Durham was incorporated in 1869. Only a few years later, the first Jews arrived: Polish brothers, Abe and Jacob Goldstein, who opened a general store in 1874. 

According to Leonard Rogoff, a historian for the Jewish Heritage Foundation and president of the Southern Jewish Historical Society, the antebellum movement of the South into industrialization drove the first, primarily German-speaking, Jewish immigrants to Durham in search of economic opportunities in the budding city. 

Rogoff said the first large number of Jews came later, in the 1880s, when Buck Duke, the founder of the American Tobacco Company, traveled to New York to recruit cigarette rollers for his factory in Durham. He said cigarette rolling was considered a Jewish trade because it didn’t require much skill, making it easy for new immigrants to become involved.

“Duke brought about 125 cigarette rollers down to Durham and, of course, they did what Jews tended to do; they formed a union and started to radicalize the other workers,” Rogoff said. 

Lynne Grossman, an executive assistant with Jewish Heritage NC, said her great uncle was among the cigarette rollers Duke brought to Durham.

“I grew up in the synagogue,” she said. “My family has been here since 1881.”

During that period, the demographic of Durham Jews began to transition from German-speaking Jews to Eastern European Jews, Rogoff said.

“From the 1880s to the 1920s, between 2 and 2.5 million Eastern and Central European Jews arrived in the United States, and a sprinkle of them came down to Durham,” Rogoff said. 

Rogoff said this wave of immigration was the true birth of the Jewish community in Durham, as Jews established a ghetto on Pine Street where the Duke tobacco factory is located. 

The first Durham congregation was founded in 1887, where community members met in a rented hall on Main Street. They built their first synagogue, now known as Beth El, on Liberty Street in 1905. 

“They were located rather symbolically, at least the Eastern European Jews were, between Black and white Durham, with the African American community down in Hayti and the white community living further up the hill,” he said.

Rogoff said the Jewish community in Durham shared close connections with the Black community due to their relationship within the working class of the city. 

“There’s always been this relationship,” he said. “Jewish merchants purchase produce from Black farmers to sell in their stores; Jews cater to Black trade in their stores and tended to have more liberal policies than other stores in terms of getting credit or trying on clothes. So there always had been this history of cooperation between the two communities,” he said. 

Grossman said her father hired young black men to wait on customers and was one of the first white business owners in Durham to do so as black employees had previously been hired more or less as housekeepers. 

Rogoff added that both the first synagogue and the current conservative synagogue in Durham were financed by loans received by Black-owned credit unions in Durham. 

Many of the German-speaking Jews, because they were more prosperous, tended to live further up the hill in closer proximity to the white neighborhoods, according to Rogoff. 

He said that after World War I, as Jews advanced from merchant and working-class jobs to more professional fields, their ties to the Black community weakened. 

“We certainly left our roots,” Amit Ariely, an inclusion counselor with the Jewish Community Center’s Camp Shelanu, said. “We began to occupy this little corner of the world, and it was far from where we started.”

Rogoff said the suburban sprawl seen after World War II solidified this geographic and cultural disconnect, and with that, the practice of Judaism in Durham evolved. 

“Instead of walking to services because they were observant Jews, now they have a parking lot,” he said. 

In 1948, the original Beth El congregation hired a conservative rabbi and constructed a new modern synagogue on Watts Street, near the East Campus of Duke University in 1957. 

Rogoff said the new synagogue diverged from traditionally Orthodox floorplans, instead opting for mixed-gender seating for services. However, Orthodox services are still held in the basement of the site. 

“There’s a photograph of my brother and I standing with my parents and others at the groundbreaking of Beth El Synagogue,” Grossman said. “I was the second woman to be bat mitzvahed at our new synagogue.”

She said that when the synagogue hired a conservative rabbi and the congregation held more academic and professional occupations, service times and attendance changed to accommodate the new schedules of the synagogue’s members. 

This evolution of Jewish practices alongside economic development within Jewish communities follows a typical pattern among post-industrial cities, according to Rogoff. 

“Durham is a very progressive and radical place, and I think so is our Judaism,” Ariely said. “It creates an opportunity for connectivity and acceptance, which is how Judaism should be, but it definitely looks different than it used to.”

Despite their class breakthroughs, Rogoff said Jews in Durham continued to face antisemitic discrimination, largely from the working-class white community. 

He said Duke University set quotas for the amount of Jewish students they would accept. Certain departments within the Duke University School of Medicine were believed not to admit Jewish applicants and some country clubs didn’t allow Jewish members until the 1930s. 

Even so, Rogoff said Durham has had numerous prominent liberal leaders. Durham’s first Jewish mayor, Emanuel “Mutt” Evans, served six terms between 1951 and 1963, despite newspaper campaigns against his candidacy led by the Ku Klux Klan.

“As an academic community, there was always certainly a liberal and progressive element in Durham that was receptive to Jews,” Rogoff said.

Ariely said he wasn’t aware of Durham’s Jewish history because of how self-contained the community is. He said his perception of Jews in Durham stems entirely from the reform synagogue, the Jewish day school, the conservative synagogue and the JCC. 

“Jews are an inherently enclosed group, but we didn’t get to where we are like that,” Ariely said. “We do a lot of work at the JCC with refugee groups and economically disadvantaged people in Durham, but in some ways, we’re still disconnected.”

Edited by Leah Paige and Sarah Monoson