NARRATOR: The following program is a production of Ozarks Public Television.

Most people think of American Jews as those being on the East Coast and the West Coast in large urban areas, and the story of the Midwestern Jew is ignored, not just in the general population, but also in the Jewish population.

And so the story of how the Jews of the Ozarks created their community is so important for us to understand the development of the Ozarks and the American Jewish experience.

The first Jews to come to North America came in 1654 from Brazil, where the Inquisition had followed them.

VADIM PUTZU: A group of 23 people coming from the now Brazilian , town coastal town of Recife.

And they moved out of there because what used to be a Dutch colony had become a Portuguese colony.

And so they joined sort of this wave of, you know, transatlantic exploration.

MARA COHEN IOANNIDES: And they came to New Amsterdam, what we now call New York, which was governed by Governor Stuyvesant.

He did not want them and wrote to the Dutch West India Company, they had petitioned for the right to open a synagogue, the right to have a cemetery, the right to do commerce with the Indigenous peoples, and also the right to defend the town.

What governor Stuyvensant didn't understand was the major shareholders of the Dutch West India Company were Jews.

And so they had him removed as governor, and the Jews became Burghers of the town.

They gained what was citizenship at that time.

This is an interesting moment in North American Jewish history where religion doesn't matter, where everyone is equal, and everyone is a citizen.

Those people mainly established themselves on the coastal areas, right?

We think about New York.

We think about Baltimore.

We think about Philadelphia, one of the earliest Jewish communities established in the late 17th century which still has one of the oldest Jewish cemeteries there.

MARA COHEN IOANNIDES: Most of the Jews in the colonial period were what we call Sephardic.

These were major trade owners, and they wanted to expand into this new world.

VADIM PUTZU: Sephardi Jews were the descendants of Jews who had spent several hundred of years in the Iberian Peninsula.

And by the end of the 15th century, in the beginning of the 16th century, they had been expelled from Spain and Portugal as part of christianizing those nations.

They were typically what we would call today middle class or even upper middle class traders, merchants, with very good international relations and international contacts.

Jews in North America, during the time of the American Revolution also participated in the war.

There were pro-British Jews, and there were pro-revolutionary Jews.

There were men like Haim Solomon, who actually funded the military.

He spent his entire fortune and was promised numerous times by the American government that he would be paid back, and he never was.

He died in poverty, and he never regretted it because he really saw the cause as the most important thing.

The Jews of Newport, Rhode island, were so excited with the election of George Washington as president that they sent him a congratulatory letter, and his response is another one of those sacred moments in American history where he ensures that regardless of anyone's religion, everyone will be an American citizen equally.

And that is held onto by American Jews as this assurance for all generations that here we are.

George Washington has said we are all brothers, and we will all be equal.

VADIM PUTZU: The idea that you could escape economic distress and arrive into this country that promises religious freedom but also promises economic opportunity, it was an interesting opportunity because Jews had been essentially forbidden from owning land, not just in Europe but in most of the Middle East as well.

MARA COHEN IOANNIDES: The west is starting to open.

And so now there's this open, unused land that needs to be filled.

JOHN SCHMALZBAUER: Of course, there's the First Peoples that were in the area, the Osage and later the Cherokee.

And you also have smatterings of French and Spanish Catholics in Missouri, especially in the Eastern Ozarks.

Ezekiel Block was the first Jew to arrive in Missouri.

He moved to New Madrid in 1796.

He came with his slaves.

He was a merchant, among other things, and he was the first of the many Blocks of the Block family to live along the Mississippi River.

It was not uncommon for Jews to own slaves, not any more or less common than it was for Christians to own slaves.

It was an accepted practice in America at that time.

Most of the settlement of the Ozarks by white US citizens, by Anglo-Americans, took place in the 19th century and beginning in this part of the Ozarks in Southwest Missouri in the 1820s and 1830s.

And throughout the period before the Civil War, throughout most of the Ozarks, your typical settler was going to be a white family from somewhere in what we call the upper south, the upland south, somewhere in Tennessee or Kentucky or Virginia, North Carolina.

In the early 1800s, many of the Jews immigrating to the area had German or English backgrounds.

Most of these immigrants were involved in trade because that's what they had done in the old country, and they brought those skills and connections with them.

VADIM PUTZU: Some of the earliest businesses that Jews went into as they came to the United states were the wine and liquor trade, in part because they were doing that already in Europe.

The first Jew to move to Saint Louis in 1804 was Joseph Philipson.

