There was an Israelitic Society in Unsleben Bavaria

That our first settlers, many of them from the Bavarian town of Unsleben, formed the Israelitic Society so quickly suggests that they had been in a similar group before.

Our oldest document, a Farewell Card known as the Alsbacher Document as it was written to Moses Alsbacher, the leader of the group that arrived in 1849, and his wife Yetta, supports that thinking. Its 233 signatures show there was a large Jewish population. That the message was written by Lazarus Kohn, the community's teacher, shows there was an organization that that could hire and pay a teacher. We also know that in 1856 its Jewish community was able to buy a burial ground.

Was there such a community body in Unsleben, If so, what was its name?

We reached out to CWRU Professor Jay Geller who is an expert on the history of Jews in modern Germany. He soon found a reference to the "Israelitische Gemeinde Unsleben" (Unsleben Israelitic Society or Unsleben Community of Israelites). It was in an 1868 German publication.

We believe that our founders organized following the structure they left behind and gave their new communal body the same name, the Israelitic Society.

Image below from Prof. Jay Geller, CWRU

Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, reshaped Eastern and Central European Jewry in so many ways. Jews began to be seen as citizens, not as members of a separate community. They began to dress like others, to speak the national language, to enroll their children in secular schools. and more. Reform congregations grew, founding a Reform rabbinic seminary.

Later a Conservative movement would appear.

The strong Jewish community organizations, which were both synagogue and community, would change. There was less need for an organized community. The control of the Orthodox rabbinate gave way to diverse congregations and for many to no congregations, to intermarriage and even assimilation. Scholars say Jews now lived in communities of synagogues.

America, with our separation between church and state, no history of a ghetto or a religious requirement for voting, was not a place where the Central European model would flourish. In Cleveland and other cities the Israelitic Society for a while did it all. It was both synagogue and Jewish Community Federation.

Here, as elsewhere, it would soon be replaced by one, then multiple congregations, and later separate mission-focused welfare organizations

. Not until the early 20th century would a central community organization start to form in Cleveland.

The Timeline

 our Jewish settlers numbering about sixty in a city of about 6,000 are ready to organize to support each other as Jews in a new land.

As Thorman and the other Unslebeners were at the group's center, its name and mission followed the example of Unsleben's Jewish communal group: the Israelitic Society,

That new organization was both synagogue and community. It served the Jewish community's religious life with services, education, and burial grounds, and with welfare and more. It was also the Jewish community's interface with the larger community. Today we might consider it as  synagogue and Jewish Federation combined.

Von der Gemeinde zur "Community": Judische Einwanderung in Chicago 1840-1900 (review)
Cornelia Wilhelm
American Jewish History
Johns Hopkins University Press
Volume 90, Number 1, March 2002
pp. 69-72
10.1353/ajh.2003.0019 and

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