Happyville, South Carolina was a short-lived rural Jewish agricultural settlement of 2,300 acres located in Aiken County, South Carolina, between the communities of Aiken and Montmorenci. The colony was founded by Yiddish-speaking Russian-Jewish socialists who wanted an escape from the sweatshops of New York City.
Between 1890 and the 1920s, many Jewish immigrants settled in or near Aiken. The immigrants were Eastern European Ashkenazi Jews, mostly from Russia and Poland. In 1905, a group of Russian-Jewish socialists from New York founded a farming colony in Aiken County that they called "Happyville". The residents of the colony grew watermelon, cotton, corn, and grapes. Community members would fish for catfish, pike, sunfish, smelt, and hold fish fries. Lumber was also cut and sold. [1] [2] [3] During the early 20th century, the state of South Carolina created the Department of Agriculture, Commerce, and Immigration at the urging of a wealthy banker in Columbia, with the intention of attracting "desirable" European immigrants, particularly Russians. The department's campaign, printed in both German and Yiddish, was called "South Carolina, The Garden of America", and attracted the attention of the Jewish-American socialist Charles Weintraub and his business associate Morris Latterman. Together Weintraub and Latterman purchased the Sheffield Phelps Plantation, a former slave plantation. The project was blighted by bad weather, insufficient funds, and land unsuitable for growing crops. By July 1908, the population dispersed and the land was sold back to Weintraub. Weintraub owned the land in partnership with three brothers from the Surasky family until 1918 when the Suraskys bought Weintraub's share of the land and sold the property. [4] [5]
Aiken is the most populous city in, and the county seat of, Aiken County, South Carolina, United States. According to 2020 census, the population was 32,025, making it the 15th-most populous city in South Carolina and one of the two largest cities of the Central Savannah River Area.
The Forward, formerly known as The Jewish Daily Forward, is an American news media organization for a Jewish American audience. Founded in 1897 as a Yiddish-language daily socialist newspaper, The New York Times reported that Seth Lipsky "started an English-language offshoot of the Yiddish-language newspaper" as a weekly newspaper in 1990.
Abraham "Abe" Cahan was a Lithuanian-born Jewish American socialist newspaper editor, novelist, and politician. Cahan was one of the founders of The Forward, an American Yiddish publication, and was its editor-in-chief for 43 years. During his stewardship of the Forward, it became a prominent voice in the Jewish community and in the Socialist Party of America, voicing a relatively moderate stance within the realm of American socialist politics.
Francis Salvador was an English-born American plantation owner in the colony of South Carolina from the Sephardic Jewish community of London; in 1774 he was the first professing Jew to be elected to public office in the colonies when chosen for the Provincial Congress. He had joined the independence cause and in 1776 was the first Jew killed in the American Revolutionary War, fighting with the militia on the South Carolina frontier against Loyalists and their Cherokee allies.
The history of the Jews in Colonial America begins upon their arrival as early as the 1650s. The first Jews that came to the New World were Sephardi Jews who arrived in New Amsterdam. Later major settlements of Jews would occur in New York, New England, and Pennsylvania.
William Aiken Jr. was the 61st governor of South Carolina, serving from 1844 to 1846. He also served in the state legislature and the United States House of Representatives, running unsuccessfully for speaker of the House in 1856 in "the longest and most contentious Speaker election in House history."
Jewish gauchos were Jewish immigrants who settled in fertile regions of Argentina in agricultural colonies established by the Jewish Colonization Association. The association was established by Baron Maurice de Hirsch, a Jewish-French industrialist who amassed a fortune building railroads in Russia. After the death of his son, Hirsch resolved to help Russia's Jews and bought more than 80,000 hectares of land in Argentina. Among these colonies are Colonia Lapin and Rivera in the Province of Buenos Aires and Basavilbaso in Entre Ríos. Most of these immigrants were from Podolia and Bessarabia, in Imperial Russia.
The history of Jews in Charleston, South Carolina, was related to the 1669 charter of the Carolina Colony, drawn up by the 1st Earl of Shaftesbury and his secretary John Locke, which granted liberty of conscience to all settlers, and expressly noted "Jews, heathens, and dissenters". Sephardi Jews from London were among the early settlers in the city and colony, and comprised most of its Jewish community into the early 1800s.
Jonas Phillips (1736—1803) was a veteran of the American Revolutionary War and an American merchant in New York City and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He was the immigrant ancestor of the Jewish Phillips family in the United States. Emigrating from Germany in 1759, Phillips worked off his passage as an indentured servant in Charleston, South Carolina. He moved to the North in 1759, becoming a merchant in New York City and then moving to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
The Jewish Colonisation Association, in America spelled Jewish Colonization Association, is an organisation created on September 11, 1891, by Baron Maurice de Hirsch. Its aim was to facilitate the mass emigration of Jews from Russia and other Eastern European countries, by settling them in agricultural colonies on lands purchased by the committee in North America, South America and Ottoman Palestine. Today ICA is still active in Israel in supporting specific development projects under the name Jewish Charitable Association (ICA).
