Blog

At this writing in early 2021, B’nai Jehudah’s current and incoming President are both women, but it wasn’t always this way. Reflecting the times, B’nai Jehudah’s founders and early leaders were men. The suffrage movement wasn’t successful in Missouri until 1919, and the 19th Amendment to the Constitution wasn’t passed until the following year. For […]

Following a thorough search process, Harry H. Mayer was elected B’nai Jehudah’s Rabbi in March 1899. His tenure lasted 29 years, the longest of any rabbi at that point in the Congregation’s history. Mayer was the son of a rabbi who served a Reform congregation in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania for over three decades. Harry entered Hebrew […]

B’nai Jehudah is currently engaged in its first search for a Senior Rabbi in 18 years, since Rabbi Arthur Nemitoff came home from Columbus, Ohio. While Rabbi Nemitoff gave the Congregation plenty of advance notice of his retirement plans, the current search is proving more unique than anyone could have imagined. The limits imposed by […]

We lost our second rabbi in succession to Philadelphia with the departure of Rabbi Henry Berkowitz in fall 1892. The Congregation quickly began a search for a replacement and 28-year old Rabbi Samuel Schulman gave a “trial sermon” at B’nai Jehudah November 11, 1892. At the end of the service, “the congregation came forward almost in a body, both […]

In last week’s blog, we met Rabbi Joseph Krauskopf, who left B’nai Jehudah for Philadelphia. As it happened, Rabbi Krauskopf’s roommate and close friend at Hebrew Union College was Henry Berkowitz of Pittsburgh, PA. Soon after their ordination in 1883, the two new Rabbis became brothers-in-law as well. Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, the College’s founder, […]

Hebrew Union College, the oldest Jewish seminary in the United States, was founded in Cincinnati in 1875, and graduated its first rabbinical class in 1883. Prussian-born Joseph Krauskopf was one of the four members of that class and became B’nai Jehudah’s Rabbi upon ordination. Rabbi Krauskopf was well accepted by the Congregation beginning with his […]

With ambitions for a larger, grander building in mind, B’nai Jehudah sold its first temple at 6th and Wyandotte in the spring of 1883 for $15,500, more than twice the cost eight years earlier. The Congregation rented back from the buyer for $66.67 per month during construction of its new Oak Street temple. Ground for […]

Kansas City had about 32,000 residents at the time of the Congregation’s founding in 1870. It grew to 52,000 by 1880 and mushroomed to 132,000 by 1890. Among the new residents in the early 1880s were Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe.  The beginning of the great migration from Russia came in the winter of 1881-82 when a few refugees reached Kansas City […]

B’nai Jehudah’s story is one of peaks and valleys. One of our early challenges was keeping a rabbi steadily employed. This likely reflected limited budget, the frontier personality of the fledgling city and the stringency of the Congregation’s leadership. B’nai Jehudah dedicated its first permanent building with fanfare in September 1875. In March 1876, the […]

Those first few years of the 1870s were our congregation’s infancy. Our founding families had a cemetery, employed their first Rabbis and the Congregation became an original member of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (now the URJ) in 1873. Weekly services were held in rented spaces with sermons delivered in English or German. Membership […]