They sold boots to miners, ran drugstores in tent towns, and carried a Torah to the shore of the Bering Sea. Some made fortunes, and some lost everything. One of them fled Russia a step ahead of exile to Siberia and ended up paying for Anchorage’s public library. And when Jewish families in Germany wrote to Washington in 1939 asking to settle in Alaska, chambers of commerce in four of the territory’s largest towns voted against letting them in.
Sam Bayles came ashore at Nome in June 1900 with a Torah in his arms. The scroll had been handwritten in Lithuania in the 1870s, and his father, Rabbi Afroim Hessel Bayles, had given it to him. It was an odd thing to bring to a gold rush, but Nome in 1900 was an odd place.
Prospectors had found gold in the creeks above the town in 1898, and the next year somebody found it in the beach sand itself. That set off the stampede, because beach gold couldn’t be staked and didn’t need a tunnel or machinery, only a shovel and a strong back. About 20,000 people landed on that shore in the early summer of 1900. Tents ran thirty miles along the coast from Cape Rodney to Cape Nome, the town’s improvised government couldn’t keep up with sanitation or anything else, and plenty of the newcomers had spent everything just getting there.
The gold wasn’t a discovery in the way the legend tells it. Two Inupiaq boys, Constantine Uparazuck and Gabriel Adams, showed three Scandinavian prospectors the deposit at Anvil Creek, and the boys were refused the right to stake claims or share in the find. The men remembered as the Three Lucky Swedes became millionaires.
In September, about sixty Jews gathered in Nome for Rosh Hashanah. The Nome Nugget, in an account printed a century later, called it the most westerly and northerly Rosh Hashanah service in the world. Within weeks the crowd that had poured in over the summer was leaving almost as fast as it had come, but a core stayed. In 1901 they formed the Hebrew Benevolent Society to help people who’d run out of luck, and in a town where fortunes turned over in a week, the need never ran dry.
Jews had been part of Alaska for more than thirty years by then, and the first of them came for furs, not gold.
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On October 18, 1867, Russian officials formally handed Alaska to the United States in a ceremony at Sitka. A Jewish soldier named Benjamin Levi took part, lowering the Russian flag and raising the American one. San Francisco’s Jewish merchants had traded with the Russian-American Company through the 1850s and 1860s, and when the United States paid $7.2 million for the territory, two of them were ready.
Louis Sloss reached Sacramento in 1849, a young Bavarian Jew who had first settled in Kentucky near his older brother. He didn’t dig for gold. He sold harnesses, livestock, and mining tools to the men who did, weighed their gold dust, and poured their liquor, all from a space seven feet wide under a canvas cover. Floodwaters wiped him out his first winter.
He started over and eventually opened a general store with partners, and in 1851 another Bavarian Jew, Lewis Gerstle, joined the business. Gerstle had crossed the country with almost no money, tried mining, and decided it didn’t pay. The two balanced each other well. Sloss was outgoing and good at deals, and Gerstle was methodical and good with the books. They became family, too: Louis married Sarah Greenebaum in 1855, and Lewis married her sister Hannah. When the Sacramento River flooded again in 1861 and 1862, the families moved to San Francisco and went into stocks, shipping, hides, and furs.
In September 1867, a trader named Hayward Hutchinson arrived in San Francisco looking at Russian America’s assets and talked business with Sloss and Gerstle. Early in 1868, he and the shipping merchant William Kohl took over the Russian-American Company’s trading posts, more than fifty of them scattered across the territory. That October, Sloss, Gerstle, and their partners merged with Hutchinson, Kohl and Company to incorporate the Alaska Commercial Company. Sloss became its first president and Gerstle its vice president, and four of the seven partners in the firm that had bought out the Russians were Jewish.