The First Aliyah, also known as the agriculture Aliyah, was a major wave of Jewish immigration (aliyah) to Ottoman Syria between 1881 and 1903. Jews who migrated in this wave came mostly from Eastern Europe and from Yemen, stimulated by pogroms and violence against the Jews. An estimated 25,000 Jews immigrated. Many of the European Jewish immigrants during the late 19th-early 20th century period gave up after a few months and went back to their country of origin, often suffering from hunger and disease.
The Jewish Territorial Organisation, known as the ITO, was a Jewish political movement which first arose in 1903 in response to the British Uganda Scheme, but only institutionalized in 1905. Its main goal was to find an alternative territory to that of Palestine, which was preferred by the Zionist movement, for the creation of a Jewish homeland. The organization embraced what became known as Jewish Territorialism also known as Jewish Statism. The ITO was dissolved in 1925.
Zgurița is a village in Drochia District, in the north of Moldova. At the 2004 census, it had a population of 2,840.
The Gov. William Aiken House was built in 1820 at 48 Elizabeth Street, in the Wraggborough neighborhood of Charleston, South Carolina. Despite being known for its association with Gov. William Aiken, the house was built by John Robinson after he bought several lots in Mazyck-Wraggborough in 1817. His house was originally configured as a Charleston double house with entrance to the house from the south side along Judith Street. The house is considered to be the best preserved complex of antebellum domestic structures in Charleston. It was the home of William Aiken, Jr., a governor of South Carolina, and before that the home of his father, the owner of South Carolina Canal and Railroad Company, William Aiken.
Judaism, the second-largest religion practiced in New York, with over 2.2 million followers in New York State; and with approximately 1.6 million adherents in New York City as of 2022, represents the largest Jewish community of any city in the world, greater than the combined totals of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Nearly half of the city's Jews live in Brooklyn. The ethno-religious population makes up 18.4% of the city and its religious demographic makes up 8%. The first recorded Jewish settler was Jacob Barsimson, who arrived in August 1654 on a passport from the Dutch West India Company. Following the assassination of Alexander II of Russia, for which many blamed "the Jews", the 36 years beginning in 1881 experienced the largest wave of Jewish immigration to the United States. In 2012, the largest Jewish denominations were Orthodox, Haredi, and Conservative Judaism. Reform Jewish communities are prevalent through the area. Congregation Emanu-El of New York in Manhattan is the largest Reform synagogue in the world.
Am Olam was a movement among Russian Jews to establish agricultural colonies in America. The name means "Eternal People" and is taken from the title of an essay by Peretz Smolenskin. It was founded in Odessa in 1881 by Mania Bakl and Moses Herder, who called for the creation of Socialist agricultural communities in the United States.
Jews have inhabited the Southern United States since the late 1600s and have contributed to the vibrant cultural and historical legacy of the South in many ways. Although the United States' Jewish population is more often thought to be concentrated in Northern cities, such as New York, thousands of Jewish immigrants chose to settle in the more rural Southern United States forming tight-knit religious communities and creating a unique cultural identity. Jewish immigrants came to the South from various countries, backgrounds and religious traditions within Judaism. Major Jewish communities include Memphis, Tennessee; Houston, Texas; Savannah, Georgia; Charleston, South Carolina; Charlottesville, Virginia; and Wilmington, North Carolina. Jews participated in many important events in Southern history, such as the Civil War, the World Wars, and the civil rights movement.
Yaazor, also known as the Yiddishe Kolonye was a 351-acre agricultural settlement created by Russian-Jewish immigrants to Maryland, supported by the Hebrew Colonial Society of Maryland. Residents of the commune spoke Yiddish and Russian. The colony was located in what is now the Pickall Area of the Patapsco Valley State Park, downstream from the Daniels ghost town and upstream from Ellicott City, in the Woodlawn census-designated place of Baltimore County. The settlement was located between Johnnycake Road and the Patapsco River. Rabbi Tobias Goodman founded the community is 1903 as a Utopian refuge for Russian Jews escaping from the antisemitism and pogroms of the Russian Empire. By 1940, the community was mostly abandoned and the last land was sold by 1968. At its peak, 200 people lived at Yaazor. There were houses, farms, and a one-room school. After school, religious classes were held in the schoolhouse and the community's rabbi taught on Sundays. Benjamin Szold Levin of the Jewish Historical Society described Yaazor as "a kind of Fiddler on the Roof shtetl in America."
The Jewish-American working class consists of Jewish Americans who have a working-class socioeconomic status within the American class structure. American Jews were predominantly working-class and often working poor for much of American history, particularly between 1880 and the 1930s. During this period, Ashkenazi Eastern European Jewish immigrants constituted the majority of the Jewish-American working class. By the mid-1950s, the Jewish-American community had become predominantly middle class. Stereotypes commonly depict American Jews as fundamentally upwardly mobile and middle class to upper class. Despite the "imagined norm" that American Jews are "middle-class, white, straight Ashkenazi", many Jewish Americans are working class and around 15% of American Jews live in poverty.
Abraham Surasky was a Jewish-American peddler who was the victim of a 1903 antisemitic murder in rural South Carolina.