He opened the first distillery west of the Mississippi River.

He brought a little joy to the country.

One of his brothers, Jacob, married into the Block family.

So we can see how all of these families became so interconnected.

The first Jewish congregation in the state of Missouri was formed in St. Louis in 1836.

Its first place of worship was over a store on Front Street.

The establishment of the United Hebrew congregation in 1841 was the first organized synagogue west of the Mississippi.

And they were the 20th.

congregation formed in the United States.

VADIM PUTZU: The second much larger wave of Jewish immigration to the United States occurred beginning in the 1830s and really intensifying in the 1840s and the 1850s, mostly from Central Europe.

They came alongside their fellow Christian Germans, Lutherans, because of economic crisis that was plaguing Central Europe.

You have this spate of German language travel literature that starts coming out in the late 1820s and into the 1830s, some of it written by folks who had visited Missouri.

And so Missouri becomes one of the real magnets in the new world for German immigrants.

They're both Protestant and Catholic.

There are a few Jewish immigrants who will eventually end up in the Ozarks as well.

Those early settlers were reform Jews.

Reform Judaism was a sort of an outgrowth of 19th century-- the 19th century German experience, where for the first time, German Jews found themselves interacting with a larger public.

And Reform Judaism was seen as a way to accommodate that and a worship style that was much in the style of their neighbors.

The first wave of Jews were these Sephardic Jews, and they were established in the community.

They had their own synagogues.

They had their own cemeteries.

And with the first trickle of German Jewish immigrants, the German Jewish immigrants incorporated themselves into the Sephardic communities.

The Sephardic Jews and the German Jews had different cultural expectations and different modes of practice.

And so intermarriage between the two communities was very difficult and frowned upon on both sides, which made finding a Jewish partner even more difficult and complex.

The codified Jewish law goes back millennia, and it's an ongoing process, and it's evolving process.

Reform Judaism understood that there were other considerations in terms of the evolution of our people and how we live and where we live.

And it certainly evolved and thrived in America.

And Reform Judaism understands that there is a respect for Jewish law, but it doesn't get the final say.

The Sephardic Jews tended to stay on the east coast because that's where they were established.

And so the German Jews, when they arrived, moved west to more open territory.

VADIM PUTZU: The first Jews arrived in Springfield shortly after the establishment of the state of Missouri, again as part of families who were trying to extend their network of business from bigger cities like St. Louis west.

MARA COHEN IOANNIDES: The first Europeans to move here were, among others, the Polk family.

John Polk Campbell came here in 1829, and in 1836, he donated this area to be the town square.

The town was incorporated in 1838.

So most of the Jews in Springfield in the early period had their businesses here.

JOHN SELLARS: In the beginnings of the city back in the 1830s and '40s, it was a subsistence, what did you need to survive type of thing.

But as time went on and the city began to develop and grow, things that that we wouldn't consider to be a luxury but at that time they did-- better clothes and, you know, more, more elegant clothes than just dungarees and things to work in every day-- came to be popular, and they found that trade and stepped into it and took care of that.

The white building that has the railing at the top, that was owned by Dr. Ludwig Ullmann, who was perhaps the earliest Jew to settle in Springfield.

In 1860, he is recorded in the Sarcoxie, Missouri census.

He was a surgeon for the Union Army.

And of course, there was an army hospital based here, which is probably why he came.

He ran a pharmacy and a medical practice out of that building.

And I love the advertisements he had in the press, where he talked about-- and this is very important for soldiers-- treating illnesses of the eyes and the genitals.

Very, very important.

Ludwig Ullmann's brother in law, Abraham Moss, was also a surgeon for the Union Army.

And after the Civil War, he opened a pharmacy in Neosho, Missouri.

His brother-in-law was his private partner, and his pharmacy was right next door to the city hall.

The second Jew to arrive and settle in Springfield was Victor Sommers, who came in 1868 from Louisville, Kentucky.

And I'm quite sure that Victor had heard that the railroad was going to arrive in Springfield in 1870, and that's why he came.

So he came, and he opened his business.

He founded Victor Sommers and Company, which was an early department store offering clothing and household goods on Boonville Street near the city square.

The immigration that you get after the Civil War is much more diverse religiously than you saw before the Civil War.

You do start to see Jewish immigrants come into small towns in the Ozarks, not necessarily a more racially diverse set.

The Ozarks is still a very white region after the Civil War.

Southwest Missouri doesn't attract a lot of foreign immigrants, but the ones that are attracted are attracted to the Ozarks by railroad companies.

