Beth El’s legacy

LITTLE ROCK — I almost feel like an intruder as I enter Temple Beth El in Helena-West Helena. It’s quiet here.

Inside, the building is dark. Katie Harrington, director of the Delta Cultural Center, unlocks the door. The DCC, an arm of the Department of Arkansas Heritage, now operates Beth El as an assembly center. At some point, part of the building will be used to tell the story of the Jewish experience in Arkansas. It’s a fascinating one.

According to the Encyclopedia of Southern Jewish Communities, a project of the Goldring-Woldenberg Institute of Southern Jewish Life, Jews first settled in Helena in the early 1840s. In 1846, a Torah was borrowed from Congregation B’nai Israel in Cincinnati to use for the high holidays.

An official congregation was organized in 1867 when 65 Jews formed Congregation Beth El (House of God). Eight years later, the congregation purchased land for a Jewish cemetery. Helena’s first Jews worshipped in the homes of members. They later met in a rented storage room on Ohio Street and then in a former church.

The city’s first synagogue was constructed in 1880. The building we’re entering on this day was built in 1916 and still features the original organ, purchased for $4,000 by the congregation’s Ladies Benevolent Association. That association earlier had raised money to add indoor toilets to the original synagogue in 1904. It paid for a new roof the following year.

“In addition to serving Jews in Helena, Beth El was a regional congregation that attracted Jews from such smaller towns as Marianna, Marvell, Trenton and West Helena,” according to the encyclopedia. “In 1904, Jews in Marianna asked whether Beth El’s rabbi could lead services there once a month; the temple board agreed as long as they became duespaying members of Beth El, which they did.

“This regional nature of the congregation is apparent in the window memorials in the main sanctuary. One was donated by the Jewish citizens of Marianna, one by those in Marvell and another by a member who lived in Marks, Miss.”

When the Delta was booming economically, Jews were common. They had come up the Mississippi River from New Orleans and down the river from St. Louis.

Many of them initially worked as traveling peddlers. A number of these Jewish immigrants went on to become successful merchants and planters. The 1870 census showed that most of the Jews in Helena had been born in Prussia and other parts of what would become Germany. By 1880, Jews dominated the retail trade in Helena. There were 22 Jewishowned businesses in the city in 1909. Men such as Pete Goldsmith, Harry Grauman and Joseph Solomon also became leaders in the state’s cotton industry.

Helena had a Jewish mayor, Aaron Meyers, from 1878-80. Jacob Fink, whose father had come to Helena in1862 and opened a mercantile store, was later mayor. Jacob Trieber, whose family settled in Helena in 1868, became the first Jew ever appointed as a federal judge when President William McKinley nominated him in 1900.

By 1927, the year Trieber died and the year of the great flood along the Mississippi River, there were at least 400 Jews living in Helena. As the Delta declined during the decades that followed, so did the Jewish population.

One Jew who did remain is prominent attorney David Solomon, whose grandfather first settled in Phillips County in the 1860s. David and Miriam Solomon’s three sons left Helena and moved to the East Coast. One became director of the American Jewish Historical Society. Another became the dean of the law school at New Jersey’s Rutgers University-Camden.

In 1967, when Beth El celebrated its 100th anniversary, the congregation had 68 families with 109 members, not including children. Four years ago, with only about 20 members remaining, the synagogue was closed and the temple was donated to the state.

Many of the building’s artifacts were shipped to Bentonville to help out Congregation Etz Chaim, which

is thriving as Wal-Mart employees and vendors move to Northwest Arkansas from across the country.

In a story last December for the Jewish news service JTA, Ben Harris told of a Friday night gathering at the home of Miriam and David Solomon.

“Six elderly Jews-nearly all in their 90s-took their seats in the Solomons’ living room as David, a Harvard-trained lawyer and dapper Southern gentleman, led a short, mostly English service. When it was over, cocktails were mixed-‘a libation,’ he called it-and the group passed around a tray of cheese straws, a local specialty.”

Since Beth El was donated to the state, the remaining Jews have gathered for services in private homes just as those first Jewish settlers had done in the 1800s. Jewish life has come full circle in East Arkansas. Harris notes that there’s a quote from Isaiah near the entrance of Beth El: “Thy gates shall be open continually.” With the temple in the hands of the Delta Cultural Center, visitors will have a place to learn for generations to come about the Jewish experience in Arkansas.

As Miriam Solomon told Harris, “Why wouldn’t I be proud? As long as that temple stands, there will be a Jewish presence in Helena.” -

Free-lance columnist Rex Nelson is the senior vice president for government relations and public outreach at The Communications Group in Little Rock.