Categories
Vol. 70, No. 1 (Summer 2026) - Celebrating America’s Sestercentennial

Northern Lights Another Look at Communal Education in the Upper Mississippi Valley

 

Earl Schwartz

Many a twentieth-century commentator on Jewish education in the United States noted something “different”1 and “noteworthy”2 about Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota. Writing in the 1990s, Jacob Marcus found it “curious” that the Talmud Torah of Minneapolis had gained a national reputation “off by itself, distant from mass Jewish communities,”3 while Daniel Elazar attributed strong educational programs in the Twin Cities to factors shared with other “Mississippi River Valley” Jewish communities, including distance from the “fissiparous” dynamics of large East Coast populations.4

What Marcus had found curious, others, like Elazar, would find fortunate. Smaller—but not too small—midwestern communities proved fertile ground for the development of constructive relationships across institutional divides: better situated, physically and socially, to foster “unity in diversity” through community-wide planning and coordination of resources.5 What might current educators learn from how resulting educational programs came to fruition and earned such praise?

Historical Overview

Through much of the twentieth century Midwest Jewish communities commonly conveyed a progressive, peoplehood-centered ethos. While larger Jewish populaces often broke into disparate enclaves, midsize Midwestern Jews tended to converge in Jewishly-diverse neighborhoods. Resulting day-to-day interactions increased the likelihood that community members were personally acquainted, leaving less room for factional divides.6 Class divisions would develop, but powerful, patronizing aristocracies of the sort found in many older and larger population centers were not characteristic of Midwestern communities. To a significant degree, working class consciousness burgeoned among local small business owners and their employees, rather than in the shadow of Jewish grandees and mammoth businesses.7 There were criminal episodes—bootleggers, fraudsters—but communities built past them. Such locales coincided with Mordecai Kaplan’s description and prescription of “organic” communities: “one in which all activities and institutions conducted by Jews for Jews are interactive, and in which the fostering of Jewish peoplehood, religion and culture is given primacy.”8 The New York “Kehillah” had its virtues as a concept, but it didn’t exist as a community. In the Midwest it did.

Jewish solidarity in the region was fueled in part by antisemitic threats and barriers. Carey McWilliams’ often-noted article “Minneapolis: The Curious Twin,” published in 1946, built toward the conclusion that Minneapolis could be considered the antisemitic capital of the country, but the “curious” side of McWilliams’ exposé is often overlooked—that far healthier conditions prevailed just across the Mississippi in St. Paul. If racist and anti­semitic influences plagued the region, positive forces were widely at work as well.9 “Curious,” once again.

It has been suggested that among the mores brought to the region by Scandinavian immigrants was an extra measure of “community mindedness.”10 Farmer-Laborite Floyd B. Olson, elected governor of Minnesota in 1931, would memorably embody this frame of mind for his Jewish constituents, uplifting working class self-esteem in tandem with Labor Zionist and other labor-oriented influences. A child of Norwegian and Swedish immigrants, Olson grew up enmeshed in the Jewish world of his North Minneapolis neighbors—so much so that he was likely the only governor of the period to speak Yiddish.11

Olson’s election foreshadowed a liberal turn in Minnesota politics, in tune with La Follette Progressives in neighboring Wisconsin. Concurrent with publication of McWilliams’ article, Hubert Humphrey was elected mayor of Minneapolis, and in the years that followed the nation’s most prominent liberals, including Humphrey, Adlai Stevenson, George McGovern, Eugene McCarthy, and Walter Mondale, came from the region12—a congenial environment for the development of a progressive, community-minded Jewish agenda.

Indications abound of broad-based vigor in Midwest Jewish communities, from the close of the nineteenth century through the twentieth. Minneapolitan Nina Morais Cohen, daughter of Clara and Sabato Morais, attended the founding conference of the National Council of Jewish Women in Chicago in 1893, leading to the formation of a Minneapolis chapter shortly after her return, and a St. Paul chapter a few months later.13 Fannie Brin, also a Minneapolitan, served as President of the NCJW through much of the 1930s. Louis Hurwich, longstanding superintendent of the Boston Bureau of Jewish Education, would assert that Boston was “the first community in the United States to organize Jewish education on a community-wide basis, and as a community responsibility,”14 but the Boston Bureau was formed in 1920, while a communal Talmud Torah, precursor of a local Bureau of Jewish Education, had been established in Des Moines, Iowa six years earlier.15 The first “Hillel House” was founded adjacent to the Champaign-Urbana campus of the University of Illinois in 1923 (followed in 1924 by a University of Wisconsin Hillel in Madison, Wisconsin), and in the 1930s one of the two Hebrew-speaking Habonim Labor Zionist “הכשרה/preparation for aliyah” farms in the United States was established in Minnesota.16 Hebrew Theological College in Chicago would emerge as a center of progressive Orthodox thought, and Twin Citians Frances and Julius Butwin produced the first English anthology of Sholom Aleichem. In the spring of 1960 Abraham Joshua Heschel served as a visiting professor at the University of Minnesota, and the next year at the University of Iowa.

