And hopefully, one with a hopeful ending.
I should have known something was amiss by how easy it was to get in. No crowds, no lines, no tickets at will call—no tickets at all, tickets not being necessary. But I didn’t realize just how amiss things were until I arrived at an empty sanctuary.
An empty sanctuary in an empty synagogue. On Rosh Hashanah.
Though I may not be the best Jew, I know this much: Synagogues ought to be packed on Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. It’s when all we not-the-best Jews actually don our kippahs and show up to shul.
On the bimah, someone suddenly appeared, magician-like, from behind a curtain. He carried a box to set up the service and said hello to the room, meaning me—me alone. “Don’t worry,” he said. “It’ll be full. Kids always come at the last minute.”
“…Kids?”
“Yeah, kids. This is the children’s service.”
The children’s service?! Right on cue, they came bursting in—dozens of children, dressed in their synagogue best, little ties and tiny bows. Their mothers followed, and some fathers, too—and while their children largely ignored me, the adults gave me a good once over, and all their looks, and all their stares, their squinting eyes and turned up noses, channeled their thoughts to me, which were: Why is this middle-aged man sitting all alone at a children’s service?
They directed their kids to sit in pews far away from mine.
I came here, to Charleston, South Carolina, to celebrate the newness of the year 5785 in America’s oldest synagogue in continual use (the modifier “continual use” is necessary to differentiate Charleston’s Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim [KKBE], built in 1840, from the older Touro Synagogue in Rhode Island, built in 1763, but only in “continual use” since 1883). But through a mix-up with the goyim at the city’s visitor bureau, I was booked into the daytime “family” service, rather than the previous evening’s “adult” service. If I’d known the “family” service was for the benefit of children, and not—as I assumed—the weary parents of angsty, fidgeting rugrats who couldn’t politely shut up and sit through the “adult” service, I wouldn’t have agreed to attend. But I couldn’t explain all this to the suspicious southern mothers and their glowering husbands, who were probably all scrolling through the sex offender registry, expecting to find my picture.
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But there’s an unexpected benefit to this unusual situation—I’m a Jew who never had a bar mitzvah sitting in a room full of other Jews whose B’nai mitzvah were still spoken of in the future tense. So, in a sense, we were all intellectually equal. At least in spiritual matters.
Charleston’s KKBE, a Greek revival-designed synagogue, rededicated in 1840 after a fire destroyed the previous temple.Jeremy Tarr
The Charleston visitor’s bureau invited me to the Holy City after reading a 2023 article I’d written about a trip to Jerusalem with my parents. For years now, after decades of ignoring my heritage, I’ve felt the weight of my Jewish blood. I’d written these feelings in that article, of the guilt and shame in turning my back on my ancestry, and my desire to do better. And to do better doesn’t only mean studying the Three Ts (the Torah, the Talmud, and tradition), but understanding the vast, complicated history of the Jews, from ancient Israel to the contemporary diaspora. So when the visitor’s bureau asked me if I wanted to learn about America’s Jewish history—which didn’t start with the popular imagination of Ellis Island refugees, those like my family who fled from pogroms and hardship—but one that dates far older, that precedes the existence of the country itself, I immediately agreed.
I knew almost nothing of Charleston—certainly nothing of its Jewish character. I imagined a genteel city of seersucker and Lilly Pulitzer by day, and by night, a rowdy, drunken, vomit town. And of course, very, very Christian. But alongside its estimated 400 churches are four synagogues, two of which are Orthodox, and a Chabad in Mt. Pleasant. Roughly 10,000 Jews live in the greater city, about 1.1% of the population–far fewer than in New York (12% Jewish) or Los Angeles (17% Jewish). However, in the year 1800, more Jews lived here than in any other part of the country.
“Everyone thinks [American] Jewish history starts with the waves of the 1880s,” Harlan Greene explained to me. “You know, Emma Lazarus stuff: ‘Give me your tired, weak,’ you know.” Greene, a writer and historian, has worn many hats in this city, as an archivist and professor at the College of Charleston and a chronicler of the city’s Jewish and queer histories. He says the reason Charleston is ignored in Jewish history is, “it’s not a simple story. It’s too nuanced.”
And the reason for this historical forgetfulness—the nuance that Greene spoke of—comes down to the same reason for a lot of this country’s historical forgetfulness. “People are uncomfortable with the fact that Jews helped enslave.”
1. Coming Street Cemetery is the South’s oldest Jewish burial site. The obelisk on the left in this image marks the grave of Marx E. Cohen, Jr., a Jewish Confederate solider, killed at the Battle of Bentonville.Jeremy Tarr 2. The plot of David Lopez and his family. Lopez was a Jewish builder who constructed KKBE in 1840, and “whose skilled workers included enslaved African Americans.”
