By Rabbi Seymour Rossel
Parashat Re’eh
People used to say “nothing Jewish was alien to the heart” of New York financial wizard Jacob Schiff (1847-1920). He was a Reform Jew yet he donated funds to establish the Jewish Theological Seminary, hoping it would become a pathway for a “reasonable Orthodoxy” for American Jews. Instead, as we know, it became the keystone of a new movement, Conservative Judaism. At the same time, Schiff made generous gifts to both Yeshiva University of New York and Hebrew Union College of Cincinnati.
Schiff donated $50,000 (about $1 million in today’s dollars) in 1913 to the Jewish Publication Society to support the first American translation of the Holy Scriptures — a gift so significant it was reported in The New York Times. He helped underwrite the first English-language Jewish Encyclopedia (published from 1901–1906 and still available online), helped establish the Jewish Division of the New York Public Library and helped subsidize the Jewish collection of the Library of Congress. He was a principal benefactor to New York’s Montefiore Hospital and president of its Board of Trustees for 35 years. Nearly every Sabbath afternoon, you would find him walking Montefiore’s halls to personally visit patients.
In 1891, Jacob Schiff became a director of the Baron de Hirsch Fund of America, financed by Maurice and Clara de Hirsch to help recent Jewish immigrants learn trades and farming and resettle on farmlands in New Jersey and the Catskill Mountains of New York. Most of those immigrants had fled Russia in the wake of state-sponsored pogroms in the early 1880s. A new series of even more deadly pogroms was carried out against the Jews of Kishinev, Odessa, Kiev and many small villages in Ukraine and Bessarabia from 1903–1906.
Schiff lobbied three successive presidents to aid Russian Jews in their efforts to immigrate to America. In 1906, he headed a committee dedicated to redirecting Jewish immigrants away from overcrowded East Coast ports. They first favored New Orleans but, just then, the city was suffering a wave of yellow fever. Galveston became their port of choice since one of Germany’s largest passenger ship lines went directly from Bremen to Galveston — this meant that thousands of Jews could easily be rerouted. Choosing Galveston earned Schiff a place in Texas history. More importantly, in Galveston he found the perfect partner, a singular rabbi named Henry Cohen.
Born in London in 1863, Henry Cohen arrived in Galveston in 1888 and served as its rabbi until his death in 1952. He gained national recognition for his prodigious rescue efforts in the wake of the tragic 1900 Galveston hurricane. But the years of his greatest glory began when Schiff and his committee appointed Cohen head of the Jewish Immigrants’ Information Bureau to carry out what became known as the “Galveston Plan” and then the “Galveston Movement.” Schiff pledged $500,000 to the effort “to direct four million Jewish immigrants to the American West.” The goal was glorious. It proved elusive.
In truth, from 1907–1914, Rabbi Henry Cohen was himself almost single-handedly “the Bureau.” He met each ship, shook each hand and planned where each immigrant would settle. The Bureau provided railroad tickets, sending Jews who spoke little or no English to cities large and small and arranging for new immigrants to work with those who had come just before them. All over Texas, Jews set up housekeeping and became part of a large network of self-help, all of it coordinated from the rabbi’s office in Galveston.
Cohen directed immigrants fresh off the boat to places as far away as Fargo, North Dakota, but most he settled in Texas in cities like Tyler, Texarkana, Marshall and Palestine. Not only were these conveniently situated along the train line from Galveston, but the charity rate for travel was only $4 or $5 apiece. For years, the Galveston Movement survived despite reluctant immigration officers in the port, sponsors who argued, an economic depression gripping the country and some local problems — as when the city of Cleburne refused to accept any more Jewish immigrants because the newcomers complained too much, demanded too much, found too many faults with everything and refused to labor in assigned jobs. (Funny how much they sound like Israelites in the wilderness!) It also became clear that the immigrants themselves generally expected a very different America from what they found in Texas. But the effort persevered until the beginning of World War I, when the German cruise lines stopped arriving in Galveston and Jacob Schiff and Rabbi Henry Cohen were forced to close the Bureau doors. In the final analysis, about 10,000 Jews had been relocated one by one through the port of Galveston.
What, you may ask, has this to do with this week’s Torah portion? In Re’eh, we read:
“If … there is a needy person among you, one of your kinfolk in any of your settlements … do not harden your heart and shut your hand against your needy kin. … Give to them readily and have no regrets when you do so, for in return the Eternal your God will bless you in all your efforts and in all your undertakings. For there will never cease to be needy ones in your land, which is why I command you: open your hand to the poor and needy kinsman in your land.” (Deut. 15:7, 10–11)
The Torah observes there will always be needy persons among us. The efforts to help the needy arrivals in Galveston resulted in self-supporting Jewish communities strung out along the railways of Texas and the West. The Movement succeeded by not forcing Jewish newcomers to become farmers or ranchers but by allowing them to be what they already were — a few professionals, many craftsmen, tradesmen and shopkeepers. Immigrants helping one another soon resulted in general stores, which became dry goods businesses, which gave rise to well-known department stores, as it is written, “… in return the Eternal your God will bless you in all your efforts and in all your undertakings.” (Deut. 15:10)
We really should not need a reason for reaching out to help the needy among us — as Schiff and Cohen did — but could there be any reason better than what the Torah demands this week? And could there be any proof better than the Jews in Texas and how we got here?
Rabbi Seymour Rossel is rabbi-in-residence at Congregation Adat Chaverim of Plano. He is the author of “Bible Dreams” and “The Essential Jewish Stories”; a member of the Rabbinic Association of Greater Dallas; and former dean of the School of Education of Hebrew Union College in New York.