A HISTORY OF JEWS IN SPOKANE
"for others, a knowledge of the history of their people is a civic duty, while for JEWS it is a sacred duty." Maurice Samuel,the Professor and the Fossil
Story by Carol Oseran Starin
I talk about "Who’s Minding The Store?"everywhere I go. And, I haven’t gone anywhere in the last 8 months where someone didn’t say, "You know, my grandfather had a men’s clothing store in Tacoma, or "My father and his brothers worked at the family grocery store in Greenwood," or "You need to talk to my grandmother – she remembers hearing from her mother who, at age 12, was the ’runner’ for the grocery store that was in their living room."
I couldn’t have imagined how excited people would be to tell their stories. And we have 150 of them from around the state! We tell of businesses from Seattle, Tacoma, Olympia, Spokane, Elma, Walla Walla, Bellingham, Toppenish, Aberdeen and more. Families met to write their stories together. Sisters had coffee to sort through their photographs. And now we know the words to the advertising jingle for the Bi-Rite drug store in Toppenish, as well as the secret behind their famous special ointment!
As the stories poured in, the threads of the tapestry that is the history of the Jews in Washington State began to weave together. The store that one family lost during the Depression was purchased by another Seattle family. Ben Bridge worked at Schwabacher’s in the tobacco and candy department. A family business in Toppenish led a friend to a long lost Chicago cousin, whose family also had a business in Toppenish.
It’s the little details that make the history come alive. Sol Amon, who joined his father Jack, in the Pike Place market, is now known as the "Cod Father." Ralph Mackoff, who had men’s wear stores in Spokane, was known as "2 pants Ralph." Morris Rosen, who became the founder of Alaskan Copper Works, worked on the construction of the Panama Canal, earning 68 cents an hour. Jimi Hendrix and Quincy Jones shopped at Myers Music. When Bert and Sid Thal bought Fox’s Gem Shop in 1948, they couldn’t afford to change the name on the store, and that’s why it’s still Fox’s and not Thal’s. Jack Richlen learned how to pickle meats while working as a clean up boy at McIntosh’s meat market. It was Johnny Cohn’s job, as a 12 year old, to walk down the line of hanging chickens and chop off their heads.
Ray Frank was the first Jewish woman to speak from a pulpit in the United States. In 1890, in Spokane WA, she delivered the Yom Kippur sermon:
(excerpt)...."I can scarcely tell you how much I feel the honor you have this evening conferred upon me by asking me to address you. For a woman to be asked at any time to give council to my people would be a mark of esteem; but on this night of nights, on Yom Kippur eve, to be requested to talk to you, to advise you, to think that I am tonight the one Jewish woman in the world, may be the first since the time of the prophets to be called to speak to such an audience as I now see before me, in indeed a great honor, an event in my life which I can never forget........" Four centuries of Jewish Women's Spirituality
Here is a fact that you might find intriguing: Did you know that, up through the 1970’s, Temple Beth Shalom did not allow women to be counted in a minyan, and they could not be called to the Torah and given aliyahs? Our spiritual leader at the time, Rabbi Eugene Gottesman, had been raised in an Orthodox home. He was ordained as an Orthodox Rabbi and was adamantly opposed to accepting women as equals in the religious life of our temple. However, with time, Rabbi Gottesman adjusted to (and eventually supported!) the recognition of women. And it was our own Libby Avnet, who is now 96 years old, who became the first woman ever called up to receive an aliyah in Temple Beth Shalom. Was it easy to accept for some of the congregation? Absolutely not.
