1890:
With economic success enabling more and more German Jews to move
"uptown," Baltimore Hebrew becomes the first congregation
to leave East Baltimore. After selling the Lloyd Street Synagogue
to a Lithuanian Catholic parish, it settles into the imposing Madison
Avenue Temple in the fashionable northwest Baltimore neighborhood
of Eutaw Place. All the established German Jewish congregations
relocate uptown by 1903, constructing monumental temples befitting
their members’ elevated status.
1890:
The Hebrew Friendly Inn and Aged Home is founded. It will evolve
into Levindale, the Baltimore Jewish community’s primary facility
for care of the elderly and disabled.
1897:
Gertrude Stein moves to Baltimore, where her parents had grown up
in the German Jewish community, and enrolls in the Johns Hopkins
University Medical School. She lives in Eutaw Place until 1902 when
she departs for Europe and a celebrated literary career. Her debut
novel Three Lives (1909) is set in a "fictionalized Baltimore."
1898:
The Baltimore branch of the Workman’s Circle is founded. The
group provides sickness and death benefits to members, holds lectures,
operates a library and Yiddish school, and serves as a forum and
catalyst for labor activism.
1903:
Thousands of Baltimore Jews gather to protest the Kishinev massacre
in Russia and to raise funds for the victims.
1903:
Henrietta Szold moves to New York City, where she becomes part of
the national Jewish intellectual scene working as an editor, writer,
and translator.
1904:
Isidor Rayner, son of a leading Baltimore German Jewish family,
is the first Jewish U.S. Senator elected from Maryland. He serves
two terms.
1904:
Much of Baltimore’s business district is destroyed by fire;
rebuilding is swift.
1905:
After 15 years as the Church of St. John the Baptist, the
Lloyd Street Synagogue once again becomes home to a Jewish congregation,
Shomrei Mishmeres. Its spiritual leader, Rabbi Avraham Schwartz,
becomes known as the "chief rabbi" of the Orthodox East
European Jewish community. Shomrei Mishmeres occupies the Synagogue
until disbanding in the 1950s.
1905:
Henry Sonneborn and Co. builds the largest men’s clothing
factory in the world at Paca and Pratt Streets.
1906:
The city’s German Jewish charities consolidate as the Federated
Jewish Charities. The following year, Russian Jewish charities consolidate
as the United Hebrew Charities. Both are kept busy serving the many
Jewish poor, aged, orphaned, and infirm.
1907:
Some 40,000 Jews live in Baltimore.
1909:
The Jewish Educational Alliance (JEA) is founded as a merger
of the Daughters of Israel and the Maccabeans. In 1913 it moves
into its longtime home at 1216 East Baltimore Street. Generations
of Baltimore Jews participate in the JEA’s social, cultural,
educational, and athletic activities until the building closes in
1952.
1910:
Baltimore’s Jacob and Louis Blaustein begin selling kerosene
door-to-door; their American Oil Company will become one of the
country’s largest, pioneering no-knock gasoline, the visible
gas pump, and the drive-in filling station.
1912:
After returning from a visit to Palestine, where she was appalled
by poor health conditions, Henrietta Szold founds Hadassah, the
Women’s Zionist Organization. She moves to Palestine in 1920
and becomes a major figure in institution-building.
|