Jewish San Francisco

By Edward Zerin and Dr. Marc Dollinger

In San Francisco, the "instant city" of the gold rush days, Jews were pioneers among pioneers. Some came as immigrants directly from Europe, others as resettled adventurers from the East Coast, and still others as scions of southern Sephardic families. Out of this mixed multitude emerged a community with synagogues and institutions to care for the needy and the sick, along with a dignified social fabric. New immigrants following the Russian pogroms of 1883 were absorbed, and the ashen ruins from the 1906 earthquake were rebuilt. The city's cultural treasures and social needs were enriched, and the city's Jews were nurtured by civic commitments. Today's 70,000 San Francisco Jews, standing upon the shoulders of pioneering giants, continue to build and rebuild.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
• Release date: Oct 9, 2006
• ISBN: 9781439618172

Edward Zerin

Edward Zerin, Ph.D, a retired congregational rabbi, psychotherapist, university professor, and author of The Birth of the Torah, has a long and distinguished record of Jewish history writing and consulting. In Jewish San Francisco, using vintage images from private collectors, as well as the archives of the Western Jewish History Center of the Judah L. Magnes Museum, Zerin portrays a mother lode of Jewish history on the West Coast and taps into a vein of social and cultural riches.

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INTRODUCTION

I am a newcomer to San Francisco, but not a newcomer to Jewish life. Shortly after arriving in my new home, I began visiting the Jewish institutions and meeting Jewish professionals. Riding the MUNI transportation system, I mined a Jewish religious and communal history that began with the arrival of the forty-niners and discovered a Jewish consciousness that distinguishes Jewish San Francisco to this day.

Jews and non-Jews alike were pioneers among pioneers; however, two important factors distinguished the Jewish forty-niners. While other Americans often had the option of going back to their families in the East, the overwhelming majority of Jewish newcomers came directly from Europe, where political conditions made returning very difficult and most problematic.

Second, many brought with them the knowledge and the skills to supply miners and other town residents with clothing, boots, hats, and other essentials. Frequently they were products of chain migrations, with a brother, uncle, cousin, or friend staying on the East Coast or in Europe sending merchandise west. Those who could afford it stayed in San Francisco, while those who could not compete went off to the mining camps and interior towns where there were fewer stores. Few of those ever mined for gold.

Within the tents of these sturdy newcomers, recalls the foreword to a notable history of Western Jewry (A. W. Voorsanger’s Western Jewry: An Account of the Achievements of the Jews and Judaism in California, including Eulogies and Biographies and the Jews in California by Martin A. Meyer, Ph.D., 1916, San Francisco, Emanu-El), there were conceived plans for the establishment of Jewish communal institutions. When the communities grew and attained material success, synagogues and religious schools, benevolent societies and homes for orphans, the sick and the aged, were erected. [And] In their civic virtues and in those qualities that attest the moral strength of a community the Jewish men and women of pioneer days occupied distinguished rank.

What originally had been a Mexican outpost called Yerba Buena, San Francisco became an instant city that grew up suddenly during the gold rush. In 1880, San Francisco became the ninth-ranking city in population in the country and the Pacific Rim’s uncontested metropolitan hub. With the great majority foreign born or of foreign-language parentage, the city’s 233,000 people accounted for well over a quarter of the state’s population. Of this number, San Francisco’s 16,000 Jews were exceeded in number only by the Jewish inhabitants of New York City. Today San Francisco’s Jewish population approaches 70,000, with a total of 350,000 Jews in the Greater Bay Area—the third largest Jewish center in the United States after New York and Los Angeles.

Reaching out to the larger community, the Jews of San Francisco envisioned and responded to the many needs of the city’s growing diversification. Turning within, they put new wine in old bottles to meet new world challenges to their ancestral traditions. Like the biblical Noah, they secured their San Francisco ark from within and without.

Jewish San Francisco is a pictorial update of what started in 1848 and continues into the 21st century. I invite you to mine the past and traverse the present, to explore San Francisco’s cultural treasures, and meet a socially responsive Jewish community.

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PIONEERS AMONG PIONEERS

The California gold rush was an odyssey into an unknown land for everybody, but the Jewish immigration to California at this time was a unique phenomenon. Jews had migrated to new lands before, but, for the most part, they had settled in metropolitan areas or in smaller towns where there were good prospects of earning a livelihood. They did not know what to expect when they reached California. The claims of travel guides proved to be exaggerated. In 1849, there were no large cities at the mines, only a few small towns; means of transportation from San Francisco to the mountains were poor; and the gold was usually not easily obtained. But the Jews came in large numbers to this unknown land on the strength of the same rumors that motivated the Gentiles. Statistics for the early years are not available, but there are indications that by 1860 there were possibly as many as 962 Jewish males in San Francisco.

—Robert E. Levinson, The Jews in the California Gold Rush, page 6

In 1846, Yerba Buena was a quiet Mexican village of approximately 200 people. In 1847, its name was changed to San Francisco, and the following year, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ceded California to the United States. By 1849, San Francisco became a sprawling instant city of canvas tents and flimsy shacks, quickly ravaged by fires, floods and sandstorms; infested with rats and vermin; and subject to cholera. Gang warfare and murders overflowed onto the muddy streets. (Courtesy Bancroft Library.)

People of all colors, social classes, nationalities, and religions came by every conceivable means—by wagon or on foot across mainland North America, by ship around Cape Horn, or by passage across the Isthmus of Panama or Nicaragua. All too often, when they undertook their journey, they did not realize that the gold fields were over 100 miles inland and that arrival at San Francisco’s Golden Gate was just the beginning of another arduous undertaking. The map above shows 1800s overland trails to California from the eastern United States. The lower map indicates gold rush–era sea routes to California from the eastern United States.(Courtesy Wayne State University Press.)

From left to right, Dr. McDonald, Dr. Louis Sloss, and Dr. Swift joined a wagon train to cross mainland North America. When cholera broke out, they left the train as soon as their medical services could be spared, believing that their packhorses could travel much easier and faster than loaded wagons. They arrived safely in California. (Courtesy Bancroft