MARA COHEN IOANNIDES: As the trains moved west, they had to have an established town every 20 or 30 miles so they could be restocked.

And this provided an opportunity for these Jewish merchants to open stores in these towns.

The arrival of the railroad is key to our story and key to the development of Springfield.

So in 1850, the population of Springfield was about 500.

In 1856, the population was about 720.

In 1861, the population grew to 2,000.

The railroad arrived in 1870 and 1876.

The population of Springfield was 5,600, and the population of North Springfield was over 1,000.

So you see that huge jump when the railroad comes, and it's the railroad that brings the Jewish population.

Many of the German Jewish immigrants who arrived after the Civil War do not have those ingrained prejudices against the African-American community.

People could come into the store in the front entrance.

They could try on the clothes.

They could haggle about their prices.

So there were Jewish German merchants who built their stores in places that were accessible to this minority community.

One of those stores was here in Springfield, the Marx Store, owned by Jake and Gus Marx.

In the building that is now the History Museum on the square was originally where the Cohn brothers had their business.

Four brothers arrived in 1870-- Julius, Gus, Emil, and Theo.

In 1878, the brothers were bought out by their sister, Frances Cohn Marx.

She married the man Jake Marx.

And then his brother comes, and the two brothers run a business for a while.

And then they have a fight.

Nobody's quite sure what it's about.

Nobody remembers anymore.

And so while one Marx brother had one store, the other Marx brother had the other one, which was a haberdashery.

This building, 1313 and 1315, is the Marx Hulbert building, is a national historic monument.

It was built in 1900.

In this building, Gus Marx, who bought out his brother Jake Marx, moved the clothing store in 1915.

The Marxes arrived in 1878 and were here on the square area for a hundred years.

About 1880, that building was renamed the Nathan Clothing Company.

In 1913, that whole side of the square was burned down, and it was rebuilt.

In 1932, Maurice and Louis Barth bought out the Nathan Company, and that's why it was all known to many of us as the Barth building.

Their family was from Mexico, Missouri.

1982, Barth's Clothes and a number of businesses went into the History Museum building.

And in 2011, the museum on the square bought it out and developed it into their own building.

We moved in there and opened in 2019.

It took several years to restore it and get it to where we wanted it.

There's nothing original to the interior of the building at all.

All of that stuff had to be removed.

It took quite some time.

It took several years for us to get up and open there.

If we go straight up Boonville to just past where the parking lot is, that up there was a block of businesses.

Up on that corner in 1879, Daniel or David, it depended upon his mood at the moment, Herman opened his tailoring business.

Unlike a lot of the other families, the Herman brothers were American-born.

Herman Brothers was known all over the country.

They had branches in other cities.

There was one in Texas, I believe, and people from Chicago would send their orders in and have their clothing shipped because he was so careful about his business.

His business was left to his son, Edgar, and Edgar kept it open until he retired.

JOHN SELLARS: They had ready to wear stuff in their store, but most of their things were custom made.

And it was a very imposing building on St Louis Street.

And they worked out of that for many years there.

MARA COHEN IOANNIDES: Levy's and the Wolfs have a long history in Missouri as long histories in Missouri go.

In 1888, Moses Levy opened the Model Dry Goods Company here, but he already was running a business.

His brothers were running a business in Marshall Township in 1866.

And Moses came to be with his brothers, and they kind of sent him to all kinds of places around Marshall to run various businesses.

Levy and Wolf, that was a huge store on the square, mainly women's clothing.

It was an iconic store in the downtown area for many, many years, a three story building, quite imposing with a big Levy Wolf sign on the roof.

MARA COHEN IOANNIDES: He invited his nephew, Solomon Wolf, in 1914 to join him.

These brothers Levy and brothers Wolf married sisters.

In 1914, when he took his nephew, Solomon Wolf, into the business, that's when it became the Levy Wolf Store.

The last owner of the store was Colleen LaBolt.

She was the daughter-in-law of Della Levy Labolt, who was the stepdaughter of Moses Levy.

Dr. Ludwig Ullmann, on the square ran his pharmacy and medical business.

But as he became wealthier and wealthier, he started investing in town.

And one of the buildings he invested in was this one he built.

This was originally the nicest hotel in Springfield.

It was originally three stories high.

And over time, each story has been taken down.

But it was written up in Springfield Press as the most exotic, the most elegant hotel one could wish to be in-- the Ullmann Hotel.

The Schwab brothers arrived in Springfield about 1904.

One was Max and one was David.

