Jewish Beginnings in San Angelo
From its very beginnings, San Angelo has been home to Jewish merchants."The majority of general mercantile stores in the 1870s and 1880s were owned by Jewish merchants," according to Suzanne Campbell, former director of the West Texas Collection at Angelo State University.
Schwartz & Raas, owned by Louis Schwartz and Joseph Raas, was an early Jewish mercantile business, and their building, now the location of J. Wilde's at 20 E. Concho Ave., is one of the oldest permanent structures in the city. Schwartz, before moving back to New York, also had the building built that is the current location of Meyers Drug on the northwest corner of Chadbourne Street and Beauregard Avenue.
The San Angelo Standard newspaper reported on the closing of Jewish businesses for high holidays as early as 1884, according to the Texas Jewish Historical Society's website.
Jewish entrepreneurs also worked in ranching and the wool industry, Campbell said.
Ben Ficklin general mercantile store owner Leon Halfin moved to San Angelo after the flood in 1882 to become a rancher and owner of a wool business.
"So many times, people paid (their bills) in livestock," Campbell said. "That's how so many went into the ranching business. Whatever was needed, that was what they would do. People would come here, work for an established Jewish merchant, learn the language and customs (many were Eastern European Jews), then move west and set up their own business, making way for the next group to move in," Campbell said.
"A lot of them put down roots and stayed, then their children and grandchildren went off to college. Most of them didn't want to come back and be in the same business their parents were in; they wanted to be doctors, lawyers, accountants," Campbell said. "That's what led to the dwindling of the Jewish community."
Did You Know?
Did you know that San Angelo became a city because of the investment of a Jewish businessman? According to Suzanne Campbell, former director of the West Texas Collection at Angelo State University, Marcus Koenigheim, of San Antonio, loaned Bart DeWitt money in the 1870s to buy 350 acres in West Texas. DeWitt named the area San Angela, after his wife Carolina Angela De La Garza DeWitt.
Eventually, DeWitt defaulted on the loan, and Koenigheim ended up with the land again. Koenigheim did not want the land, and even tried to trade it with a man named Joe Levi for a wagonload of whiskey. Levi refused, because the whiskey had more value.
San Angelo did not have a good reputation at that time, and Koenigheim wanted to bring in more reputable people, so he donated the majority of the land to churches in what is now downtown San Angelo, and gradually sold off as much of the rest of the land as he could, Campbell said.
Often, what goes around comes around; when the small Jewish congregation began building its synagogue in 1927, donations from area churches helped raise the funds to pay for the building.
"That building is the result of Christian charity," said Armond Goldman, whose father, David Goldman was the rabbi when the synagogue was built. "Deep in the Depression years, it was difficult to come up with funds to do this sort of thing.With the Jewish population less than one percent of San Angelo's, it was "very interesting that people would rally around others of a different religious persuasion."
As a child in the 1930s and 1940s, Goldman remembers San Angelo as "peaceful."
"There was so much going on in the world, but in San Angelo, people of all faiths were together. You couldn't tell any of that," he said.