This swell of productive energy was accompanied by a pronounced tendency toward inclusivity. One indication of this inclination is the comparatively high proportion of Midwest Jews who came to identify with Conservative Judaism, accompanied by a surge of Midwestern prominence in Conservative circles. The movement’s “rooted cosmopolitanism”17 meshed well with Midwestern tendencies. The first Camp Ramah (as well as the Reform movement’s first permanent overnight camp) was located in Wisconsin, and Conservative congregations in Minneapolis and in St. Paul both claimed the distinction of being home to the first chapter of United Synagogue Youth. A statistical profile of several Jewish communities, published in 1984, showed 53% of respondents in Minneapolis and 55% in St. Paul identified as Conservative. The next closest percentage was Richmond, Virginia, at 40%.18

Numerous mid-to-late-twentieth-century figures prominent in the Conservative Movement grew up in the Twin Cities, or spent a major portion of their public life there, including University of Judaism Dean Max Vorspan, United Synagogue Executive Director Albert I. Gordon, and Rabbinical Assembly presidents Arnold Goodman, Harold Kravitz, Perry Rank, and Kassel Abelson, who also served as Chair of its Laws and Standards Committee.

Twin Cities Conservative congregations would come to figure prominently in fully equalizing female and male duties and roles. Recalling a bat mitzvah receiving an aliyah along with her triplet brothers at Beth El Synagogue in 1951, a witness remembered Rabbi David Aronson walking to the front of the bimah at the conclusion of the Torah reading, looking outside and saying, “I don’t see any lightning. I don’t hear any thunder.”19

Even Lubavitch had a regional quality. One of its more prominent spokespersons in the 1970s and 1980s, a professor of public health at the University of Minnesota, grew up in Winnipeg, attended a Peretz Folk School, and in his younger years leaned toward Labor Zionism. Lubavitch’s longtime “Head Shliach” was a child of North Minneapolis and attended the communal Talmud Torah. A modicum of midwestern progressivism could also be discerned in the founding of Chabad’s women’s education program “Bais Chana” in St. Paul in 1971.

And if the Twin Cities Jewish communities proved exemplary in their pursuit of common ground, Gunther Plaut, in his study The Jews in Minnesota: The First Seventy-five Years, maintained that early in the century Duluth, Minnesota outpaced Minneapolis and St. Paul “along the path of communal unification,” beginning with a high degree of cooperation between German Jewish immigrants and those who soon followed from Eastern Europe. “Of the three major Minnesota communities which saw the development from a unitary to a dual Jewish community [German-Eastern European] structure, Duluth was the first to foreshadow the ultimate third step: the reunification into one single Jewish community.”20 This tendency was still evident in 1970 when Duluth’s Conservative and Reform congregations merged and relocated to the city’s Jewish Community Center, which was also home to a communal Talmud Torah. Such developments confirmed Plaut’s observation, but in the ensuing decades the potential for communal productivity ebbed with a sharp decline in the city’s Jewish population.21

Jewish Education in Minneapolis and St. Paul

Through much of the twentieth century, characteristics Daniel Elazar associated with the region as a whole were commonly noted in connection with Jewish education in Minneapolis and St. Paul, in particular.

While some Minneapolis Talmud Torah administrators and instructors would demonstrate decidedly weak teaching and personal skills, in its most successful years it was a major social and cultural intersection in the community. In Europe, the term “Talmud Torah” came to be linked with community-supported schools for children from families that could not afford private tutors. The Talmud Torah of Minneapolis proudly embraced and extended this legacy of Jewish public education.

Writing in 1952, Leo Honor, originator of the expression “unity in diversity,” concluded that the Minneapolis Talmud Torah had been “one of the outstanding Talmud Torahs in the country, with its graduates radiating a profound influence in every phase of Jewish life.”22 Up through the mid-1960s its main facility was located on Minneapolis’s Near Northside, where a large proportion of the city’s Jews lived, with branches in South Minneapolis, and at the close of the 1950s in St. Louis Park, a first-ring suburb. Into the 1970s, classes met 7 hours a week. The school year extended well past the close of the public school system’s academic year, and began again before it resumed.

By maintaining kashrut throughout the school, observing the traditional calendar, requiring kippot, and placing the study of Tanakh in Hebrew at the center of the curriculum, the Talmud Torah signaled that traditionally observant students had a home at the school. The founding in 1944 of Torah Academy, an Orthodox day school, in cooperation with the Torah Vedaas Academy in New York, reflected the dissatisfaction of some with the Talmud Torah’s curriculum. Nonetheless, in its first five decades a significant number of Torah Academy students also attended the Talmud Torah, a telling indication of its position in the community. The location of its main facility within walking distance of the majority of Jewish households in the city into the 1950s,23 along with a diverse faculty and student body, nurtured a sense of Jewish common ground greater than a particular congregation or movement represented, including in matters of gender. In 1922, the same year that Judith Kaplan, daughter of Mordecai Kaplan, celebrated becoming a bat mitzvah, Minneapolis Talmud Torah President Sarah Berman, in an article in the American Jewish World (a regional weekly), noted, “mention should be made of an innovation introduced by a representative of the women for the consideration of the Board of Directors. This innovation is to put the girl students on an equal footing with the boys by giving the girls something corresponding to Bar Mitzvah.”24

The school’s place in the community was in keeping with the halakhic prioritization of bet ha-midrash over bet ha-k’nesset, and the aggadic insistence that talmud Torah was of even greater significance than a long list of priorities, including mindful prayer—a point to be recalled at the outset of morning prayer.25 In such a community it was no surprise that the Talmud Torah would give birth to a congregation, Beth El Synagogue, founded in the early 1920s as successor to the Talmud Torah’s well-attended student and alumni worship services.

