Digitized 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.
INTRODUCTION
With God's help, my folks all arrived out there in No Man's Land...
-- Elias Brownstein, "A Letter to My Grandchildren" [1]
IT
WAS a good 18 miles from Dodge City to Ford, Kansas, and
then at least another 12, south and a little west, almost to
the Clark County line, to where Elias Brownstein had built
his one- room soddy. Its walls were blocks of the prairie;
the planks of its door had been hewn from a nearby tree.
Stones had been pried from the ground, brought inside and
arranged into a kind of fireplace that could be used for
cooking and heating. Years later, Mr. Brownstein would
remember it as something like a cabin, but in 1885, it was
his home -- home for him, his wife, Fannie, and their nine
children, two of whom were born there.
The house was a brown chunk of a building, its sides held
together by tough, dried matted grass, weeds sticking from
its pores, sitting alone on a dismal prairie that seemed to
stretch and roll forever with only a few trees, no streams,
and creamy, rough rocks punching out of the earth where,
back East, green grass would have grown.
Mrs. Brownstein saw it all. And, as she later told her children
and grandchildren, the first time she saw it she got down on
her hands and knees and kissed the earth and said her
prayers. The Brownsteins were Russian Jews. God had saved
them. God had brought them to Kansas.
[2]
* * * * * * * * * * *
During 1882-86, there were seven attempts to start Jewish
agricultural colonies in Western Kansas as havens for
Russian refugees who had come to the United States to escape
czarist pogroms and persecution. None lasted more than a few
years as a colony. Most had disappeared by 1890, although a
few Jews remained in the communities. By 1900, however,
virtually all Jews were gone and the colonies had
vanished.
It is the intention of this study to establish the locations of
the colonies, to tell something about them and their role in
Kansas history as well as in Jewish history in America. Each
colony had its own particular story, yet they all shared
common reasons for their early demises. They were poorly
financed. They lacked good communications with their
sponsors, being too far from the centers of Jewish
emigrant settlement in New York, Cincinnati and
Philadelphia. They were established during years of
droughts, grasshoppers and incredibly difficult winters.
Most of the emigrants who established them were not farmers
in Russia and were inexperienced at farming. Most were
dissatisfied with farming. They remained on the farms only
as long as was necessary until they could start businesses,
stores and shops as they had done in Russia. Yet to say that
the colonies were failures would be to oversimplify them. It
would be to judge them only by their brief
durations.
The first colony, Beersheba, established in 1882, was in
Hodgeman County, about 25 miles northeast of Cimarron. As a
colony, it lasted two to three years, but Jewish residents
were in the area for as long as seven to eight years after
that. A second colony, Moses Montefiore, was begun in 1884
in Pratt County, but it lasted only a year. The third
colony, established in 1885, was south of Ford, Kansas and
was named after the German statesman, Edward Lasker. Like
Beersheba, it had a sod house synagogue for schooling and
religious services. The Brownsteins were a part of the
Lasker colony, although Mr. Brownstein later acquired
property at Beersheba as well.
The other short-lived colonies, established in 1884-86 were
Hebron, Gilead, Touro and Leeser. Hebron, also known as New
Jerusalem, was in Barber County, and at its peak, 1885-86,
may have had as many as 200 residents including Hungarian,
Austrian and German Jews as well as Russian Jews. Gilead,
begun in 1886, was a Rumanian Jewish community in Comanche
County only a few miles southwest of Hebron. Touro, in
Kearny County, and Leeser, in Finney County, were both
started in 1886 and Touro also included at least one former
Beersheba resident as a landowner.
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