Torah and Taro: Jewish Contributions to Hawaii

By Mathew R. Sgan

In a prior book titled Honey and Poi Sgan had come across many stories about Jewish individuals, events, and organizations which have had an impact on their host Hawaiian culture. No institution, it seemed remained unaffected by the presence of Jews (less than 1 %) in Hawaii. In telling this story from his point of view, he will attempt to persuade the reader that although never large in terms of numbers, Jews, Judaism, and Israel played important and unrecognized roles in each stage of Hawaiian history from 1778 to the present.
Further, this book seeks to persuade readers that such impact is based on admirable personal traits derived from Jewish traditions and heritage. Those traits, if examined, understood, and applied properly, foster constructive, responsible, and productive actions. They encourage Jews to work toward the improvement of the social conditions of the societies and communities in which Jews live.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9781664132528

Mathew R. Sgan

When not dancing and talking with tourists, fellow citizens of Hawaii, family, and friends, octogenarian Mathew R. Sgan spends time writing, reading, and learning. Shaka and Shalom will be his fifth book since coming to Hawaii with his beloved wife, Mabel 'Gin' Lum Sgan in fulfillment of a promise to her that, upon her retirement from college teaching, they would move to Hawaii to be near her family. Arriving In Hawaii in 2000, Mathew set up a business called Non Profit Fundraising Services. He and his business were privileged and fortunate to be selected to lead the team that raised the funds needed to rebuild the Visitor Center shoreside of the iconic USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor. Eventually, some 54 million public/private dollars was raised for that purpose. Finally, Mathew had a third act for the story of his life.

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Copyright © 2020 by Mathew R. Sgan.

All rights reserved.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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Rev. date: 12/02/2020

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Contents

About the Author

Books by Author

Acknowledgments

Prologue

Chapter 1 The Monarchy 1778−1895

Chapter 2 The Missionaries 1778−1893

Chapter 3 An Early Jew, Perhaps? 1793−1837

Chapter 4 Jews Trickle In 1850-1899

Chapter 5 The Territorial Years: Pre-WW2 1900−1940

Chapter 6 WW2 and Pre-Statehood 1941-1959

Chapter 7 Hawaii and Arab Israeli War 1945−1948

Chapter 8 Early Statehood Years 1960−1999

Chapter 9 Mutual Publishing Company - A Case in Point 1972−2020

Chapter 10 Current Statehood Years 2001-2020

Chapter 11 Manoa Chocolate: A Case in Point 2010−2020

Chapter 12 Epilogue

Chapter 13 Afterword

Bibliography

Front Cover-Torah, Yad (pointer), and Tallit by Richard Lum.

Back Cover-The pineapple is from Kauai Hawaii. The etrog is a citrus fruit grown in Israel. It is especially associated with the Jewish historic festival of Sukkot.

About the Author

Mabel Gin Lum Sgan and I moved to Hawaii from New England in 2000. Gin was born in Honolulu, attended Roosevelt High School, and received BA and MA degrees from University of Hawaii at Manoa. Gin, the common name she preferred, was pronounced with a hard G. As in Ginsburg, she would joke. Gin and I met as graduate students at Cornell University. I have a BA from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and an MA from Colgate University.

We received Cornell PhDs and married in 1963. During the next four decades, we made frequent trips to Hawaii. Gin had a large extended clan on Oahu. Gin’s father, Wing Hong Lum, and mother, Kam Shim Lum, were Chinese immigrants. They had ten children: seven girls and three boys. One boy died as a child.

Our family visited Hawaii more often as our children, Laurel and David, grew. It was most enjoyable to be with the extended Lum clan, which, as the third generation started to marry, became even more multiethnic.

In 2000, Brother Dick Lum wrote a family memoir titled The Jelly Factory. One of Wing Hong’s various undertakings was to establish a guava jelly-making business. Naturally, his employees consisted mainly of his children.

Dick details some five generations in the memoir. There are perhaps over forty nationalities among the family members. Niece Lisa Wong (Dick and Caroldine’s daughter) had her ancestry DNA determined by MyHeritage. She amazed the family by adding Eskimo and Neanderthal to the list!

Gin and I often joked that the reason that we were able to stay married for fifty-three years was that we both came from good peasant stock. Even though one heritage was Eastern European and the other was Southern China, we recognized how important our extended family ties are and benefitted from the resourceful nature and support that each provided.

