ROCHESTER

ROCHESTER, industrial city in New York State. -Early History Established in 1812 as a mill town at the falls of the Genesee River in western New York, Rochester attracted its first Jewish residents some three decades later. The construction in the early 1820s of the Erie Canal, which crossed the Genesee at Rochester, opened a trade route west from the Hudson River and spurred migration to the area, including a number of Jewish merchants with packs on their backs. These young men, recently arrived from Germany, were located at first in the smaller canal towns of Brockport and Lockport, among others, but the booming settlement at the falls, which secured its first city charter in 1834, prompted several of these men to move there within the next decade. Among four Jews listed in the city's 1844 directory was Meyer Greentree, generally regarded as Rochester's pioneer Jewish resident. Born in Bavaria in 1819, he had gone to Rochester as a peddler from New York in the early 1840s and soon married a local seamstress. They quickly combined their skills with those of three young newcomers, Joseph and Gabriel Wile and Hirsch Britenstool, in establishing Rochester's first ready-to-wear clothing firm. As the number of Jewish residents increased, the need for religious services became more urgent, and twelve young men met in 1848 to organize Rochester's first congregation. The B'rith Kodesh Society eventually leased a former Baptist church, which it later purchased and remodeled as a temple. The number of Jews listed in the Rochester directories increased to 39 by 1850. Marcus Tuska became the first resident rabbi in 1851. Increasing in numbers, the Jews of Rochester organized a Hebrew Benevolent Society which held its first public festival at Palmer's Hall in 1856. A half dozen of their most enterprising merchants had opened ready-to-wear men's clothing stores on the north side of Main Street bridge, a business that was rapidly becoming Rochester's second most important industry. A Hebrew, German and English Institute, also established in 1856, taught the increasing number of Jewish children until   their parents decided, after the end of the Civil War, to rely on the public schools. A Harmony club, formed in 1868, assumed leadership in the social life of the Jewish community, which was now centered in the sixth ward on the city's northeast side. In 1865 the first Jewish alderman, Joseph Beir, was elected. Modernizing tendencies at B'rith Kodesh prompted the withdrawal in the late 1860s of a conservative faction to form a second but short-lived synagogue. The original congregation brought Max Landsberg to Rochester as its rabbi. While Rabbi Landsberg progressively led his congregation, housed after 1876 in a new temple on the east side of town, into fuller conformity during the next decade with the Reform synagogues of Chicago and elsewhere, a group of newly arrived Polish Jews successfully established the more Orthodox Temple Beth Israel in 1879. A split in the old Harmony club produced the Phoenix club in the mid-seventies and the Eureka club a few years later, but while the German Jews who dominated these clubs hesitated to admit the newly arrived Polish and Russian Jews to membership, they quickly formed a committee in 1882 to raise funds for the relief of a new wave of destitute refugees from Eastern Europe. A move for the creation of the Western New York Jewish Orphan Asylum attracted its chief support at Rochester where it opened in 1885 on North St. Paul Street. Some of the sons of the first Jewish settlers joined two years later in establishing the Young Men's Jewish Association to assist newcomers in mastering the English language and adjusting to American ways. -East European Immigration With the passage of years, as Beth Israel erected a new temple on Park Avenue on the city's more salubrious southeast side, where its members were moving, a new influx of Jews from Eastern Europe took their places in the old Jewish quarter and established several new Orthodox temples and institutions in that crowded district. The division between the several groups was aggravated after the turn of the century because of labor-management difficulties within the clothing industry. Many destitute newcomers, unable to find jobs except in the factories and sweatshops of their more fortunate predecessors, resented the proffered assistance of the United Jewish Charities and other German Jewish agencies and proceeded in 1908 to organize the Associated Hebrew Charities to maintain independent institutions of their own. The Jewish Sheltering Home they established gradually displaced the older Jewish Orphan Asylum and later, as the Jewish Children's Home, served the entire community until the growing demand for adoptions dispensed with the need for such shelters. A Jewish Home for the Aged, founded under Orthodox leadership in 1920, quickly expanded, and called the Jewish Home and Infirmary, maintains an enlarged and modern institution on St. Paul Street (1970). The rivalries among these and other Jewish welfare agencies were overcome and forgotten in 1924 with the establishment of the Rochester Council of Social Agencies, at which time the Community Chest assumed the fund-raising