Keeping histories of Ohio's small Jewish communities alive

Upper Miami Valley & Greene Co. included in

By Marshall Weiss, The Observer

Austin Reid, 26, grew up in Lancaster, about 30 miles southeast of Columbus, in Fairfield County. The Jewish congregation there, B'nai Israel, had closed a few years before he was born.

"Like many smaller cities and towns, there was a Jewish community there at one point," he says. "But there were still some signs of the community when I was growing up. The building was still there. It had been converted to a private residence, but you could tell it had a religious purpose at one time. There was a war memorial downtown with a Magen David (Star of David) on it in addition to a cross."

Reid, who wasn't born Jewish, remembers wondering what happened to the congregation, and why a Star of David would be engraved on the war memorial.

As an undergraduate history and political science major at Capital University — and a Jew by choice — he decided to find out. For his history capstone project, he researched the history of Fairfield County's Jewish community.

When he dug into that history, he discovered there were several other Jewish communities in small Ohio towns with histories that had never been written about.

of small Jewish communities in Ohio.

Among those he's completed are the Upper Miami Valley and Greene County, here in the Dayton area.

From the beginning, he learned how to go about this research from The Columbus Jewish Historical Society.

Chronicles

After he graduated Capital University and moved to Ithaca, N.Y. — where he worked for the Hillel at Ithaca College and earned his master's degree in public administration from Cornell University — Reid continued writing about these small Ohio Jewish communities as a volunteer project to stay connected to his home state.

"It really kicked up again during the Covid pandemic because I found myself with a lot more free time," he says. "Some of the volunteer organizations that I would keep myself busy with weren't really functioning, and I needed

Reid is now writing his 14th and 15th histories Continued on Page Four

When I meet with classes, I often start out with a question: What does it take to have a Jewish community? The answers are usually "a rabbi" or "a building for prayer." Sometimes it's "kosher food" or "a Torah scroll." These are extremely important to maintain a Jewish community. But when Jewish communities first came together in Ohio in the early to mid-1800s, you could count the ordained rabbis in the United States on one hand (maybe two). Few Jewish communities in their first decades could afford to buy or erect a building. They'd meet in homes or rent a room or two somewhere to pray. Maybe someone might know how to ritually slaughter cattle and foul. Probably very few. Then, a student will answer, "To have a Jewish community, you need Jews." My next question: "How many?" True halacha (Jewish law) and tradition, so many Jewish communities organized here when they reached a minyan, a quorum of 10 men. Sometimes it was eight or nine; local Jews could rely on Jewish peddlers crossing Ohio's roads to pull their wagons off for rest and prayer. Jews forming new synagogues would write to established synagogues around the world to raise funds for or to receive Torahs.