Gin succumbed to cancer in 2015. She is remembered with much love in a commentary titled A Beautiful Life and A Beautiful Death by her sister Eileen. Gin was laid to rest in Abraham’s Garden in Hawaii Memorial Cemetery Park in Kaneohe, Hawaii.

Daughter Laurel, her husband Adam, and their three children have settled in New England. Son David is a partner in the law firm of Gill Zukeran & Sgan in Honolulu. David married a Hawaiian woman, Maile Psiris. Their daughter Aulani is in the fourth grade of the Kamehameha School. David and Maile hope that her younger sister, Anuhea, will also attend Kamehameha School.

This book is in large part a love letter to Hawaii. It and the Lum family produced a lovely woman who brought her husband to her state to be a constructive citizen. Thanks, Hawaii.

Mahalo and toda rabah, Mathew Sgan

Books by Author

Photo%20of%20Books%20by%20Author_bw.jpg

The Boston Book of Sports: From Puritans to Professionals 2009

Fried Matzah for Breakfast: A Family Memoir 2012 (with brother Dr. Arnold Sgan and niece Karen Small z"l)

Honey and Poi: The Origins and Development of Congregation Sof Ma’arav in Honolulu Hawai’i 2018 (with Dr. Alex Golub)

Appendix Compiled in Conjunction with Honey and Poi 2018

To the men, women,

individuals, and families

of Jewish heritage who

contributed to making

Hawaii a better place and to

the Hawaiians and the Aloha

spirit that enabled them.

Acknowledgments

This book is built on library research, document review, website materials, and for the more contemporary era, personal interviews and follow-up. I was heavily dependent on the assistance of the personnel at the Hawaii State and the University of Hawaii Manoa libraries. In addition, I utilized, both digitally and on site, the collections of Brigham Young University-Hawaii in La’ie and Mission Houses in Honolulu.

The Hawaii State Public Library System (HSL) provided materials (books, articles, films) that showed how other minority ethnicities had been studied in Hawaii. Thus, significant African American, Filipino, Samoan, and Tongan resources were at hand and could be culled for important features and systems for organizing facts about them efficaciously. Such pamphlets also reflected a recognition of these minority groups within the larger Asian and Caucasian populations of Hawaii.

HSL also provided booklets citing sources of genealogical references available at the various public and private libraries in Hawaii. Follow-up at such sites as the Hawaii State Archives was then much better informed. The assistance of the archivists there is much appreciated.

I also visited mainland museums to great advantage, including the Boston Athenaeum, the New Bedford Whaling Museum, and the Special Collections of the Divinity Library of Yale University. I am indebted to the courtesies and cooperation that I received from the special assistants and curators at each of the museums I approached. The archives (letters, files, newspapers, and flyers) that I perused at the museums provided important background on the monarchy-missionary period.

I consulted with many other fine people and resources in Hawaii. Larry Steinberg has been responsive and very helpful by enabling me to access information about Jews and Jewish Hawaii that he is compiling for the historical record. The wonderful volunteers—Sally Morgan, Deboarah Washofsky, Charlotte White—at the Temple Emanu-El Krupp Levinson Library advised me and provided me with materials on many occasions.

Various individuals also assisted: Fran Margulies, Dan Bender, Sandra Armstrong, Marlene Booth, and Avi Soiffer were very generous to respond quickly to my requests and fact-checking e-mails. Carolann Biederman, Seth Markow, Laurel Sgan, Dr. Arnold Sgan, Sid Goldstein, and Naomi Hoffman were kind enough to read early drafts of some sections and make suggestions to correct matters and to make things clearer. Thanks to Alan Kosansky, Cheryl Martin, Jim Wolfe, and Michelle Schneider for taking part in a name-recognition experiment that provided valuable insight. Special toda raba to Dina Yoshimi and Gregg Kinkley for their observations and elaborations.

Kirk Cashmere’s draft The History of the Jews of Hawaii is very important. He served as my muse. I thought of Kirk wading through the toil of winding and winding and then squinting to read the microfiche and microfilm to determine if a person should be included as being Jewish. I thought of him spending hour after hour looking at wills, trust documents, and ship’s passenger lists to find a Jewish name or reference. I thought of him physically turning newspaper pages to search for information about his topic.

