During the great wave of Jewish immigration to the U.S. of the late-19th and early-20th centuries, a few thousand took advantage of the Homestead Act to stake out claims in the Great Plains. Robert Zaretsky writes about this generally forgotten chapter of American Jewish history:
Little in the lives of these . . . East European Jews suggested that, once processed at Ellis Island, they would proceed to find their way to North Dakota as homesteaders. . . . Most were traders or peddlers, wholly dependent on the commerce provided by close-knit communities. . . . In her austere Dakota Diaspora: Memoir of a Jewish Homesteader, Sophie Trupin describes [a] sense of imaginative disconnect. Soon after landing in the U.S. with her family, Sophie began to hear a mysterious word. They were bound for “Nordokata.” It was there that “our traveling would come to an end. We had no idea what it would be like. But whatever it was, we would finally rest.”
Time and again, another Jewish pioneer, Rachel Calof, recalls the challenges that Jewish law imposed on her family’s struggle for survival. During their second and especially harsh winter on the homestead, the family, which had little else than wheat seed for nourishment, never butchered their cow or one of their oxen. The reason was simple: “I don’t believe it ever occurred to anyone to kill or eat an animal that had not been ritually slaughtered according to the precepts of our religion.”
The Belgian-born Jewish philanthropist Maurice de Hirsch supported many of these Jewish pioneers, much as he also funded efforts to establish Jewish agricultural communities in Argentina, Ottoman Palestine, and elsewhere:
In 1882, a first wave of Jewish immigrants settled on a partly forested tract of land several miles north of Bismarck. Called Painted Woods, after the name of the closest village, the colony quadrupled in size from 1882 to 1885, from an initial dozen families to more than 50 Russian and Romanian families in 1885. By then, the colony boasted large herds of cows and oxen and tilled more than 1,400 acres of land. But the experiment proved short-lived after a series of unusually harsh winters, dry summers, and a prairie fire overwhelmed the fledgling farmers. By 1886, the settlers quit Painted Woods for nearby cities in neighboring states, leaving behind a school district called Montefiore, named after the Jewish philanthropist Sir Moses Montefiore.
Read more on Forward: https://forward.com/culture/557696/jewish-history-immigration-homesteaders-north-dakota-greenberg/