The Geneva Free Press story of September 4, 1928 (courtesy of the Ashtabula County Library, Ric Consiglio) tells us that the Jewish farmer families at the Labor Day 1928 banquet were told of Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver's gift of $1,000 toward a Jewish Center.

Marc Raphael, Abba Hillel Silver’s biographer, tells us that Silver was very generous to those who came to him for financial help, but the sum of $1,000 then was more than a month’s salary, so it not likely to have been a personal gift from the rabbi.

The minutes of the Trustee meetings of The Temple, Silver's congregation, for 1927 - 28 have no mention of the gift nor of a letter of thanks from the Geneva Jewish farmers.

A search of Cleveland's Jewish newspapers from 1927 - 1930 finds no mention of a Jewish center for the farmer families.

Could the gift have been from the Bureau of Jewish Education, which Silver helped found in 1924? Not likely as the BJE had to raise its own funds and supported only local programs. It would not get funds from the annual Federation campaign until 1931.

Then who gave the $1,000 and for what purpose?

The Abba Hillel Silver archives at the Western Reserve Historical Society are s great resource for research. They are nearly 100 lineal feet of papers, organized in nearly 6,000 folders and available on more than 235 reels of microfilm.

The detailed descriptions (Finding Aids) of the WRHS archives are online.

A search for farmers found a folder on the Geneva Jewish Farmers. The Finding Aid entry is shown below.

This first letter, from the Farmers Association in New York City, thanks Rabbi Silver for the gift "from the congregation of which you are the spiritual head." The rabbi may have been solicited because he led Cleveland’s Bureau of Jewish Education.

It is not likely that Silver thought that The Temple would make the gift.  The Temple, in those days, was adjusting to the costs of a new building and its first assistant rabbi. It was even late in paying its dues to the Union of American Hebrew Congregations.

Silver sent his gift of $100 and another donor’s check for $100, to Joseph Golomb, a grape farmer in Geneva.

The gift was completed early in January 1928, nine months before the Labor Day banquet at which it was first reported. The aim was not for a community center. It was simply to hire a Hebrew School teacher for the children of the Jewish farmer families.

The gifts are an admirable expression of "Klal Israel" (Jewish Unity or Jewish Peoplehood). Here are Reform Jews, children of "pioneers" from German-speaking Central Europe, supporting the traditional Jewish education of the children of Eastern European Jewish immigrants.

Yasher Koach!