Mary Donohue

The Hartford Daily Courant

On June 28, 1882, The Hartford Daily Courant printed a tiny ad entitled “The Russian Refugees” that read in part “The committee of the local Russian Aid society, engaged in the relief of the Russian Jew refugees in this city … ask assistance from the public … Hartford has received a large number … and others are arriving daily.”

Jews had lived in Hartford since the 18th century and had arrived from Germany in the mid-19th century in numbers large enough to form a congregation, Temple Beth Israel. Though divided by culture, language and class from the Orthodox Eastern European newcomers, members of Hartford’s German Jewish community nevertheless worked to assist their coreligionists.

Hartford was represented at a major meeting of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society of the United States in New York in 1882, where plans were put forward to settle as many Jews as possible on farms. Funds from a wealthy German Jew, Baron de Hirsch, who devoted his fortune to helping Russian Jews, created the Jewish Agricultural Society, which gave mortgages to Jews willing to settle on farms in the U.S. The organization initially pinpointed two areas in Connecticut in which to establish independent Jewish-owned-and-run farms, one encompassing the towns of Colchester, Lebanon and Montville, and the other in Vernon, Ellington and Somers.

In each of these areas, the society financed the construction of a synagogue, knowing that such a facility was essential to the creation of a Jewish community. By 1908, the agricultural society provided not only mortgages, but the assistance of a Yiddish-speaking farm agent, a Yiddish farm magazine and scholarships to agricultural colleges. In the early 1900s, more than 1,000 Jewish farm families settled in Connecticut. In 1916, 16 Connecticut communities had Jewish Farmers’ Associations.

Among the many stories, the Bercowetz family left Bellevue Street in Hartford in 1909 to buy an 80-acre farm in Bloomfield for $8,000. The farm provided dairy products and meat and became known for its cattle. Merkin Dairy in Simsbury bottled and delivered its own milk.

Jews are Taking to Agriculture

The Hartford Courant continued to notice the progress made by Jewish farmers. In 1909, in an article entitled “Jews are Taking to Agriculture,” the paper reported that Jewish farmers from Ellington had won a gold medal in the first-ever national agricultural fair for Jewish farmers, held in New York City. With the founding of agricultural society-sponsored credit unions in 1911 in Fairfield and Ellington, The Courant reported that “Jewish Farmers Eliminate Loan Shark.”

All farmers fought the weather, economic depression and the periodic collapse of farm prices, and many Jewish farmers did not make it. But, Jewish farmers had strong allies in the agricultural society, the University of Connecticut Agricultural College and the state Department of Agriculture. These essential organizations all supported farm families’ own ingenuity and business savvy in turning old Yankee farmsteads into flourishing dairy or poultry farms. In many cases, these hard-working and inventive individuals revived declining rural communities and in doing so, transformed the public’s stereotypical images of Jews. A 1928 Courant article was headlined “Jewish Farmers Prosper in Connecticut: Living Down Their Reputation as Mere Middlemen Who Do Not Labor, They Have Shown That They Can Till the Soil and Make it Pay.” In the article, reporter Isabel Foster credited Jewish farmers for creating something out of nothing.

Mary M. Donohue is the senior architectural historian of the Connecticut State Historic Preservation Office and co-author of “A Life of the Land: Connecticut’s Jewish Farmers”  For more information visit: The Jewish Historical Society of Greater Hartford