And before a rabbi arrived in town, David led the reform congregation services.

They ran a men and boys clothing store around here.

JOHN SELLARS: Schwab's men's clothing was on Campbell street, just south of College.

It was across the street from what became Rubenstein's, and the Schwabs were another one that did men's ready to wear and were very successful.

Rubensteins, they came here with a successful business.

They established a tremendous trade there.

On the corner of Campbell and College on the Southwest corner at the site of the old Ullmann hotel.

ROSEMARY RUBENSTEIN: Joseph L. Rubenstein was born in what is known as Kalvarija, Lithuania in 1872.

He grew up there with his brothers and sisters until the age of 13, when there was an uprising by the Cossacks.

His parents smuggled him out across the border under gunfire, and he ended up in, of all places, Dade County, Missouri.

And he opened Rubenstein's in Greenfield.

He called it Rubenstein's, Dade County's greatest store.

My grandfather is Arthur Rubenstein, and his brother Herschel came in the 1920s to start Rubenstein's business here in Springfield and eventually moved to 201 South Campbell, which was the old Ullmann hotel.

And they took the top floor off, and they were in that building from 1947 until it closed in 1983.

Jews in the United States were passionate about their Americanism, and it was rare but not uncommon, for Jews to get involved in American sports.

One of the Ozarks' earliest Major League Baseball players, it was a guy named Barney Pelty, whose nickname was The Yiddish Curver.

And Barney Pelty was born in 1880 in the small town of Farmington, Missouri, which is in the Northeastern corner of the Ozarks, the old lead belt of Missouri.

His father Sam Pelty was a cigar maker.

Sam Pelty had emigrated from Prussia to St. Louis at some point and married a Jewish woman who was also born in Germany.

They landed in Farmington, Missouri.

Most of the Peltys spent the rest of their lives there in this small town of Farmington, Missouri.

He plays baseball at a local college there in Farmington called Carleton College.

He eventually starts playing minor league baseball and gets signed in 1903 by the Saint Louis Browns, one of the worst franchises in Major League history.

But Barney Pelty was actually-- he was a pretty good pitcher.

He was an above average player.

He just, unfortunately, was on a bad team.

He had a really, really good season in 1906 when he set the franchise record with a 159 earned run average, which, I think it still stands today.

The third wave of Jewish immigration to the United States is perhaps the largest one in terms of numbers.

We're talking about at least two million people who left Eastern Europe, places like Poland and Ukraine and Belarus and Russia of today, between the 1880s and roughly 1917.

Beginning in the 1880s with the unrest in the Russian Empire, conditions became unsafe for Jews.

And so there was a rise of hate crimes, called pogroms, and economic problems coupled with this rise of anti-Semitism.

Living in the Russian Empire became untenable.

And so Jews in the millions fled their homes in the Russian Empire for the new world.

This third wave radically altered the composition of Jewish communities in the United States.

Because these Jews were coming from a lower socioeconomic place.

One of the organizations created to help these Eastern European immigrants be moved around the country was the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, which still exists and still works with immigrants.

They would try to match an immigrant with their skill set with a town in the midwest and west that needed someone with that skill.

Israel Lotven is an example of this.

He arrived before World War I, and when he said that he was a shoemaker, they knew of a shoemaker in Springfield, Missouri, looking for someone to work for him.

And they sent him here.

And that was the beginning of the Lotven family in Springfield, Missouri.

He brings his daughter over, and she traveled alone.

And she was a young teenager.

They were separated from their family until the end of the First World War.

They could not communicate with his wife and three sons who had been left behind.

After the war brought his wife and sons here, Chaim Lotven among other things, helped build the first bookstore on campus at Missouri State University.

His brother, Izzy, was a shoe salesman in numerous stores downtown.

And so most of the older crowd, probably at least once or twice, had their shoes fitted by him.

By the 1890s, their numbers were big enough that they could establish a community.

They could buy land in order to have a cemetery and then eventually a synagogue or at least a place of worship.

Jews in Springfield began organizing in 1891 when they advertised in The American Israelite for a rabbi to come and serve the community.

In 1893, Temple Israel was officially organized as a house of worship in Springfield, Missouri.

That made it the 29th Jewish congregation in the state in 1900.

It's an interesting case because unlike other towns, where first, the cemetery was organized, and then the congregation was organized, they did it in the same legal document.

The temple is about 130 years old.

The original building was in midtown near MSU.

At one time, there were both a reform and an Orthodox congregation sharing the building that had different names in it.