George Gordon, the school’s central figure in its formative years, personified these qualities. Having studied at the Telz Yeshivah in Lithuania, he went on to pursue a medical degree, and in 1900 began his practice in North Minneapolis. Gordon’s dedicated service as a physician was deeply appreciated in the community, but in 1928 he moved from medicine to serving as director of the Talmud Torah, guided by an educational perspective closely resembling Mordecai Kaplan’s, with whom he was in personal contact.26

Minneapolis Talmud Torah curricula would focus on nurturing students’ sense of membership in a living people with a shared history, a shared language, distinctive practices, a multifaceted literature, and mutual responsibilities; curricula in which Moses and Moses Maimonides, Emma Lazarus and Levi Yitschak of Berdichev, Ahad Ha’am and Henrietta Szold all had a place at the table, with the ensuing conversation unfolding, to a great degree, in Hebrew.27

A telling indication of the social dynamic underlying these developments was the role played by Samuel Deinard, rabbi of Temple Israel from 1901–1921, in maintaining communal ties. Temple Israel was the only Reform congregation in the city at the time, and on the second day of Rosh Hashanah, when his Southside congregation held no services, Deinard attended Knesseth Israel, a Northside Orthodox congregation, where he would be invited to deliver the sermon—in Yiddish.28 Deinard also strongly identified with the Zionist movement, despite significant opposition to Zionism in Reform circles of the day. Gunther Plaut concluded that in Deinard the community “intuitively recognized the spirit of the new community to come…”29

But inclusiveness wasn’t simply a local idiosyncrasy. The devastation of European Jewry, followed by the establishment of the State of Israel, led to a period of worldwide Jewish affinities, made personal through the lived experience of family, neighbors, and friends. The convergence of Jewish ethnicities and orientations in Israel was an inspiring indication of vigorous intra-Jewish diversity, extending beyond the reach of the most horrible of circumstances. Both loss and renewal confirmed the timely pertinence of communal schools and curricula centering on inclusive peoplehood, a shared history, and a shared future. Midwestern communities were especially well situated to mediate this sensibility.

In 1951 the Talmud Torah’s main branch moved a short distance to a new building facing Frances E. Willard Elementary School. The implication was clear enough: The Talmud Torah was an educational counterpart of the school across the street. But other forces were shaping Jewish communal life as well. in the post-World War II years, as discriminatory practices receded, Jewish North Minneapolis began to give way to upward, outward and “white-flight” mobility. In 1948, approximately 60% of Jewish residents of greater Minneapolis lived on the Northside. By 1959 the percentage had shrunk to 38%.30 Amid these changes, and despite indications of continued vitality, Jonathan Krasner dated the initial contraction of the Talmud Torah to this period, noting that though “One area of the country where the Talmud Torahs held out a little longer was the Mississippi Valley…By the 1950s even the venerable Minneapolis Talmud Torah, which maintained strong enrollment figures, had cut its extracurricular program, reduced its hours, and saw its academic standards decline.”31

Nonetheless, into the 1960s and 1970s, enrollment remained relatively high, and curricula continued to focus on ivrit b’ivrit speaking and reading instruction, biblical and classical rabbinic texts, and more recent Jewish thinkers. Depending on the particular class and instructor, high school students might be introduced to the Jewish Thought Today volume of Louis Jacob’s “Chain of Tradition” series, Mishnah (in Hebrew), the Hebrew script of Yehudah Amichai’s radio play היום בו נקבר מרטן בובר (The Day Martin Buber Was Buried), and the book of Job, taught by a member of the Orthodox Torah Academy day school faculty.

As the Jewish Northside unraveled and the Minneapolis Talmud Torah’s communal presence receded, Elazar’s thesis regarding regional characteristics was reconfirmed in St. Paul. By the 1960s the great majority of the city’s Jewish residents had moved to the city’s Highland neighborhood. Synagogues and Jewish-owned small businesses followed, along with a newly coalesced communal Talmud Torah. In the years that followed one indication of a broad commitment to inclusivity was the finding in a 2004 population study that 13% of Jewish households in greater St. Paul (695 households) were from the former Soviet Union, a percentage second only to New York City.32 Resettlement and integration efforts, including full Talmud Torah scholarships for the children of immigrant households, resonated strongly with the sort of “organic” Jewish community Kaplan envisioned.33

As in Minneapolis, St. Paul’s Talmud Torah students came from both Conservative and Orthodox congregations, but a significant number of Reform congregation members and unaffiliated youth were also enrolled in its programs. Its administration and faculty came to include highly skilled educators from around the world, including Israelis with Yemenite and Georgian backgrounds,34 instructors who had grown up in Argentina and Chicago, a Covenant Award winner from Green Bay, Wisconsin,35 and six authors or co-authors of Jewish educational books.36 Enrollment would peak in the early 1960s at approximately 550 afternoon school students, out of a St. Paul Jewish population of approximately 10,000.37

Through the early 2000s the Talmud Torah remained the community’s educational center, offering a supplementary afternoon school program, a day school (founded in the early 1980s), an early childhood program, and an adult education program, while also serving as the home of the Twin Cities Jewish Middle School, co-founded with the non-denominational Minneapolis Jewish Day School. The depth and breadth of learning the Talmud Torah provided is reflected in a list of guests who met with students, including Israel Prize-winning author Natan Shaham, Knesset member Meir Pail, Israeli-Palestinian writer Anton Shammas, moral development theorist Lawrence Kohlberg, Yad leKashish founder Miriam Mendelow, Chief Kadi of Israel Ahmed Nattur, Hebrew University Law Professor Zev Falk, and Minnesota Attorney General “Skip” Humphrey, son of Hubert Humphrey.

