Congregation Adath Israel

Congregation Adath Israel grew from Middletown’s immigrant Jewish community, including primarily Polish and Russian Jews who arrived between 1895 and 1920 seeking religious freedom and economic opportunity. Before 1900, few Jews lived in Connecticut, where Congregationalism had dominated since the Colonial era and Jews were not explicitly granted the right to organize into religious societies until 1843. By the mid-1800s, Jewish immigrants from Germany and Austria-Hungary began arriving in Middletown in small numbers, followed by a large influx from Eastern Europe at the end of the century. Some of the first Eastern European Jews settled in Portland, drawn by work at the Eastern Tinware Company, whose recruiters met arrivals at Ellis Island, and their first shul was housed in a commercial building there. Middletown’s thriving economy soon drew most of Portland’s Jews across the river, and by 1905 a community of 80 families had developed in the South End, where Jewish-owned grocery shops, bakeries, and dry goods stores lined Sumner, Union, and South streets. These families worshiped in private homes and rented rooms until the Connecticut General Assembly approved the incorporation of Congregation Adath Israel in 1905. In 1908, the congregation bought its first permanent home, a former two-family house on Union Street, close enough to members’ homes and businesses for them to walk to Sabbath services according to Orthodox Jewish law. Rose Schwartzbuch, who had been in the United States seven years, married Harry L. Shapiro there in 1911 in one of the congregation’s first weddings. The dedication in 1929 of the synagogue at the northwest corner of South Green firmly established Judaism as a partner in the city’s diverse religious community, and in 1942 Adath Israel joined the Conservative movement.

Middletown, Connecticut · United States