One time, it was called the United Hebrew Congregations.

The Orthodox community had a need for kosher food, food that adhered to the food laws that are outlined in Jewish law.

And so right behind us over here in that building was Jacob Lipman's grocery store.

He came in the early 1920s.

He worked as the rabbi and supported himself as a grocer.

And he was also what we call a shochet, a ritual slaughterer, who would adhere to the laws of kashrut.

When he died in 1933, his daughter Sonia took over the business.

JOHN SELLARS: Lipman's had a good grocery store.

At that time there were over 400 independent grocery stores in the city of Springfield.

You didn't have the big supermarkets like you have now.

And so it was a very successful time for those kind of small, independent groceries.

Joplin followed just a little bit later than Springfield.

It's the same thing that drew a lot of other people to the area-- the lead and zinc mining.

Relatively few of the Jews here were directly involved in mining operations.

But as the town of Joplin grew, the need for retail facilities emerged.

Jewish immigrants arrived in this area, certainly by the 1870s.

I know that my paternal grandparents came from Heilbron, which is not too far from Heidelberg, Germany.

And I don't know all the details, but he and his son, his siblings, came over, I guess, at about the same time.

They had family in Louisville, Kentucky, and I'm pretty sure it was sometime in the 1890s that they came over.

Of course, Joplin was a mining boomtown.

They all decided to move this area, and they opened up dry goods stores.

Different siblings, I guess, ended up managing the different stores.

By the turn of the century, they were enough that they could begin to form Jewish organizations.

The earliest may have been the chapter of the B'nai B'rith, the fraternal organization of Jews.

It was, I think, in 1911 that this congregation was incorporated, and it was in 1916 that the congregation finally had its own home when this structure was built.

JIM FLEISCHAKER: A member of the synagogue actually went to Turkey in the early 1900s and got the idea for building a synagogue of based on the architecture.

There's a mosque, a famous mosque, in Istanbul that I think they based it on.

They came back and contacted Austin Allen, who was a architect here who designed a number of the significant buildings here in Joplin.

So they came up with the plans and started construction in 1916 and completed it in 1917.

The building originally had a dome on it and a tower with a minaret on top.

Well, we had a fire in 1970 that burned out the ceiling over the sanctuary and the dome.

Most of the members of the congregation were merchants.

One of the best known was the Newman family, who, of course, had the Newman Department Store in Joplin built, which is now the Joplin City Hall.

The German Jews who ran the big department stores here, some of them resented the smaller businesses started by some of the Yiddish speaking Jews.

People were emigrating en masse to the United States, and people who were here who had already achieved some sort of middle class status were fearful.

Jews were part of them, especially the third wave, and you could see the anti-Semitic attitudes about to begin with.

Following the First World War, there was a rise of Nazi ideologies in the United States.

There became this very uncomfortable, growth of anti-Semitism across the country, and it did not skip the Ozarks.

JOHN SCHMALZBAUER: Fantastic Caverns was owned by the Ku Klux Klan at one time.

The Ku Klux Klan was known not just for anti-black racism, but for nativism, anti-immigrant, kind of bigotry and anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism.

The upsurge in anti-Semitism in the United States in general in other places in the Midwest was in the thirties.

And I think that it can't be separated from what was going on across the ocean, but it had also some American causes also.

Jewish Americans fought in every war in North America.

They registered and fought with their convictions.

World War II was no exception.

Once it became clear that the Nazis had a mission to kill the Jews of Europe, Jewish Americans registered in greater volume.

These were their families that were being threatened overseas, and they were going to protect them.

Let us also not forget that the United States had immigration quotas, including during World War II.

Those quotas for Jewish immigration were not lifted even during World War II to the point that we have famous examples of ships full of Jewish refugees from Nazi and fascist extermination in Europe who were turned around.

So there was both, if you will, a sort of maybe popular anti-Semitism, you can say, and some institutional despite a number of other factors, constitutional and whatnot, that granted, you know, freedom of worship and so on and so forth, which is really, you know, part of the foundation of the United States.

I was born in Nyiregyhaza, Hungary, on April 23, 1944 in the Nyiregyhaza ghetto.

The day after I was born was the day that it was sealed.

And for all intents and purposes, I shouldn't be here.

Everyone in my mother's family was murdered.

My mother and I were the only survivors.

I'm here because my father got us out when I was about a week and a half old.

He was in a forced labor camp.

And when he learned that I had been born, he escaped from the camp.