In the St. Paul Talmud Torah Afternoon School study of biblical texts in Hebrew began in the elementary grades, and among high school classes offered was a course on mystical, rational and existential approaches to Jewish life. In the 1990s, fifth- and sixth-grade St. Paul Day School students studied nine chapters of Mishnah (in Hebrew), along with additional rabbinic sources, in preparation for service on the school’s Vaad Din/Justice Committee, which was responsible for resolving complaints brought to the committee by students, faculty or staff members. Curricula in each of the agency’s programs were designed developmentally, presenting challenges that stimulated growth—taught by skilled and knowledgeable faculty, with ample instructional time. Curricula met students where they were, while leading them to ask, “What is beyond that horizon? And then that one? And how can I find out?”

In their study Ethnic Identification Among American Jews (1974), Arnold Dashefsky and Howard Shapiro maintained that the St. Paul Talmud Torah offered a “highly illuminating” example of what a central communal education agency could achieve when unencumbered by the organizational politics and ideological constraints that so often hampered synagogue-based programs. In both Minneapolis and St. Paul, centering Talmud Torah curricula on Hebrew language skills, classical texts, and contemporary thinkers and issues appealed to families from across the community, including significant numbers of households not affiliated with a synagogue. The cooperative division of responsibilities freed congregations to focus on in-depth development of liturgical skills, with impressive outcomes in both settings.38 Writing in the mid-1960s, longtime University of Chicago Hillel Director Maurice Pekarsky argued that Jewish communities in search of “a beginning, roots, and a future” must build educational programs that “help us discover the means of traveling in time.”39 The St. Paul Talmud Torah’s schools did just that.

A degree of regional educational vitality also persisted. An annual Jewish educator’s conference was held in the 1980s and 1990s, alternating between the Minneapolis and St. Paul Jewish Community Centers. Modeled after the national Coalition for Advancement of Jewish Education/CAJE conferences, “Minne(sota)-CAJE” brought together educators from across the ideological spectrum. Educators also benefitted from documents and artifacts gathered and maintained by the Jewish Historical Society of the Upper Midwest, sparking research and numerous publications.

However, in the Midwest, as throughout the country, indications of communal dissolution were accumulating. Deeply introverted forms of Orthodoxy exerted growing influence in traditional circles,40 and while Birthright/Taglit and other Israel-focused initiatives continued to attract significant participation, links between American Jews and Israelis were growing more tenuous and strained. The 2013 Pew Center study Portrait of Jewish Americans indicated that 43% of respondents identified “caring about Israel” as indicative of being Jewish, one percent higher than those who chose “Having a good sense of humor.”41 There was little reason to doubt that an increasing number of Twin Cities Jews were nearing a comparable perspective.

Symptomatic of these developments was the spasmic contraction of the Minneapolis and St. Paul Talmud Torahs. By the 1980s the Reform congregation Samuel Deinard had led succeeded in gaining direct funding from the Minneapolis Federation for its education program, a major step away from the communal agency system. Writing in the early 1980s, former Talmud Torah of Minneapolis Director L.I. Kaiser, while lauding the school’s successes, concluded that members of an increasingly diffuse community “now serve other gods and other needs.”42 In 1990 Elazar noted that even in Minneapolis, where the Talmud Torah “is considered a community jewel, when the very substantial segment of Federation leaders who are affiliated with the Reform temple acted to provide the latter’s far less intensive school with Federation support, they succeeded in breaking a 70-year rule that Federation aid for Jewish education was solely directed to the community institution…”43 Today what remains of the Talmud Torah of Minneapolis is a joint project of the city’s two Conservative congregations. Enrollment is open to the community at large, but it no longer retains the central, integrative position it once held.

Developments in St. Paul would eventually follow a similar course. One of the community’s Conservative congregations led the way in challenging the Talmud Torah’s standing as communal common ground, echoing developments in Minneapolis 20 years earlier. When the congregation announced in 2000 that it was opening its own afternoon school, the President of the St. Paul Federation responded, “The preservation of communal Jewish education remains an important value for the St. Paul Jewish community and of the United Jewish Fund and Council [Federation]…we need to be mindful of the importance of maintaining our communal agencies and institutions. I would hope that all elements of our community would rededicate themselves to finding solutions to community issues which benefit and enhance the entire St. Paul Jewish community.”44 Even so, Federation support for a communal agency-centered approach to Jewish education in St. Paul withered in the years that followed, and the Twin Cities Jewish Middle School succumbed to inter-city tensions in 2007.45

By 2024, all that was left of Dashefsky and Shapiro’s “highly illuminating” Talmud Torah of St. Paul was its adult education program, and in 2025 that program was transferred to a local self-described “journalism and engagement hub.” The Talmud Torah’s website indicated that

For nearly 70 years, TTSP has been a cornerstone of Jewish education in the Twin Cities, shaping generations through innovative programs and unwavering commitment to communal learning.

Looking ahead, the TTSP is evolving its role to amplify its impact by transitioning from direct programming to a grant-making model, supporting organizations that share a vision for vibrant Jewish education and individuals who hope to access opportunities for learning.46

Jewish “belonging,” in the Twin Cities and elsewhere, would increasingly resemble membership in a private organization or organizations. Newcomers to the area, along with local youth, were left to grapple with communal questions absent memories of a curious and illuminating past. Appeals to Klal Yisrael (Jews in general) were no match for the ensuing challenges. While am/עם (people) shares its root with eem/עם (with), a klal/כלל (generality) is, in essence, an abstraction.

