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What does it mean to make a new home?
For Jewish women immigrating to the U.S. in the 1880s, making a new home meant more than hanging up clothes, dusting off dishes, and buying new
furniture. Making a new home meant struggling to hold on to a religious and cultural heritage while starting over in a strange place.
Jews began arriving in the Upper Midwest from German-speaking countries in the 1850s and from Eastern Europe in the 1880s. Many women carried bundles of cherished objects as well as the traditions of their heritage.
This site explores Jewish women’s experiences in unpacking, rearranging, and remodeling their heritage in the Upper Midwest. It also relates how their female descendants redefined that legacy in order to create a more egalitarian community.
Learn about Jewish women and the things that they carried, preserved, and changed in the new place they came to call home.
top photo: Hannah Marcus, her two daughters, and their children. All three women homesteaded in North Dakota, about 1910. Courtesy of the Jewish Historical Society of the Upper Midwest.
inset photo: Ann Goldstein and her children Al and Esther, Solen, North Dakota, late 1930s. Courtesy of the Jewish Historical Society of the Upper Midwest.
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