Dan Bender wrote to me of Kirk’s groundbreaking research:

When Kirk took me to the State Archives Building to show me what he was up to, I was fascinated . . . So many of the people identified as being Jewish were discovered by Kirk thru careful review of their belongings in probate . . . a worn tallis, an unworn set of tephilin. a Siddur (note: prayer associated items) . . . He began by looking at everyone named Cohen . . .

Then I looked at my computer. The information I could obtain with a click or two on an icon or a link was enormous. As my familiarity with using the technology advanced, my appreciation for my good fortune grew. It must be that I should write this book, I thought, given the access that I have to what’s what and who’s who in this twenty-first century.

It wasn’t a cake walk, and there are certainly insight and material lapses, but technology provided answers in many instances. Thanks, Kirk, and good luck to those who might use this book for future investigations into Hawaii matters.

My previous book Honey and Poi suggested this book to me. In doing research for that book, I ran into the theme that I have carried forth in Torah and Taro. That theme essentially is how was it that so few people and the religious ideas of a particular minority ethnicity kept showing up and making a difference in a kingdom, territory, and state thousands of miles away from any reasonable migration or cultural expectation of that happening.

To the officers and fellow congregants of my synagogue Sof Ma’arav and my co-coordinator Dr. Alex Golub, my appreciation for agreeing to participate in the Sof history project book Honey and Poi. Sof provided startup funding that encouraged me to write that book, which, in turn, led to this book. Mahalo, Congregation Sof Ma’arav.

A special word for the businesspeople who assisted me in presenting two case studies. Thank you, Bennett Hymer (Mutual Publishing) and Dylan and Tamara Butterbaugh (Manoa Chocolate). I think those chapters highlight Jewish values and inner drive, Jewish grit and aspiration if you will, that supports my thesis in this book. In basic terms, that thesis is illustrated by the Monty Python song spoof about Broadway. It is titled, You Won’t Succeed in Broadway if You Don’t Have Jews. Jewish heritage does make a difference.

I am grateful to the people who made themselves available for interviews, provided needed documents, and answered my follow-up questions. Bennett Hymer and his firm Mutual Publishing deserve special thanks for their preparing Honey and Poi for publication. Naturally, I am responsible for Torah and Taro’s contents and presentation.

Finally, mahalo to the too numerous to mention people who have reviewed and improved my writing, answered my proofreading requests, and helped me get to publication. In writing to prove something, doubts and self-criticism often arose. I am grateful that I could rely on friends to check my assertions and speculations. I relied on them to tell me if my writing was clear, informative, authentic, and most of all, interesting. I hope the reader finds it all those things.

Shaloha, Mathew Sgan

Honolulu, Hawaii 2020 (5781)

Prologue

About the Title: Torah and Taro

In determining the title of this book, I went through many paired possibilities. Hora and Hula (dances), Kohane and Kahuna (priests), and Honey and Poi Part II (foods) were all considerations. They all had a certain appeal.

I decided on Torah and Taro out of appreciation of both Hawaiian and Jewish reliance on and appreciation of tradition, ancestry, and roots. I was attracted to the anagrammatic and alliterative nature of the words. I felt that my goal of associating how each culture has interacted with the other to mutual benefit is conveyed by such a title.

Why This Book about Jews in Hawaii

While perusing the website periodical Tablet, I came across an article that included information about a Maui woman named Risa Schwartz Whiting. The article, titled A Mormon Kahuna in Hawaii, was written by Rokhl Kafrissen

In an otherwise rambling, interesting, and humorous story of a homosexual marriage in a Tahitian Mormon ceremony, Kafrissen speaks to the wonderful blending of Christian, Mormon, and Polynesian traditions that make Hawaii hospitable to Jews. Utilizing Yiddish (Jewish language) as marks of emphasis, Kafrissen highlights her encounters throughout the state.

My interest remained with Risa Schwartz Whiting. Her history includes being adopted in 1942 by a Christian family in Belgium when her biological Jewish parents were shipped to Auschwitz and executed. She was then readopted by Jewish parents through the post-WW2 efforts of a Jewish organization, the Joint Distribution Committee.

Her obituary (she died in 2016 at age 77) indicates that she became a beloved theatrical performer in Maui. She and her husband established a statewide Dr. Martin Luther King peace poetry contest. In 2004, she was honored for her theatrical contributions to Hawaii by the Hawaii chapter of B’nai B’rith and Hillel at University of Hawaii at Manoa (UH Manoa).