*****

If many Midwestern Jewish communities once embodied characteristics of Mordecai Kaplan’s “organic” community, in recent decades they have largely come undone. Some factors, both constructive and adverse, were idiosyncratic, having to do with local social and economic developments and particular persons—the Minneapolis Talmud Torah’s George Gordon, for example. However, leadership positions, paid and voluntary, were also open to individuals unsuited for the work, or with little lasting commitment to that specific locale. The Twin Cities communities were fortunate in this regard, though not without exceptions.

Broader cultural influences were also shaping Jewish communities throughout the region and country. The authors of Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life,47 published in 1985, maintained that life in America had long been riven by a tension between social responsibility and personal opportunity, tensions that were taking their toll on the social side of life. By the closing decades of the twentieth century a growing proportion of American Jews, including Midwesterners, were immersed in the pursuit of personal advancement in ways that did not always mesh well with what would be needed to productively sustain their Jewish communities.

Some changes were physical. Excepting those who continued to seek out residences within walking distance of their synagogue, Midwestern Jews were living farther apart from one another. This geographical change came with institutional ramifications. As “nearby” faded as a primary motive for synagogue membership, congregations sought new members by marketing customized programs and services to Jewish consumers. Coinciding with a general dilution of the construct “community” (e.g., “online community”), the term would commonly come to be used in the Twin Cities as a euphemism for “congregation.” The decision of the Minneapolis and St. Paul Federations to directly allocate educational funds to congregations, along with funds to Orthodox programs informed by premises decidedly divergent from principles broadly affirmed by Twin Cities Jews, signaled a significant recalculation of “community.”

Ethnic bonds that had once moderated ideological differences were also waning. Growing up in many a mid-twentieth-century Mississippi Valley Jewish community had come with a very real sense of ambient Yiddishkeit, conveyed through the spoken Yiddish one might encounter on the street, at neighborhood shops, and in the nearby homes of family and friends; not the antique manner of a self-contained faction, but a broad, living legacy, reinforced by a healthy measure of halakhic observance among many, and halakhic deference among many others. Such experiences had helped to substantiate a Jewish רשות הרבים/public domain, fertile ground for expansive and deep Jewish education. More recently, younger midwestern Jews would more likely encounter sporadic hints of Yiddishkeit, if at all, in the form of stereotypical foods, music, and a comedic accent; from people, to ethnic group, to religion, to vestigial remains.

What might this teach us about deep and broad belonging and learning?

1. It has been suggested that the phrase ḥaverim kol Yisrael (all Israelites belong) in Birkat ha-Ḥodesh (blessing preceding a new moon) stems from early rabbinic efforts to spread the word that every pilgrim to the Temple would be treated as having observed requisite purity practices, and would therefore be considered an observant חבר/ḥaver/someone who belongs for the purposes of the pilgrimage; חברים/ḥaverim/those who belong —not centered on friendship per se, but belonging.48 Children in other locales could easily encounter Jews who did not consider them חברים, but that was far less likely in Minneapolis or St. Paul, where talmud Torah was communal common ground, introducing students to their local Jewish contemporaries in shared learning contexts.

2. Communal schools such as the Twin Cities Talmud Torahs were particularly well situated to a) embody a deep and broad embrace of Jewish life through inclusive faculties, enrollments and curricula; b) maximize access to educators in the community; c) foster relationships among faculty, staff, and students of varying backgrounds; d) make efficient use of limited material resources; e) provide educators sufficient hours and compensation to warrant their focused commitment; and f) set tuition rates in keeping with constituents’ circumstances. Given these factors, reestablishing local communal agencies (not simply “bureaus”) remains a commonsense approach to Jewish education. Defining “local” for these purposes may prove challenging, but it is a vital challenge.

3. There is a world of difference between using communal resources to build institutions that draw disparate elements of a community together, and the politic scattering of assets. Parceling out communal resources among congregations and private schools facilitates the absence of day-to-day educational interactions between faculty, students, and their families. In these days of Jewish factions and fractions, providing support for shared learning that traverses halakhic and ideological divides is a crucial responsibility of communal funding bodies.

4. If it is to prove formative, one’s Jewish education must be as engaging, intellectually substantive, and inspiring as any of one’s other learning experiences, if not more so. Courting students with, in Maurice Pekarsky’s words, “therapy education, survival education, education in pleasantness,”49 rather than seriously challenging them, can lead students to reasonably conclude that a typical Jewish education comes with childish expectations and ineffectual outcomes, and can therefore be left behind. In their most vigorous years the Twin Cities Talmud Torahs went a long way toward contradicting that conclusion, employing faculty and curricula of sufficient depth and breadth to warrant the ongoing regard of Orthodox and non-Orthodox parents and students alike.

Policies of the Twin Cities Talmud Torahs indicated due regard for dietary and calendrical halakhah, while constructively engaging halakhic diversity. Reflecting on Northside sights and smells on Friday afternoons, George Gordon was remembered as saying that “reiaḥ hayahadut” is as important as “ruaḥ hayahadut”—the smell of Judaism is as important as the spirit of Judaism.50 A pervasive presence emanated from the homes of neighbors with varied backgrounds and orientations. Today’s students and their families may understand halakhic standards in different ways, but an overarching appreciation of both reiaḥ and ruaḥ must prevail if a communal school is to genuinely prove a point of communal common ground.

