As Small Towns Fade, So Do Houses of Worship

VIRGINIA, Minn. â€”  She first came to the red-brick temple in her father’s arms, carried past stained-glass windows, up to the stage for a special day. She was 1 week old.

Now she’s 83.

He came as a young, newly married doctor to this rugged Iron Range mining town, joining his father in the crowded pews where they attended services almost every Friday and Saturday.

Now he’s 90.

Dorothy Karon and John Siegel are the last active members of B’nai Abraham synagogue, survivors of a once-thriving Jewish community, mostly Eastern European immigrants and their descendants who prayed and played poker, married and mourned under one roof for much of the last century. They came when the walls rang with the Yiddish banter of newcomers eager to learn English and find their place in a new world.

They stayed when the halls fell silent as people died or moved away. The pews emptied, services stopped, the six Torahs -- handwritten scrolls of the first five books of the Old Testament -- were donated, stolen or sent elsewhere to be preserved. But the synagogue still stands. And Karon and Siegel, as stubborn and proud as the building itself, are determined that it be preserved.

“As long as we’re alive, this building is going to stay alive,� vowed Karon, who still drives to the synagogue in her 1992 Cadillac, although she only lives at the other end of the block. “I feel connected to this building.�

“It’s part of [the] family,� Siegel echoed. “I can’t see letting it go.�

The struggle to save religious sanctuaries -- along with their history and heritage -- is a story that is repeating itself in small, shrinking towns throughout the country.

“As rural America empties, so do the houses of worship,� said Marilyn Chiat, an art historian in Minnesota who specializes in religious art and architecture.

Many places date back to settlers who tilled the soil in the late 19th century and founded these now-fading communities. “They were built by people who came to this country and couldn’t make a statement individually, but they could do it collectively,� Chiat said.

In the town of Virginia, she says, building an elegant temple was a public pronouncement -- an attitude not shared by some in big cities who feared anti-Semitism and didn’t want to attract attention.

“They felt comfortable enough to be visible,� Chiat said.

B’nai Abraham is the only one of four synagogues remaining on the Iron Range, a melting pot of European immigrants that once included about 1,000 Jews, including the Zimmerman family and their son, Bob Dylan, who grew up in nearby Hibbing.

The 93-year-old temple, which is on the National Register of Historic Places, has managed to defy the fate of other houses of worship that have auctioned off their contents -- chairs, organs, stained-glass windows -- then closed.

Delafield Evangelical Lutheran Church, in western Minnesota, held a final potluck dinner in 1998, then closed, ending its 125-year-history. Mark Brodin, who was baptized and confirmed there, chronicled itis demise in a documentary. “Watching your past and your family’s past deteriorate -- that’s a hard thing to do,� he said.

The white clapboard church was hauled away on a flatbed truck -- its steeple had been removed. It was born again as part of a historical and tourist site 22 miles away.

But many sit idle. In North Dakota, about 400 of 2,000 churches are vacant, according to a study by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. More than 75% are in towns of 2,500 or less.

In the Dakotas, there once were more than 40 Disciples of Christ churches; now there are two. In rural Iowa, 10 Methodist churches have closed in the last five years.

In Rolling Fork and Greenwood, Miss., and Wharton, Texas, synagogues have closed. In Lexington, Miss., and Helena, Ark., others are in jeopardy. In southern New Jersey, a campaign is under way to save nine temples, some dating to the 1880s.

Some congregations hope to survive by bringing back a familiar figure from America’s past: the circuit-riding preacher who kept his sermons in his saddle bags.

In South Dakota, a retired minister has returned to the pulpit -- actually, three of them..

A church or synagogue in a small town is for more than prayer, says Gary Goreham, chairman of the department of sociology and anthropology at North Dakota State University. “It’s the glue that holds much of a community together. It’s a place that provides meaning, identity and belonging.�

It was all that -- and more -- to Dorothy Karon and John Siegel.

The story of B’nai Abraham mirrors the life of small-town America at the turn of the 20th century: a flood of immigrants staking their claim in a strange land.

Virginia, about an hour north of Duluth, was a boom town, blessed with iron ore mines and lumber. In the 1890s, there were 15 mines among the towering curtains of evergreens and poplars. A decade later, it was home to the world’s biggest white-pine sawmill.

Young men with strong backs and big dreams came from Norway, Sweden, Lithuania, Poland, Russia and Finland to claw out the ore that helped transform America with railroads and cars.

With mines and mills also came merchants, many of them Jewish, setting up shop in town.

There were the Milavetzes and the Shanedlings, whose names are etched on the purple, blue and gold synagogue windows. And there were the Schibels, Jewish brothers from Helsinki who owned a clothing store catering to miners. Their advertisements, in Finnish, always began with the words, “Fellow countrymen.�

The synagogue, built for $12,000, opened in 1909. Two of the founders traveled to New York and Washington to solicit donations. For most of its life, the temple was Orthodox -- and, in keeping with tradition, women sat apart from men. It became a center for the town’s 175 to 200 Jews. “It was like a home away from home for everybody,� said Phyllis Gordon, Siegel’s daughter, who lives in Houston. “It’s where all the gossip started -- right here.�

Demand for places at worship was so great that seats in the wooden pews had to be numbered -- all 155 of them.

But over time, the younger folks left. The small town that held promise for one generation became a dead-end for the next.

It has been decades since there was a regular rabbi and about a dozen years since there were weekly services. Ten men, a minyan, are needed for prayers. High Holy Day services ended about five years ago.

Now the synagogue is empty, its walls adorned with plaques commemorating the dead.

When Karon’s father carried her as an infant to the bema -- or stage -- it was to receive her Hebrew name, Sprinsa Leah. “All the things that parents hope their children will accomplish and become were taught to me here,� she said.

Karon, who never married, attended college in California, but returned to run her father’s oil business. She lives in her childhood home, just down the block from the synagogue.

She has almost 80 years of memories, from the joy of being a little girl wearing a white beaded dress at a holiday party to the sorrow of saying goodbye to her sister, Dolores, two years ago -- the last funeral at the synagogue.

Siegel, a doctor for 44 years who delivered more than 3,000 babies, has his own recollections. Walking through a dusty basement where Wednesday night poker games were once played, he remembers the banquet held after the bar mitzvah for his son, Elliot, now 61.

“There’s a feeling of loneliness, I suppose,� he said, looking around the empty room.

Over the years, there have been a few offers to buy the synagogue.

Recently, the grandson of an original member expressed interest in using it as a retreat for youths from Minneapolis-area synagogues.

Saving this building, Chiat says, is too big a job for Karon and Siegel, who have pitched in to pay for utilities and insurance. “What these two people are doing is heroic, but they alone aren’t going to be able to preserve it,� she said.

This summer, Benjamin Yokel, a doctor from a nearby town, traveled to Virginia to conduct Friday night services and offer Hebrew lessons for about 15 people. “The best way to honor the synagogue is to use it as a synagogue,� he said.

There were wine, food, a lesson, and children laughing and running.

It wasn’t the crowd of years past but, Yokel says, the old place had new life, even if only for a few hours. “If a building can be happy,� he said, “it was happy that night.