And he had with him papers with the address of the apartment in Budapest that my mother and he had lived in previously.

The Nazi system was that all Jews were supposed to be in a ghetto closest to their official address.

And by some miracle, when my father got there with the papers, he convinced the authorities to let him take us to Budapest because that's where we belonged.

And that's why my mother and I survived.

My father died in a forced labor camp.

I had three little cousins.

They were all in my grandmother's house in the ghetto when everybody was being transported to Auschwitz.

As soon as they arrived at Auschwitz, my great grandmother, my grandmother, and the three little children were immediately sent to the gas chamber.

And that's-- that was the end of the entire family.

My mother had an aunt who had emigrated to the United States when she was a teenager.

So she lived already in New York during the war.

When the war ended, she immediately started doing research to find out what had happened to her family.

And when she learned that my mother and I had survived, she started to bombard my mother with letters saying, I'm doing everything to get you and Erika out.

It took her aunt about two years to finally convince her, and I was 3 and 1/2 when she finally agreed to come to the United States.

And after I started talking about it and telling the story, speaking at schools and things, which was only about eight or nine years ago, it reinforced in me the miracle.

I mean, 1 and 1/2 million Jewish children were murdered, and the fact that I was born in a ghetto makes it almost impossible that I'm here.

And so what it's done now is reinforce the miracle of my survival, which has reinforced my joy in life.

MARA COHEN IOANNIDES: One of the Lotven sons, Chaime Lotven, was drafted near the end of the war and ended up working in the refugee camps because he spoke English and Yiddish.

And so he could speak with the Jewish refugees and help them find family.

He could work with the Red Cross or help them resettle.

And that's how he met his wife.

Every American Jew, of course, did their part, whether war bonds or gardens in their front yards or sponsoring family members.

I mean, at the beginning of the war, you sent your money until there was nobody to send money to.

The end of the war, bring people over.

Find them family members, no matter how distant, to help them settle.

It was very much a cause.

To the right of the History Museum two buildings over is the Rosenbaum's Jewelry Store.

The Rosenbaum's have been there a long time.

Their parents were World War II refugees, Holocaust survivors.

And in fact, the older brother was born in a refugee camp before they were sent to Missouri.

They opened it in 1920, and in 1984, Walter and Lothar Rosenbaum opened that very business.

The Rosenbaums actually came here pretty recently.

They had come here from southeast Missouri to work at a at a store called Biederman's, which was like Heer's, They came here to work at-- Larry did to work at Biederman's and took over that jewelry store.

Arthur Rosen emigrated from Germany in the mid-1930s at the beginning of World War II and eventually made it to Missouri and then to Springfield, where he became an important part of the Springfield community and a well-known business leader and Jewish community spokesman.

He continuously fought anti-Semitism in the area, and he did this by speaking to public groups about Jewish culture and history in order to educate them.

He ran The Busy Bee, which was right here behind me.

Jews were not allowed to take any money out of the country.

So what he did was he spent all his money.

He bought himself the best wardrobe, the best luggage, the finest ship room he could find because he was not going to leave that money behind.

He came to this country.

He went to St. Louis.

He worked at any job he could find.

While he studied English, he met a beautiful woman and married her.

And in 1937, after they were married, they were driving around Missouri on their honeymoon.

And he stopped right here, and he said, you know, this is one of your father's businesses.

And she said, yes.

And he said, this is where I'm managing.

And he began as manager of The Busy Bee in Springfield and didn't even tell her this is where they were moving.

Over time, he was a leader of the Jewish community.

He would lead services.

He became a spokesperson and gave speeches all over about Holocaust, about anti-Semitism, about Jewish culture, all those things that need to be done to discuss our diversity.

He was also well-known because he knew every single one of his customers.

And you would walk in, and he would know your exact size and say, wait right here.

And he would go and pull it off the shelf and bring it to you.

And he was the consummate businessman.

During every war that he was alive, he would write to soldiers and send them care packages and send them news.

He moved his business from here to the one that most people remember out on Glenstone.

And when he retired, he left that business to his son.

They were still a very viable entity way up into the '80s.

There was one on Commercial Street.

There was one on downtown.

There was one on the south side.

The Rosen family built Busy Bee into the place that you had to go to get Levi's.

They had a huge amount of stock in those Busy Bee stores and were very successful.

MARA COHEN IOANNIDES: Since the late 1800s, the Jews of Springfield have been involved in every aspect of Springfield life-- politics, culture, and economics.

I think there's an understanding in Springfield that you really can build bonds because the community is not that huge.