The reason that this article is important to me is that it reinforced an idea that I have had since researching materials for a history project about the origins and development of the conservative Jewish congregation, Sof Ma’arav, in Honolulu, Hawaii. That research took me into the archives of the UH Manoa and Hawaii State Libraries and uncovered a wealth of information about Jews and Judaism in Hawaii, from their arrival in the mid-nineteenth century to the present.

Jewish influence was felt even before any record of Jews (with one possible exception) being in Hawaii had been established. The missionaries soon found that Native Hawaiians related to Hebrew Bible stories very well. Indeed, one of the first publications in the newly established Hawaiian written language was the story of Joseph and his brothers in the 1830s. A little later, the Christian and the Hebrew Bibles were also translated into Hawaiian.

I had come across many stories about Jewish individuals, events, and organizations that have had an impact on their host Hawaiian culture. No institution, it seems, remains unaffected by the presence of Jews in Hawaii. In telling this story from my point of view, I will attempt to persuade the reader that although never large in terms of numbers, Jews, Judaism, and Israel played important and often unrecognized roles in each stage of Hawaiian history from 1778 to the present.

My emphasis will be on the twin circumstances that made Jewish participation and leadership possible. One is that, although there are scattered incidents of anti-Semitism, the Hawaiian culture was accepting, indeed welcoming, of Jews and Judaism. The second is that Jewish tradition, values, and tenets have, within them, survival and aspirational motifs that engender status and material success for themselves and others. The expressions be a light unto the generations and repair the world, in addition to the moral and humane teachings of Judaism through many centuries, highlight those imperatives.

That is not to say that Jews are angels. Some of them are as criminal, immoral, and underhanded as one finds in any group. I do admit that my investigation found very few who fit the completely odious category. Even the worst of such representatives, all things considered, could be defended on some significant grounds.

Deborah Moore, in her book Jews of New York, makes the case for the intellectual, cultural, financial, and social norms and orientations of New York City being formidably a result of the influence of people of Jewish heritage. No such claim about Jewish influence on Hawaii is made in this book.

Rather, the point is that in spite of small numbers, certainly no more than 1 percent in some two hundred years, Jews have made a difference in such matters out of proportion to their numbers in the population of Hawaii. Further, however, this book seeks to persuade readers that such impact is based on admirable personal traits derived from Jewish traditions and heritage. Those traits, if examined, understood, and applied properly, foster constructive, responsible, and productive actions that tend toward the improvement of social conditions of the societies and communities in which Jews live.

About Jewish Names

Since we will be relying, for the most part, on Jewish surnames to direct us to whomever we describe as being of Jewish heritage, a short discourse about those names is warranted. The names give some insight into the background of the people, both in their origin and their continuation by heirs.

A principal problem in identifying people of Jewish heritage is that many have maintained their Jewish names centuries after their ancestors left Judaism. For example, Randall Roth is an important person in a major incident in Hawaiian history, and Roth is a common Jewish name. I asked him about his religious affiliation. He informed me that as far back as he could trace (two hundred years), his family had been Catholic.

Another problem is that many German and Jewish names are similar. Hawaii had a sizable influx of Germans during the nineteenth century. Some were German-Christians, some are German Jews, and some are whatever name they worked out with custom inspectors when neither party could understand the other’s language.

Most Eastern European Jews got surnames in the early nineteenth century (Napoleonic years) for tax purposes. Earlier (late eighteenth century) Habsburg Emperor Joseph II enabled surnames in Austria. There was some reversion after Napoleon’s defeat, but Poland followed suit in 1821 and Russia, in 1844. The rich paid for their choice of names. The poor had assigned names. (AOL, February 22, 2002 Internet)

In general, names were categorized as

1. Descriptive of head of household: Hoch (tall), Klein (small), Cohen (priest)

2. Descriptive of occupation: Eisen (iron), Schneider (tailor), Holtzkocker (wood chopper)

3. Residence: Berlin, Frankfurter, Deutsch

4. Purchased names: Gluck (luck), Diamond, Koenig (king)

5. Assigned (undesirable to encourage purchase): Plotz (die), Klutz (clumsy), Billig (cheap)

Celebrity Jews and others often change