Sod Jerusalems: Jewish Agricultural Communities in Frontier Kansas, by L. David Harris

Sod Jerusalems: Jewish Agricultural Communities in Frontier Kansas

A THESIS
SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE FACULTY
OF THE UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
MASTER OF LIBERAL STUDIES
By
LLOYD DAVID HARRIS
Norman, Oklahoma
1984

Digitized and composed in HTML for the Kansas Collection by Tod Roberts,
with permission of Gertrude Harris, widow of the author, December 2001.
NOTE: Numbers in brackets refer to footnotes for this text; footnotes
are numbered separately by chapter and published at the end of the work.

DEDICATION
Sod Jerusalems is dedicated to the memory of "Mrs. Weiser," of the Beersheba, Kansas colony, who was the first Russian Jewish emigrant to die on the Kansas frontier.

"...there was one death, that of Mrs. Weiser, but she was sick when she left Cincinnati for the colony, and although advised at the time to stay behind, she would go. She now sleeps on a gentle slope of the prairie set apart by these people as a cemetery."

--H. M. Marks, American Israelite, July 15, 1883.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am grateful to my wife, Trudy, for her support, patience, and the hours she spent working with me on Sod Jerusalems. I am also grateful to my mother, Mrs. Mable Harris, who along with my father, Lloyd Keener Harris, taught me as a boy to love Kansas and to appreciate its minorities.

Sod Jerusalems was a labor of love, but it was made even more enjoyable and meaningful due to the encouragement given me by my thesis committee, Dr. Norman L. Crockett, chairman; Dr. Arrell M. Gibson and Dr. Gary L. Thompson. They were an inspiration, and I shall always be grateful for their help, good humor and friendship, particularly to Dr. Crockett for the hours he spent working with me.