5. If contemporary Jewish communities are to constitute something more than adjacent organizations and affinity groups, members must have enough confidence in one another to engage challenges collectively. One possible step in this direction would be more serious use of participatory decision-making on a communal level. The liberal principle of individual autonomy has greatly influenced Jewish-American life, but no corresponding emphasis on liberal-democratic Jewish communal processes has taken hold.51 Such procedures can prove divisive; but if carefully constructed and constructively applied (possibly accompanied by study groups on Jewish sources dealing with communal governance), community-wide forums and decision-making practices could help to stimulate an informed sense of belonging. As Tocqueville noted, the greater good of democratic processes is not that they inevitably lead to the very best decisions, but that they spread “a restive activity through the whole social body, a superabundant force, an energy that never exists without it, and which, however little circumstances may be favorable, can bring forth marvels.”52 Jewish communities are deeply in need of such energy. Efforts to foster commonality in Midwestern Jewish communities were bolstered by local circumstance and an ample measure of community-oriented leaders. Absent such circumstances, restoring the in-common in community requires ever more conscious effort, and a greater sense of shared responsibility.

6. Camping continues to carry significant educational potential. The Midwest played a key role in the development of Jewish overnight camping, but it came with the problematic implication that one may need to leave one’s home community to experience a fully encompassing and inspiring Jewish way of life. For youth who live apart from a Jewish community, or in a community that has no apparent place for them, camping can lead to lifelong friendships and serious learning, but it must not lead campers to conclude that the episodic idylls of camp life constitute an alternative to life in a day-to-day community, with its mix of ages, households, vocations, and perspectives.

7. While the Reform movement’s 1885 Pittsburgh Platform asserted that “We consider ourselves no longer a nation but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine nor a sacrificial worship…”, its 1937 Columbus Platform dramatically reversed course: “In the rehabilitation of Palestine, the land hallowed by memories and hopes, we behold the promise of renewed life for many of our brethren. We affirm the obligation of all Jewry to aid in its upbuilding as a Jewish homeland by endeavoring to make it not only a haven of refuge for the oppressed but also a center of Jewish culture and spiritual life.”53 In the Reform movement this was a dramatic change; but in the Twin Cities, affirmation of Jewish peoplehood in Zionist terms was long prevalent, strongly reinforced by the Labor Zionist standard that the common good is best calculated in terms of consequences for common folk. That Saadia Gelb, author of The Kibbutz Experience and prominent Mapai figure, and Melford Spiro, author of Kibbutz: Venture in Utopia, were both alumni of the Talmud Torah of Minneapolis is one small but telling sign of this influence.

Israel-related cultural renewal and inclusivity played a large role in rendering Twin Cities Talmud Torah curricula rooted and invigorating, but that sensibility has dramatically receded. Nationally, this trend is most pronounced among younger Jews. A 2025 Washington Post poll indicated that while roughly 56% of respondents described themselves as “emotionally attached” to Israel, the number dropped to 36% of 18-34 year-old respondents.54 At the same time, it is hard to imagine the current prime minister of Israel consulting a wide array of Jewish thinkers from around the world about a piece of legislation pending in the Knesset, as did David Ben Gurion in 1958.55

The story of the Jewish people cannot be honestly taught without due regard for how Zionism has shaped recent stages of that story. However, doing so must include serious consideration of varied voices at Israel’s founding and subsequent events and personages, both inspiring and troubling, all within the context of the larger Jewish story. The range and prominence of speakers who met with Talmud Torah of St. Paul students in the 1970s to 1990s conveyed to students, their families, the Jewish community, and the community at large that the Jewish education they were receiving was brave, deep, and broad.

Self-aware self-criticism is a foundational characteristic of Jewish learning. Jewish educators should no more look the other way when the subject is current events than when it is Amos’s confrontation with Amaziah. The Land of Israel has a unique status in the Jewish story, and the Jews of Israel are now the largest Jewish populace in the world, the only Hebrew-speaking society, and a signal embodiment of Jewish peoplehood. Ḥaverim kol Yisrael. But as Yeshayah Lebowitz observed: “…the historical Jewish people isn’t defined in governmental-state terms… The historical Jewish people is defined in terms of its Jewishness…”56

*****

Jewish communities in many other locales have struggled to devise versions of the communal characteristics that converged in the Twin Cities, where inclusivity was enhanced by the quality of learning their educational agencies offered, and learning was buoyed by a palpable communal presence. The Twin Cities are now among those struggling locales, but through much of the twentieth century the successes of the Minneapolis and St. Paul Talmud Torahs was widely viewed as “illuminating.” Relationships could falter and outcomes weren’t always ideal, but something of the potential of cooperative Jewish communities to provide exceptional learning opportunities was evinced on both sides of the Mississippi; communities in which understanding a communal school to be a Jewish public institution was common sense, and common ground, for the common good.

Earl Schwartz is retired from the Hamline University religion department, where he also directed the social justice studies program. He is the author of Moral Development: A Practical Guide for Jewish Teachers (Alternatives in Religious Education, Inc., 1983) and Arc of the Covenant: Jewish Educational Success on the Upper Mississippi (Lexington Books, 2019), and co-author with Rabbi Barry Cytron of When Life is in the Balance (United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, 1986) and Who Renews Creation (United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, 1993).

  1. 1 L.I. Kaiser, “Minneapolis is Different,” Jewish Education 50, no. 3, (Fall 1982): 34-38.

  2. 2 A. P. Gannes, ed., Selected Writings of Leo L. Honor (Reconstructionist Press, 1965), 47.

  3. 3 Jacob R. Marcus, United States Jewry, 1776-1985 (Wayne State, 1993), 589.

  4. 4 “…the rising Jewish education establishment, mostly concentrated in the big cities on the East Coast…gave in early on to rabbinic demands to establish congregational schools and other fissiparous tendencies which may have been appropriate for their large cities…” “The National-Cultural Movement in Hebrew Education in the Mississippi Valley,” D. Elazar, https://dje.jcpa.org/articles2/hebrew-mississippi.htm.