When it comes down to it, people who want to do interfaith kind of work, people who want to work together for different causes, they can find each other, meet each other, work together, and be lifelong friends.

You had very early on an emergency response, which struck me.

There was a Red Cross hospital that was held at South Street Christian church, which was actually the place where Springfield Jews had a public service in 1890s.

So 30 years later, there is a Red Cross hospital there.

Saul Wolf from a well-known family in Springfield in the Jewish community, who was also part of the conversation-- back in 1918, Saul Wolf says, look, we want to have a public health kind of authority with a strong voice.

But they wanted government and public health folks to step in and to save lives and putting that imperative above everything else and at the same time working across faith traditions to help supply this hospital.

JUDITH PEAVEY: Back in the '90s, there was a vandalism at Jewish cemetery with swastikas and all kinds of things, and the Council of Churches organized a whole group and they came out and helped us clean it up.

And I think that we've been involved since then.

They knocked down some of the stones, and they painted swastikas and just anti-Semitic stuff.

We had to put new stones in.

People came with stuff to, you know, get the paint off.

It was just such an amazing thing that those people did.

One of the main purposes of the interfaith alliance is that we are there to support each other, particularly in times when things are pretty rough and terrible things happen.

Ken Chumley of Council of Churches and our rabbi at the time, rabbi Rita Sherwin, decided that maybe we need to start meeting and talking about how we can help each other out when it's needed.

And so it's grown from them.

Temple Israel does and always has maintain a presence in the interfaith community.

It's always been important in the modern Jewish community to maintain those kinds of relationships.

And I know that that's a priority here with Temple Israel that they continue to do that.

The Interfaith Alliance of the Ozarks and Faith Voices started to get together during COVID to keep people up to date on what was happening with COVID but also communicating with people of different faiths-- leaders, actually, of different faiths.

Last year, it was the first annual, and we are now coming into the second annual festival of faiths.

And basically, it is a coming together of people of different faiths.

JIM FLEISCHAKER: Right after the Joplin tornado we had a student rabbi here who set up a distribution center here in the synagogue and distributed items to people that needed them after the tornado.

We had Jewish organizations from out of town that came in and contributed.

We've had a lot of individuals who've been involved in various charitable organizations in the community.

As far as outreach, several members of the congregation participate in a interfaith group with the local Muslim congregation and several of the churches in town.

For me, one of the larger challenges is finding ways to welcome everybody.

We are a community, Temple Israel, that is open and affirming the LGBTQ+ community, and we find a lot of people entering our doors and seeking some kind of a spiritual identity who were rejected by their home, faith communities and sometimes by their families and sometimes met with physical and emotional violence.

Reform Judaism, by and large, is really one of the first organizations to openly ordain LGBTQ rabbis and cantors and include LGBTQ+-oriented synagogues amongst their rosters and accepting of students in their seminaries.

To my knowledge, I'm the first.

gay rabbi of this congregation, at least openly.

We understand what it means to be other.

From Exodus, where it says you shall not oppress the stranger because you were strangers in the land of Egypt, that becomes a hallmark for the Jewish community.

And it's a lesson that we drive home constantly.

That's really who the Reform movement is.

IRENE FRANCIS: The congregation is now 85 to 90 families or members, and it was getting smaller for a number of years.

And now it actually is growing slightly.

The numbers are not huge, but we are getting a lot of interest in people learning about Judaism.

And so we have a strong group of conversion students.

And we have had some recent new members also that are younger.

They have young children.

So it's young families, which is just wonderful because then there's more kids in our school and more members to grow up in the community.

MARA COHEN IOANNIDES: The Springfield Jewish community is an interesting one in a study of small Jewish communities of the south and the midwest.

While other towns lost their Jewish communities and the Jewish community of Springfield changed, it didn't really change in size.

It changed in demographics.

The merchants, their stores eventually folded because their children left town.

But with the rise of the hospital systems and the universities, you brought in this influx of people who worked in both of those fields.

And so the demographic of the community changed, and that prolonged the life of the community.

VADIM PUTZU: For a time, the numbers were enough that two communities could be sustained, for example, in a place like Springfield.

But then eventually, as those numbers dwindled, what happened is that most of those midwestern southern communities had to either merge or to die out.

MARA COHEN IOANNIDES: The Jews really didn't stay in rural Missouri because there was no support system, because a lot of the railroad towns and the river towns just faded out of existence.

And they went to larger communities.

SUE CONINE: Even though the numbers might not be the same as they might have been that Jewish communities are still present.