English colonists in a ship called Carolina arrived in the harbor of Kiawah Indigenous land in 1670. They named it Charles Town for Charles II, who ushered in the bawdy, gaudy years of the Restoration. Modeled after Christopher Wren’s London city plan, they grew a village of churches, steeples, meeting places, trading places, grand houses, and ale houses.
The year before the Charles Town settlement, the Carolina colonies began operating under the Fundamental Constitution, believed to have been written by the English philosopher John Locke, who at that time served as secretary to the Proprietor of the Carolinas. Following the dictates of Charles II, who didn’t much care who lived in his colony so long as they weren’t papists, the Constitution guaranteed “ye liberty” to everyone, including “heathens, Jues, and other dissenters.”
For those who had been harangued, evicted, beaten, and murdered from one end of Europe to the other, until their backs were up against the Atlantic, an ocean that God hadn’t yet parted, hearing of “liberty” for “Jues,” even if they were second to “heathens,” must have been sweet words to downtrodden ears. The first written reference to a Jew in Charleston came in 1695—he was a Spanish-language interpreter for the governor. Populations of Sephardics began to arrive in droves as they sought escape from the long arm of Spain’s Inquisition, which terrorized Jews throughout the colonies of South and Central America, up through Florida. In 1742, Spain attempted an invasion of English-occupied Georgia, which sent even more running into Charleston’s protection.
Here they had safety, citizenship, and rights. The community grew, and the first congregation–Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim—was established in 1749. A Jewish cemetery on Coming Street, which still survives today, opened in 1764. The Jews here fought in the American Revolution, and they fought in the Civil War–for the Confederacy.
Harlan Greene told me that to understand this allegiance, you had to look at the dedication ceremony for KKBE’s current building in 1841. “When they opened the synagogue and dedicated it, there’s an incredible statement made: Just as our ancestors defended their temple and their Jerusalem, we are going to defend our temple—and they call Charleston their Jerusalem. And that’s why they end up fighting for [the Confederacy in] the Civil War, because they have put down roots. They have been granted equality.”
After a renovation of the structure in 2020, the congregation rededicated the sanctuary with a plaque acknowledging that it was “constructed by a Jewish builder, whose skilled workers included enslaved African Americans.”
The first enslaved person was forced into Charleston only five months after its founding, and chattel slavery became the city’s defining industry. According to Robert N. Rosen’s A Short History of Charleston, “Three-fourths of all ‘heads of families’ in Charleston owned at least one enslaved person” between the years 1820 and 1840. And according to Greene, “Jews owned slaves at about the same percentage as non-Jews.”
“One reason,” Greene said, “that Jews did so well is because Blacks didn’t do well.” Slavery shifted the demographics of the city—by 1709, there were more Black people than white. “You can’t help but think that one reason Jews were doing well was because they’re of European descent. That’s the sad irony: Jews had no power in the structure, but they needed more and more white people to balance the enormous Black majority. As things got fairer for the Jews, it got worse for the Blacks. And yes, Jews were complicit.”
The house at 69 Meeting Street, where KKBE president Moses Cohen Mordecai lived.Jeremy Tarr
The writer DuBose Heyward, most well known for writing Porgy, which George Gershwin turned into Porgy and Bess, wrote that Charleston had given “her beauty, her gardens, and her dim, old-fashioned ways.” Heyward lived on Church Street, and Porgy takes place nearby, on Cabbage Row. Heyward was right about Charleston’s beauty–especially in the heart of the historic district. Around the corner is the iconic Rainbow Row, a collection of 13 brightly colored houses that have been luring tourists and visitors for over a century. And scattered throughout the neighborhood are gloriously pristine Greek Revival mansions, still showboating the colossal wealth of long-dead fatcats.
For a city with such an ugly past, it’s one of the prettiest I’ve ever seen, and most certainly the loveliest in the country.
Tyler Page Wright Friedman, a tour guide and founder of Walk & Talk Charleston, drove me around this pastel wonderland. Among her company’s offerings, which include ghosts, gossip, and pink houses, is a Jewish history tour. She told me it’s not one of the more popular ones, and I can certainly understand why. It’s one grisly tale after another.
Here, at the mansion at 119 Broad Street, lived Mordecai Cohen, a Polish peddler who immigrated to Charleston in 1788, became “landed gentry,” and served as commissioner of the Hebrew Orphan Society; he also enslaved a man named Jim, who, after self-emancipating, recounted to abolitionists the cruel horrors he and many others endured at Cohen’s family plantation. Two blocks away, at the mansion at 69 Meeting Street, lived the confusingly similarly named Moses Cohen Mordecai, president of KKBE from 1861 to 1866; he was also a secessionist, a Confederate, and an enslaver. Another two blocks away, in the courtyard of the Dock Street Theater, is a plaque honoring Judah Benjamin, the first Jewish cabinet member in North America, who served as attorney general, secretary of war, and secretary of state; unfortunately, it was for the Confederate States of America (he also was the first Jewish person on currency–his portrait affixed the Confederate $2 bill).