  5. 5 See, e.g., L.I. Kaiser’s reference to “remoteness from the East, the source of Jewish cultural chaos” as a significant asset in the school’s strongest years. “Minneapolis is Different,” 37. Also: L. Gartner, Jewish Education in the United States, A Documentary History (Teachers College, 1969), 31.

  6. 6 It is estimated that from the 1930s through the 1970s, approximately 20,000 Jews lived in Minneapolis and its suburbs. During the same period it is estimated that St. Paul’s Jewish population dropped from 14,000 to under 10,000. They Chose Minnesota: A Survey of the State’s Ethnic Group, June Drenning Holmquist, ed. (Minnesota Historical Society, 1985), 491.

  7. 7 Based on data from the early 1980s, Arnold Dashefsky and Bernard Lazerwitz observed a positive correlation between Jewish affiliation and self-employed occupations, along with sales, clerical, and manual labor. See: A. Dashefsky, B. Lazerwitz, Charitable Choices: Philanthropic Decisions of Donors in the American Jewish Community (Lexington Books, 2009), 62.

  8. 8 M. Kaplan, Questions Jews Ask (Reconstructionist, 1956), Introduction.

  9. 9 Noteworthy in this regard were St. Paul’s seven private colleges, along with a University of Minnesota campus, the second highest per capita ratio of colleges of any city, after Boston, in the United States.

  10. 10 It is commonly assumed that the English term “community-minded” comes from the Danish “samfundssind.” Regarding “Midwest Nice,” see: Kimberly Haala, “Good for you, good for others: Practicing the kindness behind ‘Midwest Nice,’” https://www.mayoclinichealthsystem.org/hometown-health/speaking-of-health/kindness-behind-midwest-nice.

  11. 11 George H. Mayer, The Political Career of Floyd B. Olson (Minnesota Historical Society, 1951), 5, 8. An uncle of the author confirmed having heard Olson address a gathering in Yiddish.

  12. 12 Vicki Peiser’s Jews in Germantown (Minnesota Jewish Historical Society, 2025) presents a contrasting picture of Jewish life in a non-urban portion of Minnesota southwest of the Twin Cities.

  13. 13 On a visit to the Twin Cities, Susan B. Anthony stayed with the Cohens.

  14. 14 Jonathan Krasner, The Benderly Boys and American Jewish Education (Brandeis, 2011), 128.

  15. 15 F. Rosenthal, The Jews of Des Moines, the First Century (Jewish Welfare Federation of Des Moines, Iowa, 1957), 78-80.

  16. 16 The other farm was located in New Jersey.

  17. 17 The expression, coined by Kwame Anthony Appiah, is an ironic twist on the antisemitic caricature of Jews as “rootless cosmopolitans.”

  18. 18 Alvin Chenkin, Gary A. Tobin, Recent Jewish Community Population Studies: A Roundup (American Jewish Committee, 1985), 171.

  19. 19 North Side Memories: An Oral History of Minnesota’s Largest Jewish Neighborhood, P. Freshman, L. Mack Schloff, eds. (Upper Midwest Jewish Historical Society, 2000), 30.

  20. 20 Gunther Plaut, The Jews in Minnesota: The first Seventy-five Years (AJHS, 1959), 139.

  21. 21 The Jewish population of Duluth in 1930 was estimated at approximately 4,000. By 1977, the number had dropped to approximately 1,000 Jewish residents. They Chose Minnesota: A Survey of the State’s Ethnic Groups, 491.

  22. 22 Selected Writings of Leo L. Honor, 67.

  23. 23 The neighborhood’s walkability is highlighted in North Side Memories: An Oral History of Minnesota’s Largest Jewish Neighborhood, vol. 2, P. Freshman, Linda Mack Schloff, eds. (Upper Midwest Jewish History, 2000).

  24. 24 L. Schloff, And Prairie Dogs Weren’t Kosher (Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1996), 171.

  25. 25 מותר לעשות בית הכנסת בית המדרש אבל בית המדרש אסור לעשותו בית הכנסת שקדושת בית המדרש יתרה על קדושת בית הכנסת, ומעלין בקדש ולא מורידין. (משנה תורה הלכות תפלה, יא:יד).

    “It is permitted to transform a synagogue into a house of study. However, it is forbidden to transform a house of study into a synagogue because the sanctity of a house of study exceeds that of a synagogue and one must proceed to a higher rung of holiness, but not descend to a lower rung.” (Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Prayer 11:14, trans. Eliyahu Touger, Sefaria, sefaria.org.)

  26. 26 Regarding “champions of Hebrew education” in the region, Elazar acknowledged that though there were no statistics, “it seems that the majority were Litvaks and indeed it was in the cities with heavy Litvak settlement that Hebrew education was most successful. As maskilim they were educated to see Hebrew as essential to Jewish peoplehood and culture…” “The National–Cultural Movement in Hebrew Education in the Mississippi Valley.” D. Elazar. Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daniel Elazar Papers Index. Regarding early Jewish educational initiatives in the Twin Cities, see Plaut, chapter 24, “Teach Them Diligently.”

  27. 27 Regarding the influence of the Hebrew renaissance on twentieth-century Jewish life, see B. Harshav, Language in Time of Revolution (University of California Press, 1993).

  28. 28 Plaut, 217.

  29. 29 Plaut, 303.