And I think our presence is very important.

There is a recognition of who we are and where we are and what we stand for.

We are, you know, dedicated members of a larger community and stand for the betterment of that community.

IRENE FRANCIS: Art Fest, which is held in November-- at Art Fest, we'll have artists and craftspeople.

So that's a draw for the community.

And of course, it's right before Hanukkah and Christmas.

So it's always, you know, nice to have artists and craftspeople.

SUE CONINE: When I first moved to Springfield in 2006, I was part of the art fest.

There were so many people that showed up, and they were wearing stars of Davids.

I turned around to Rabbi Reed, and I said, I didn't know there were so many Jewish people.

And there she goes, they're not Jewish.

They just love us.

JUDITH PEAVEY: We have a community garden out there, and we are all in our '70s to '80s doing the work.

We have amazing volunteers.

IRENE FRANCIS: Every year they plant different vegetables, and throughout the summer and fall, they'll harvest all the vegetables, and they take it to the Ozark Food Harvest.

And it goes to the different food pantries in Springfield.

So depending upon the types of vegetables, we probably bring 3,000, 4,000, 5,000 pounds of food every year donated to the food pantries.

Our problem right now is, is that most of the people that are involved in our congregation are getting up there in years.

I'm in my '80s, and people, there's still a few of them that are a little older than me.

And obviously, the real issue is, is whether we're going to have people that will step up and continue to maintain and operate congregation here in the next few years.

I think one of the main reasons-- because young people leave.

They go off to college, and they don't come back because if they want to meet somebody who's Jewish and have a relationship with Jewish people, they're not going to find it here.

So the young people are leaving and not coming back or they have other opportunities in bigger cities.

Right now, quite frankly, the Jewish community is experiencing probably one of its greatest challenges since the Holocaust with the increasing of anti-Semitism and anti-Semitic acts.

We're going through a rough time.

And it remains to be seen.

I'm a glass half full kind of guy.

You know, I like to think that this is an opportunity for us to regroup and strengthen each other.

And when you look at the whole of Jewish history, it's always been what we've done, no matter where we've been.

Springfield is amazing.

I haven't felt in any way threatened or afraid of anything.

I've always known there's a lot of anti-Semitism, especially in Eastern Europe.

The events in the past few months have emboldened people who I guess otherwise would not have been so public about their sentiments against Jews.

And that has been very frightening to see how much of it there is in the United States.

Well, there are sort of big, obvious, non-subtle forms of religious bigotry, intolerance and discrimination, and then there's the more subtle sorts of forms of those kinds of things.

And I think you could see both in a region like the Ozarks.

There are lingering kinds of things, like calendars.

One other midwestern state not far from us started classes on Rosh Hashanah, despite multiple pleas from the Jewish community that that's in the middle of the high holidays.

You can't imagine a school system or a large university starting classes on a major Christian holiday.

And so there are certain kinds of things like that that are taken for granted, part of the Protestant or Christian wallpaper in the room.

When my kids were in school, our rabbi would always give the school when our high holidays are Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah, our kids are in synagogue.

They're not going to school.

And inevitably they would, you know, schedule PTA meetings, homecoming-- I mean, all kinds of stuff.

And we would have to, like, march up to the principal.

And, you know, always, it was always a struggle.

I know the populations that aren't Christian in Springfield are small, but it often-- we're not considered.

I was a high school teacher.

And I had to bear so many prayer meetings and kids praying before playing volleyball, everything to Jesus, you know?

They just don't realize or don't think that maybe there's somebody who doesn't Believe the way they do.

One of the things we're trying to do is make people more aware of that.

SPEAKER 3: There is a sort of facets to American Jewish identity that are much wider than religion.

I remain impressed by the vitality, the vibrancy, of local Jewish life in Springfield.

To quote a former rabbi who was here when I first came to MSU, she said the Jewish community in the Ozarks is like the Maccabees-- a small but mighty community.

IRENE FRANCIS: One of the most important principles that we have is life.

We believe that living a life is important.

And not just our life as a Jewish person, but the life of everybody else is important.

So that if somebody is poor or is hungry, we don't just turn away and say, that's their problem.

We are part of a community, and we participate in that community.

And it's important for us to not turn away from others who may need help.

We have a word called "tzedakah," and people say it translates as righteous and justice.

You do what's right, and you do what needs to be done.

And I don't think people realize that we do step out of just our temple and just our Reform people, that we do care about and do go forward into the whole community as being important to us.