Despite the density of all these Jewish homes and monuments concentrated in the historic district, this was certainly not a Jewish neighborhood. The historic district simply was Charleston. The city didn’t much expand beyond the tip of the peninsula, where the Ashley and Cooper Rivers meet, until the 19th century. And in the aftermath of the Civil War, when so much lay in ruins, many Jewish families moved away altogether. Moses Cohen Mordecai went to Baltimore, Judah Benjamin fled to England, and others traveled west. But plenty didn’t change their minds on slavery. Harlan Greene told me of Franklin Israel Moses, Jr.–Jewish on his father’s side, Methodist on his mother’s–who became governor of South Carolina, and actually reversed his position, accepting civil rights. However, “he was vilified by the Jewish community for that,” Greene said. “People changed their names and did not want to be associated with him.”
Post-Bellum Charleston stagnated for decades, and so did the Jewish community. It only began to revitalize in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The second large wave of Jewish immigrants arrived–Eastern Europeans fleeing pogroms and persecution. They consolidated into a single neighborhood. “Eastern European Jews brought the shtetl mentality,” said Greene. Meaning, it’s better to stick together in one area–just like they had done in the old country–rather than spread out all over the city.
Soon, this neighborhood had a name: Little Jerusalem.
1. The sign marking Little Jerusalem on King Street. Behind on the left is Bourbon N’ Bubbles and Lamar’s Sporting Club.Jeremy Tarr 2. Morris Sokol’s at 510 King Street is currently vacant. 3. Goldberg’s at 555 King Street is now a Chinese restaurant.
On any given night in Charleston, there’s a red velvet rope outside the establishment at the corner of King and Spring. There may not be a line, but it still feels like you might not get in. It’s probably more frequented by tourists than locals, because Bourbon N’ Bubbles and its neighbor, Lamar’s Sporting Club, are regular set pieces on Bravo’s reality TV series Southern Hospitality, where the cast sometimes bartend, and Southern Charm, where the cast sometimes imbibe. King Street ought to be dubbed Bravo Boulevard–down the street at King and Ann is Republic, another bar featured in both shows, and across the street from Republic is Sewing Down South, owned by a Southern Charm cast member.
The shtetl is long gone–gentrified, vanished, Bravo-tized. Still, the remnants of the Real Balabusta of Little Jerusalem remain on Upper King Street, even though the artifacts of bygone days are only noticeable to those seeking them. Jewish names are emblazoned on buildings and sidewalks: Bluestein at 494 King Street (it’s now a Kohler kitchen and bath showroom), Morris Sokol at 510 (currently vacant), Goldberg at 555 (a Chinese restaurant, add your own Jews on Christmas joke here).
The Jewish story is often one of assimilation–blend in with the surroundings, and maybe no one will drag us to a pyre. For those coming to Charleston in that second wave, beckoned by the long-remembered call of religious liberty, they found a wholly un-Orthodox community, already assimilated.
“In Europe, you’re assigned your role as a Jew, you can’t escape it. And you come here [to Charleston], it is so easy to assimilate,” said Greene. But they wondered, “What do we have to do to keep our kids from being so totally free in America? This old world Judaism is not working anymore. They don’t understand the language. We have to make it more relevant.”
Starting in 1824, a small contingent of KKBE members began a push toward modernization, embracing the Reform movement, a Judaic reaction to the European Enlightenment and the emancipation from ghettos by Napoleon’s armies, that migrated from Germany to the United States, and which did away with religious ritual, law, and garb, and focused on the humanistic principals of biblical teaching, especially social justice. In 1873, KKBE became one of the first synagogues to join what would become the Union of Reform Judaism. And though many of the new immigrants remained Orthodox, a significant number adopted the new ways.
Little Jerusalem evolved into a mixed neighborhood, embracing immigrants from all over Europe, as well as people of color. Jewish merchants frequently employed Black people in their stores and taught them Yiddish so they could interact with the clientele. They often became Shabbos goys, gentiles who work while religious Jews observe the Sabbath.
During integration in the 1950s and early 1960s, Black people marched along King Street, protesting against stores that refused to let them shop. “And there were a lot of Jewish merchants on that list, and a lot of not-Jewish merchants on that list,” said Greene. “Then one of them did [let them in], one of the big ones.” Edward’s, a five-and-dime founded by Edward Kronsberg, the Virginia-born son of Ukrainian and Lithuanian Jews. It’s closed now, too. The only remnant is its name still etched in the sidewalk.