  30. 30 By 1971, an estimated 2% remained on the Northside. Minnesota Historical Society MNopedia, https://www.mnhs.org/mnopedia/search/index/group/talmud-torah-minneapolis.

  31. 31 Krasner, 376-377.

  32. 32 St. Paul United Jewish Fund and Council 2004-2005 Annual Report, 6.

  33. 33 Concurrently, the St. Paul Jewish Community would receive national recognition for its efforts to integrate youth with physical and cognitive disabilities into its programs.

  34. 34 In the 1970s and early 1980s, the Hebrew faculty included a daughter of Siegfried Lehmann, an Israel Prize recipient and founder of the Ben Shemen Youth Village.

  35. 35 Rabbi Joel (Yosi) Gordon, executive director of the Talmud Torah of St. Paul from 1978-1990, and a faculty member in the years that followed, received the award in 2000.

  36. 36 Harry Malin, Dori Weisman, Phyllis Cytron, Louis Newman, Rabbi Joel Gordon, and the author.

  37. 37 A. Dashefsky and H. Shapiro, The Jewish Community of St. Paul, MN, United Jewish Fund and Council, 1971, https://www.jewishdatabank.org/api/download/?studyId=465&mediaId=C-MN-St._Paul-1969-Main_Report.pdf.

  38. 38 The liturgical writings of Miles Cohen, author of לוח השנה, and Perry Rank, co-editor of מורה דרך, both of whom with roots on the Northside, are one sign of this outcome.

  39. 39 Tradition and Contemporary Experience, A. Jospe, ed. (Schocken, 1970), 289.

  40. 40 The Orthodox congregation that hosted Reform Rabbi Samuel Deinard on Rosh Hashanah seventy-some years earlier, now located in a Minneapolis suburb, fractured into three congregations, two of the three adopting highly insular ideologies. The congregation’s last rabbi before the fracture had served on the Talmud Torah faculty. In St. Paul, the remaining Orthodox congregation came to be strongly influenced by Chabad.

  41. 41 Portrait of Jewish Americans, October 1, 2013, https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2013/10/01/jewish-american-beliefs-attitudes-culture-survey/.

  42. 42 Kaiser, 38.

  43. 43 D. Elazar, “The Future of Central Agencies for Jewish Education,” Jewish Education 58, nos. 3-4 (1990): 10.

  44. 44 American Jewish World, January 14, 2000, 1.

  45. 45 A subsequent Federation-sponsored communal education planning effort, initiated in conjunction with “listening sessions” in 2012, reflected this disintegration. See: St. Paul Jewish Federation Community Planning Process, Priority 4: Strengthen Jewish Education, Final Report, October 2018, https://cdn.fedweb.org/fed-103/2/PANEL%25204%2520Strengthen%2520Jewish%2520Education%2520Final%2520Report%2520PDF.pdf.

  46. 46 Talmud Torah of St. Paul website (discontinued), https://ttsp.org/, April 4, 2026.

  47. 47 Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, Steven M. Tipton, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (University of California Press, 1985).

  48. 48 See Issachar Jacobson’s comment on Mahzor Vitry’s reference to the passage:

    יששכר יעקבסון, נתיב בינה (סיני ,1987), 234–235. ֿ

    Ephraim Urbach noted that such usage perhaps shared its etymology with similar terminology used by far more exclusive Jewish groups of the period.

    526. א.א. אורבך ,חז׳׳ל: פרקי אמינות ודעות (מאגנס ,1969), 520–

    Hillel’s “אל תפרוש מן הציבור”/“Don’t separate from the general public” is intriguing in this regard. Given its wording, he could well have intended, “We must not become the “פרוש/Pharisee” elitist sect we are made out to be!”

  49. 49 M. Pekarsky, “The American Jewish Community—What Lies Ahead?” in Tradition and Contemporary Experience, 290.

  50. 50 North Side Memories, 40.

  51. 51 There is ample evidence of democratic influence on Jewish communal decision making, reaching back to the early rabbinic precedent that “an action regarding communal needs ציבור) (צרכי is taken on condition that the majority of the community (רוב הציבור) accepts it (Tosefta Sanhedrin 2:13).” For additional examples see:

    מדינת ישראל כמדינה יהודית ודמוקרטית (האיגוד העולמי למדעי היהדות, 1999), פרק ד׳.

  52. 52 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop, eds. and trans. (University of Chicago, 2000), 196.

  53. 53 For more on the Reform Movement’s platforms, see “Platforms,” Central Conference of American Rabbis, https://www.ccarnet.org/rabbinic-voice/platforms/.

  54. 54 https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/10/06/jewish-americans-israel-poll-gaza/.

  55. 55 Ben Gurion sent them a letter with the question: Should a child whose father is Jewish but whose mother is not, be registered in Israel’s “Register of the Population” as Jewish, if that is the expressed wish of both parents? He began the letter with the explanation that the Knesset had instructed a committee in which he was included “to consider ‘statements of opinion by Jewish scholars in Israel and abroad on this subject,’ and to formulate registration rules ‘in keeping with the accepted tradition among all circles of Jewry…’” Recipients ranged from Solomon Freehof, President of the World Union for Progressive Judaism (Reform), to the Lubavitcher Rebbe, the rabbi of the Tel Aviv-Jaffa Yemenite Community, S. Y. Agnon, and A. J. Heschel. See: Jewish Identity, Modern Responsa and Opinions, S. B. Hoenig, ed. (New York, 1965).

  56. 56 ישעיהו ליבוביץ, אמונה היסטוריה וערכים (אקדמון, 2002), 114.