A little bit of small-town Jewish geography

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While recently trying to identify some of America’s smallest Jewish communities, I naturally thought of Westerly, West Warwick and Woonsocket.  But I was willing to look far beyond Little Rhody.

“Documenting Maine Jewry,” at www.mainejews.org, is primarily an online resource that has gathered thousands of priceless documents and photos.  Recently, I tried to help the website identify all of the state’s Jewish high school graduates by consulting with my mother-in-law, 91, who grew up in Portland.  She remembered six of her classmates.

Then I thought about the distinguished American sculptor Louise Nevelson (1899-1988), who was born in Ukraine but grew up in Rockland, Maine.  Thanks to documents found on Ancestry.com, I determined that she and her three siblings had graduated from the local high school.

Seeking a greater Jewish communal challenge, I fondly remembered someone from my youth in Los Angeles.  Though not exactly a relative, Allen William Brussell, known as Bill, had a fascinating Jewish lineage.  He had grown up in Aberdeen – not in Scotland, but in South Dakota!  In 1954, Bill became the second husband of my mother, Madeline’s, first cousin, Mae Magnin.

So I turned again to Ancestry.com to learn more about Aberdeen.  I could see in the 1920 census that Bill’s parents, Benjamin and Jennie Brusselofsky, had immigrated to the United States from Minsk, Belarus; he in 1902, she in 1910.  All four of their kids were born in South Dakota.  The eldest, Abraham (who became Allen), was born in 1913.  Ben was the proprietor of his own clothing store.  The state census of 1915 shows that he had arrived in South Dakota in 1912 and that his religion was “Jewish church.” State land records also show that he had purchased property in the Perkins precinct of Barthold County.

Seeking more information about that speck of a town, I went to the index of the 1910 census and found a person named Ren Bensel living in Perkins.  This was in fact Ben Brussell, and his occupation was listed as farm operator. And there were several other “Russian-Yiddish” families living nearby!  Their surnames included Ackerman, Friedel, Gutterman and Weisburd.

Through further research, I found that in 1908, Benjamin Strool, a Latvian-Jewish immigrant, had founded the town of Strool in Barthold County.  It attracted a few Jewish settlers, but a drought and a heat wave soon led to its disappearance.  So, by comparison, a town like Aberdeen must have looked rather promising.

Searching for additional information on the Web, I found that in 1917, Ben Brussell was one of the seven founders of Aberdeen’s Congregation B’nai Isaac. Three years later, rather than build its own synagogue, the congregation purchased the chapel of the First Wesleyan Methodist Church, which was constructed in 1886.

B’nai Isaac somehow still exists, so its synagogue is the oldest in continuous use in South Dakota.  But there are only two others, in Rapid City and Sioux Falls.

I learned elsewhere that there might be only 400 Jews living in the Mount Rushmore State.  Representing one-tenth of 1% of its population, South Dakota has the smallest percentage of Jews of any state.

I remembered that Bill, as a young man, had been a tennis star.  Indeed, he played on the varsity team at the University of Minnesota and belonged to a Jewish fraternity.

When Ben died of appendicitis in 1936, Bill was left with the haberdashery business at 109 South Main Street, and responsibility for his mother and younger siblings.

Where was Ben buried?  Evidently, there’s no Jewish cemetery in Aberdeen.  Perhaps a few dozen Jews are buried in the town’s Riverside Cemetery, but Ben is not among them.

So I again searched far and wide online, and found his grave in the Temple of Aaron Cemetery, in Roseville, Minnesota.  But why there?  My research revealed that Ben’s older brother, Jacob, and his family lived in St. Paul.

My wife, Betsey, and I lived in St. Paul from 1985 to 1987, and we were of course familiar with the Temple of Aaron, the large Conservative congregation whose synagogue was designed by Percival Goodman in 1956.  Had we known of Ben’s burial in Roseville, we would have paid our respects.

By 1942, Bill’s oldest sibling, Rose, had graduated from dental school at Minnesota, moved to Los Angeles and married a Jewish haberdasher.  Within six years, Bill and two other siblings, along with their mother, moved to Los Angeles.

Bill may have met my mother’s cousin, Mae, then divorced and with two sons, because they lived in the same Westside neighborhood.  Another possibility is that Bill may have attended services at Wilshire Boulevard Temple, the city’s oldest and largest Reform congregation, where Mae’s father, Edgar F. Magnin, was the senior rabbi.

As I recall, Bill never came across as a yokel.  Rather, he was a friendly, down-to-earth guy who developed his own small chain of haberdasheries.  One was in Westwood, another was downtown and the third was in Beverly Hills.

I became an employee of the Beverly Hills store during the summer of 1971, while a graduate student in art history.  I had never worked in a retail business, so I guess that Bill felt that family connections required him to give me a temporary job.

Needless to say, I was not a great salesman, but I do have a vivid recollection from that job.  One day, close to the Fourth of July, the comedian Jonathan Winters came in and asked if I had a blue polyester suit.  I did, and he tried it on.  Then he asked if there were other colors.  I said yes, and he ended up buying suits in blue, red and white. That was probably the day’s biggest sale!

Mae and Bill had three daughters, Barbara, Bonnie and Diane, but I didn’t get to know them as well as other Goodwin and Magnin cousins because Mae decided to relocate her family to Carmel, California.

Unfortunately, I also didn’t see much of Bill in later years, after he closed his haberdasheries, and, after his divorce, began spending a great deal of time in Florida.  But I know that Bill is not buried in South Dakota or Minnesota.  Rather, his remains rest in Hillside, the same Westside Los Angeles cemetery where my parents and paternal grandparents are found.

GEORGE M. GOODWIN, of Providence, is the editor of Rhode Island Jewish Historical Notes.