responsibility for all local welfare services. -Post-World War II Jews of Rochester achieved a stronger unity in the mid-1940s as the struggle for the establishment of a Jewish homeland developed. All supported the State of Israel in 1948, and thereafter. Most Jewish residents were clustered in the southeastern city wards and in adjoining towns where they built many substantial homes and three new synagogues and schools in the sixties. In 1970, the Jewish population was 21,500 (3% of the total population). -Prominent Jews Numerous Rochester Jews have played active roles in the broader community. In 1892 Max Brickner, a member of one of the city's leading clothing firms, which were nearly all controlled and staffed by Jews, was elected president of the Chamber of Commerce, the first of several Jews in Rochester and elsewhere in America to hold that position. Isaac L. Adler, a leader of the Good Government forces, became acting mayor of Rochester in 1930, and a decade later Samuel B. Dicker held that office for 16 years. Congressman Meyer Jacobstein and Louis Wiley (who left Rochester to become publisher of the New York Times) were Rochester Jews who attained national distinction. Rabbi Philip Bernstein, head of B'rith Kodesh from 1926, was prominent in national and international Jewish causes. He was deeply involved with the post-liberation care of survivors. Rabbi abraham j. karp of Temple Beth-El was an American Jewish historian and bibliophile. Sol Linowitz was a native of Rochester and headed the Xerox Corporation before entering American diplomacy. (Blake McKelvey) The Rochester Jewish community of the new millennium continues to thrive. While stable in population – a demographic study sponsored by the Jewish Community Federation of Greater Rochester in 2000 records 22,850 Jewish residents – the community is characterized by a high degree of participation and affiliation in Jewish life. The Federation, the modern center of Jewish philanthropy and community planning for the area, supports five beneficiary agencies in the Jewish community of Rochester: the Jewish Community Center, Jewish Family Service, the Jewish Home of Rochester, Hillel Community Day School, and Hillel of Rochester Area Colleges. The JCC of the early 21st century is a modern facility in which a high percentage of Jews in the area hold membership, taking advantage of family programs, summer camps, senior activities, cultural arts, and athletic facilities. The old Jewish Home and Infirmary on St. Paul Street was a precursor to the Jewish Home of Rochester, a state-of-the-art nursing home with rehabilitation facilities, day treatment programs for seniors, and a separate complex for independent living. There are a total of 12 synagogues in the Rochester area and a comparatively high number of residents (54%) belong to synagogues. This family-oriented community also has a high (20%) number of residents who are 65 or over. The Rochester Jewish community, which comprises about 3% of the Greater   Rochester area of over 1 million, is relatively affluent and gives generously to Jewish and other charitable causes. The migration from city neighborhoods to Rochester's eastern suburb of Brighton that took place in the 1960s–1970s led to the significant presence of Jewish institutions and synagogues in that area. As of the year 2000, 48% of Jews lived in the community of Brighton, down from 55% in the late 1980s; Jews were dispersing to other eastern suburbs as well as communities in western Monroe county and areas of the city of Rochester. The Rochester Federation, in addition to funding local Jewish agencies and social and humanitarian programs in Israel and around the world, houses the Center for Holocaust Awareness and Information (CHAI), which supports Holocaust education in the public schools. CHAI also sponsors educational workshops and events commemorating the Holocaust in the community. The Federation has a Jewish Education Services department that provides programming for families, teens, and Jewish adults; area synagogues also sponsor many programs in Jewish education. The Rochester Jewish community is heavily involved in Israel affairs and interfaith initiatives. Professions among Jewish residents of Rochester are manifold. In addition to contributing to the high tech industries that have a foothold in Rochester (such as Xerox, Kodak, and Bausch & Lomb), Jews are counted among the faculty of several area colleges and universities. Jews in Rochester are well represented in the professions of medicine, law and finance, in addition to real estate. A professorship at the University of Rochester was named after Rabbi Phillip Bernstein; William Scott Green was named the Phillip S. Bernstein Professor of Judaic Studies in 1991. Joel Seligman, a leading authority on securities law, took on the presidency of the University of Rochester in 2005. Dan Carp set Kodak onto the path of becoming a digital photography powerhouse as CEO of the company from 2000 to 2005. (Margot Cohen (2nd ed.) -BIBLIOGRAPHY: S. Rosenberg, The Jewish Community in Rochester: 1843–1925 (1954); A. Wile, The Jews of Rochester (1912); A.J. Karp, Jewish Experience in America (1969), 316–34; B. McKelvey, in: ajhsp, 40 (1950/51), 57–73.