In 2019, the Charleston Jewish Society sponsored a historical marker that went up at 595 King Street, at the corner of Spring. It proclaims that this neighborhood used to be Little Jerusalem, and provides a brief description of what one might have expected to find: delis, kosher markets, and a Jewish theater. Everything is written in the past tense; everything described is long gone.
While reading it, I heard the howling yelps of a bachelorette party. Dressed in lingerie, they click-clacked in precarious heels and stumbled past the historic marker. They hooted and yelled and crossed from Little Jerusalem to Bravo Boulevard, where they disappeared into Bourbon N’ Bubbles.
The sanctuary of KKBE, where congregates have gathered for centuries.Jeremy Tarr
On Rosh Hashanah afternoon, I walked from my hotel in Little Jerusalem, the lovely 86 Cannon, the entire 1.2 miles down King Street to KKBE on Hasell Street. It’s challenging to dress neatly for temple in the shvitz-summoning humidity of Charleston when coming from the mild desert air of Los Angeles. My tailored trousers, which fit my Los Angeles body, no longer comfortably wrapped my Charleston frame. I was mighty bloated by the time I arrived.
There’s a lot of sitting and standing and bowing at a temple service, a dangerous gambit for a bloated corpse sausaged into fitted pants. With each sitting, standing, bowing, another tug pulled at the seams. One wrong move, and the weakest point of the weakest thread could snap, split the seat of my trousers, and expose my tuchus to a sanctuary chock-a-block with children.
This made for a difficult time listening to the rabbi, Stephanie Alexander. She’s led the KKBE congregation for 15 years, following stints in Lexington, Massachusetts, and Dubuque, Iowa. But I spoke with her later by telephone.
I asked the rabbi to help me reconcile the Jewish history of Charleston with a Reformist ideology of the Jewish faith, one that centers on the fundamental principles of tikkun olam, meaning that Jews must work to repair the world, and gemilut hasidim, meaning that Jews are commanded to perform acts of loving-kindness.
“We try to face our history and be honest about our history with ourselves and with others,” she told me. “We feel it as a mandate to do as much as we can now and going forward, to not just repair what we’ve done, but to make the world a better place.”
Rabbi Alexander said, “I don’t think that the sin of slavery is entirely unique to Jews of the South, certainly to Jews of Charleston. It’s an abhorrent human endeavor–a societal civil endeavor–that impacted our entire country. It’s at the root of wealth that built up in this country, that built synagogues in the north, as well as in the South.” For KKBE, she sees the acknowledgment of its wrongs as an opportunity to put a horrific past front and center. In that way, “we’re able to address it and name it and reckon with it and figure out meaningful ways that we can move forward.”
“It’s a challenge to everyone who comes [to KKBE] to think about the ways in which slavery underpins our communities, our congregations, our communities, and our wealth. We all have reckoning to do.”
At the children’s Rosh Hashanah service, the rabbi asked various questions, framing them as lessons taken from the traditional service, and requested that the kids talk their answers out with their parents, and write them down on a slate. As the day is one of reflection, Rabbi Alexander queried, “What made you sad this year? And what hope did you have to help you?”
It’s a heavy question, especially at the first Rosh Hashanah after the October 7 massacre. But it’s a question that in some form or another has been pondered in this sacred place for centuries.
“In the sanctuary, you can feel the presence of generations who came before you,” the rabbi told me. “It’s tangible. We’ve been sitting in the same uncomfortable pews for decades and decades and decades and decades. When you do a Sulzer Sh’ma,” she said, referring to the traditional Sh’ma prayer, the central declaration of faith in Judaism, set to music by the Viennese cantor Solomon Selzer, “and you can imagine that they were also singing that in the 19th century. And you close your eyes and your voice gets softer for the second line, Baruch shem kvode [‘Blessed be the Name’]. It’s like you can hear the echoes, not just theoretically, but the actual resounding echoes of generations who came before you. And there’s so much inspiration in that. This sense of mission and legacy and responsibility to generations who came before and making sure that it’s there for generations to come after you, which means it needs to be relevant and current and modern and exciting, so that we continue to bring people into that space to be inspired. We are a vibrant, growing, dynamic congregation.”
To be surrounded by children, little boys in their kippahs speaking more Hebrew than I knew at their age (and probably more than I know now), and to see them in the embrace of this good and noble congregation that wants so badly to learn the lessons of the past to heal the present and protect the future–it is in many ways a profound blessing, and a beautiful way to start a year.
