DAYTON Embrace all aspects of Black Culture with Histories

Continued from Page Three something to keep my mind off the news, and so I really picked up the project more intensely."

The Upper Miami Valley

He learned about Piqua and the Jewish community of the Upper Miami Valley through his research on Chillicothe, because of historical family ties between the two Jewish communities.

"Piqua is a fascinating community to me because it is among the older Jewish communities in Ohio and has had a continuous presence there since 1858," he says. "Jewish families were living in the Piqua area before 1858, but 1858 is when the congregation was founded."

Through Temple Anshe Emeth in Piqua, Reid connected with longtime congregant, Greenville resident Eileen Litchfield.

"She was really enthusiastic about the project and helped me connect with other local people to polish up the history and have that buy-in from the local community, which was exciting."

Litchfield describes Reid's work for Anshe Emeth as a true gift.

"There aren't enough adjectives to describe my delight in getting this accomplished for temple," she says. "I have been collecting history, randomly, for 20 years, and his research blew that out of the water in a minute. I cannot tell you how ecstatic I am for his volunteering to do this."

Litchfield added she was amazed to learn there were Jews living in Greenville in the 1850s.

"It was never a very large community," Reid says of Piqua. "But it's always drawn from several communities for its members. So Troy, but also Greenville and Wapakoneta and St. Mary's had some families that would come down occasionally. It's really always been a regional congregation. And even today, I think only one member lives in Piqua."

He admires Anshe Emeth's generations of hard work and leadership to maintain itself.

"I'm sure it would have just been easier to not really spend the resources to have a Jewish community, and especially now, it's so easy to travel to Dayton from Piqua," he says. "And in some of these communities, that's what happened."

Greene County

Reid came to research Greene County after he saw an article in Cincinnati's American Israelite newspaper in 2017 about the Arnovitz family and their store in Xenia, Sol's Store, which was in business from 1931 to 1998.

He says Greene County has a long tradition of Jewish academics, particularly connected to Antioch College.

"Even in the 1920s, Antioch College had some prominent Jewish faculty members. There was Rudolph Broda, a social sciences professor starting around 1928. And his wife, Erna, she was professor of German. And William Leiserson, an economics professor from 1926 to 1933. His work on labor relations is still influential today, because in 1933, the Roosevelt administration asked him to come to D.C. One of the things he worked on was the Railway Labor Act of 1934, and that still governs some of the labor relations and airlines and railroads today."

In his history of Greene County, Reid identifies the earliest known Jew there as Benjamin Bruel of England, who was living in Xenia by 1870. He operated a clothing store there until 1873.

Reid's history of Jewish Greene County comes up to the present, with

THE DAYTON