, and the drive-in filling station.
1912 Hadassah
Three years after returning from a visit to Palestine, where she was appalled by poor health conditions, Henrietta Szold founds Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization. Its mission to improve health services for Palestine's Jewish and Arab residents will lead to the creation of Hadassah Hospital. Szold moves to Palestine in 1920 and becomes a major figure in institution-building.
1913-16 Garment Worker Strike A time of conflict between East European Jewish garment workers and their German Jewish employers. The Amalgamated Clothing Workers strike against Sonneborn results in an agreement for better working conditions and benefits. Rabbi Schwartz intercedes on behalf of Orthodox workers about to be fired for refusing to work on the Sabbath, enlisting the support of the Sonneborn family’s rabbi, William Rosenau of Oheb Shalom. Strikes against Schoeneman and Greif are not so successful; these two firms eventually move out of the city to avoid unionization.
1914 World War I
The onset of World War I brings migration from Europe to a standstill. During the war, Baltimore Jewry raises funds to help suffering Jews in the war-torn Pale of Settlement.
1918 American Jewish Congress The American Jewish Congress is founded with key leadership from Baltimorean Harry Friedenwald. Simon Sobeloff of Baltimore is its first president.
1919 Baltimore Hebrew College
Baltimore Hebrew College and the Baltimore Jewish Times are established.
1933 Adolph Hitler
Adolph Hitler comes to power in Germany and immediately initiates anti-semitic actions. Jews begin to leave, though U.S. immigration restrictions hamper their efforts. Around 3,000 German Jewish refugees settle in Baltimore between 1933 and 1941, aided by individual Jewish Baltimoreans as well as the city’s organized Jewish community.
1933 Ner Israel Rabbinical College
Ner Israel Rabbinical College is founded by Rabbi Jacob Ruderman. It acquires a national reputation and becomes a pillar of Orthodox Judaism in Baltimore. Its prominence reflects the vitality of Baltimore’s Orthodox community, which will remain a hallmark of Baltimore Jewry.
1945 Jacob Epstein Upon his death, Jacob Epstein is eulogized as one of Baltimore’s exemplary philanthropists, having played a major role in local, national, and international Jewish charities as well as Baltimore institutions such as Johns Hopkins University and the Baltimore Museum of Art. His extensive personal art collection, bequeathed to the Museum, forms a core of the BMA’s holdings.
1947 Exodus The S.S. President Warfield, an old Chesapeake Bay excursion ship, departs Baltimore harbor after being secretly acquired, rebuilt, and outfitted by a group of Baltimore Zionists led by Mose Speert. It picks up a load of Holocaust survivors in France and sets out for Palestine, disregarding the immigration restrictions imposed by Palestine's British Mandate. Attacked by the British before reaching its goal, it unfurls a new name: Exodus 1947. After a battle in which three shipmates are killed, the British force the passengers to return to Europe — and the Exodus becomes a cause celebre, one of the foundational stories in the establishment of the state of Israel.
1949 Etta Cone and the BMA
Etta Cone gives the Baltimore Museum of Art the magnificent collection of modern art that she and her sister, Dr. Claribel Cone, had gathered in Paris through the years. Among the first Americans to collect post-Impressionists, the Cone sisters had been introduced to young artists such as Matisse and Picasso by their close friend, Gertrude Stein.
1950s-70s Suburbia A new generation of Baltimore Jewry continues the geographic move north and west, into upper Park Heights, Pikesville, Reisterstown, and beyond. Many synagogues locate along the upper Park Heights corridor. Block-busting by real estate speculators helps create rapid racial turnover in West Baltimore, including Jewish areas such as lower Park Heights. East Baltimore suffers the effects of disinvestment, job loss, poverty, and misguided urban renewal.
1951 Jewish Community Center
The Jewish Community Center is formed from the merger of the JEA and the YMHA/YWHA (which had originated in northwest Baltimore in 1918).
1951 Israel Bonds
Joseph Meyerhoff and Golda Meir host Baltimore’s first Israel Bonds meeting.
1956 Helen Dalsheimer
Helen Dalsheimer becomes the first woman to head a major American Jewish congregation when she is installed as president of Baltimore Hebrew Congregation.
1958 The Lloyd Street Synagogue With most of its membership base having moved from East Baltimore, the dwindling Shomrei Mishmeres Congregation contemplates selling the deteriorating Lloyd Street Synagogue to commercial buyers. Wilbur Hunter, director of the Peale Museum, learns of the potential sale and alerts the Baltimore Jewish community to the urgent need to save the building from possible destruction. The Baltimore Board of Rabbis appoints a committee to investigate how the historic landmark might be preserved.
1960 Jewish Historical Society
The Jewish Historical Society of Maryland is created, with the mission to acquire, renovate, and maintain the Lloyd Street Synagogue. Four years later the partiallyrestored Synagogue is dedicated and opened to the public.
1968 Baltimore Riots Baltimore is hit by riots after the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. Across the city, commercial areas with Jewishowned stores suffer much damage and many businesses close. The still-bustling East Baltimore Jewish market on Lombard Street recovers, but over the ensuing decade it too undergoes decline. Today, three Lombard Street delicatessens persist as the only remnant of Jewish commercial life in East Baltimore.
1969 Marvin Mandel Baltimore native Marvin Mandel becomes the first Jewish governor of Maryland, chosen by the legislature after Spiro Agnew resigns to become U.S. Vice-President. The popular Mandel will be elected to two terms in his own right, but his political career is cut short by racketeering charges that send him to prison for almost two years. His conviction is later overturned on a technicality.
1981 B’Nai Israel Synagogue
B’nai Israel Congregation deeds its Lloyd Street building to the Jewish Historical Society of Maryland. The Society restores the synagogue while leasing it back to B’nai Israel, which remains to this day the oldest continuously-operating Orthodox congregation in Baltimore.
1982 Joseph P. Meyerhoff
Joseph P. Meyerhoff Symphony Hall opens in Baltimore, thanks to a $10 million donation from Meyerhoff.
1982 Diner
Barry Levinson’s Diner is released, the first of several popular, criticallyacclaimed movies he will make chronicling Baltimore Jewish life.
1983 Shoshana S. Cardin Shoshana Cardin becomes president of Baltimore’s Associated Jewish Charities, the first woman in the U.S. to head a major Jewish federation. She goes on to become the first woman to preside over the national Council of Jewish Federations and to hold many other leadership posts in American Jewish communal and civic life.
1987 Jewish Museum of Maryland
The Jewish Historical Society of Maryland opens a Jewish Heritage Center on the lot between the Lloyd Street Synagogue and the B’nai Israel Synagogue. In 1998 the Society and Heritage Center will become known as the Jewish Museum of Maryland.