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Meeting the Neighbors
P A G E 7
 “That summer a wealthy Jewish family and their maid moved into the big brick house below us and opened a new grocery store on the corner... On Fridays candles burned when the sun went down and new and mysterious dishes appeared on their table... Sarah... the youngest of the two daughters was a chubby lively girl, her head a tangled mass of brown curls. We became inseparable... when Sarah and I wandered into enemy territory, neighborhoods where the kids called us names; but if they called me a coon, they called her a kike, and when I was with her there was none of the embarrassment I felt when I was with my other friends, even the loyal ones who fought my battles... I liked going to the pool with Sarah, because when we came out her hair looked just like mine, the matron said.”
Era Bell Thompson, American Daughter, 1946. Thompson grew up in Bismarck, North Dakota, in the 1920s.
“I wanted to join the Girl Scouts in the worst way. She wouldn’t even open the door to us to tell us ‘no.’ For weeks we used to stand on her doorway... and then we were finally told, ‘No Jews allowed.’ What does religion have to do with Girl Scouts?”
Freda Salsberg Zacky, oral history, 1985. Zacky grew up in New Ulm, MN. The Girl Scouts’ first constitution, adopted in 1915, prohibited discrimination based on religion. Nonetheless, anti-Semitic practices did persist in some local chapters. Courtesy of the Jewish Historical Society of the Upper Midwest.
top photo: Era Bell Thompson, Bismarck, North Dakota, 1924. Courtesy of Minnesota Historical Society.
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