The company ran stores and trading posts in remote settlements and sent ships between San Francisco and the north. In 1870 the federal government gave it a twenty-year lease to harvest fur seals on the Pribilof Islands, where the herd numbered roughly 4.7 million animals. The business was enormously profitable, and the people who did the work paid for it in ways the ledgers didn’t show. The lease required the company to hire the Unangan, or Aleut, residents of the islands and to provide food, housing, and schooling. Those residents were descendants of people the Russian-American Company had enslaved and moved to the Pribilofs in 1788 to hunt seals. Under the American lessees and the federal administration that followed, food and clothing stayed scarce, workers were segregated by race, and working conditions were poor. In 1979, the Pribilof Aleuts received $8.5 million in partial compensation for the unfair treatment they’d endured between 1870 and 1946.
Sloss died in 1902. A river in interior Alaska carries Gerstle’s name. Neither man ever washed a pan of gravel, and between them they built one of the most far-reaching businesses the territory had seen.
In 1884, a different kind of Jewish pioneer reached Sitka. Solomon Ripinsky was born in Poland in 1859 and left for America at eleven. He clerked in his brother’s clothing store in Shreveport, lived in Sacramento, ran a grocery in Salem, Oregon, and rose to colonel in the Oregon militia, a title that followed him the rest of his life. In Sitka he ran a government school for forty-five students, teaching in English and Russian, and later moved to the Chilkat country in what’s now Haines. He ran a store, worked at a salmon cannery, served as postmaster, and became a U.S. commissioner with the authority of a judge. Haines elected him mayor in 1916. Mount Ripinski, north of the town, has carried his name since around 1890.
Gold turned up in the Klondike in 1896, and by 1897 steamships docking in Seattle and San Francisco were unloading stories of fortunes. Thousands headed north. Many landed at Skagway or Dyea and hauled their gear over mountain passes in snow and mud, making trip after trip because nobody could carry it all at once. Canadian authorities required each person entering the Yukon to bring a year’s worth of supplies, and plenty of men never reached the goldfields at all.
At its peak, Dawson City had up to 200 Jewish residents, and the first Jewish services in the north probably took place there. Sid Grauman, who later built Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, spent part of his boyhood in Dawson. The Jewish cemetery the community created, Bet Chaim, was rediscovered in 1998.
The historian Norman Kagan, who spent years researching Jews in the gold rushes, found that a disproportionate share of the merchants were Eastern European immigrants. Jews who had already built businesses in the California and British Columbia rushes extended credit to the newcomers. That meant a man could arrive with almost nothing, open a shop, and pay off the stock as he sold it.
Robert Bloom was one of them. Born in Lithuania in 1878, he spent nine years in Dublin as a boy, landed at Ellis Island at seventeen, and reached Dawson in 1898 as a peddler and prospector. In 1900 he led the funeral for a man who drowned in the Fortymile River. A nineteen-year-old named Max Hirschberg took a more direct route to Nome, riding a bicycle about 1,100 miles from Dawson in ten weeks. Isidore Bayles, called Ike, was the youngest of six children of a rabbi in Libau, in Courland. He crossed to America at fifteen, joined the Klondike rush in 1898, and eventually opened a clothing store in Dawson, which gave him a living whether or not anyone found gold.
Nome had its own crowd of famous and infamous characters. Wyatt Earp and Josephine, his Jewish common-law wife, ran a saloon there called the Dexter and did well enough that it made them a fortune. But the Jewish families who stayed longest tended to run stores, boarding houses, and trading posts, and they stayed because they’d found work that held up when the gold didn’t.
The Nome community thinned out after World War I, when the Guggenheim family consolidated shipping and supply lines and the isolated town lost ground. The Bayles Torah stayed in Nome until the community was too small to use it. It eventually went to Anchorage, to the congregation that became Beth Shalom.
When gold turned up near Fairbanks in 1902, Robert Bloom followed it. He opened a store in Cleary in 1905 and another on Front Street in Fairbanks in 1906, and he closed it every year for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Services were held at his home. In 1908 the community organized Congregation Bikkur Cholim, and the Clay Street cemetery still has a Jewish section from those years.
In 1912, Robert married Jessie Spiro, a second cousin he’d met on vacation in Dublin, and brought her to Fairbanks. She started the town’s first kindergarten in 1918 and Alaska’s first Girl Scout troop in 1925, and a camp near Fairbanks still carries her name. Together they founded the Fairbanks Aeroplane Company in 1921, and Robert helped found the University of Alaska. Once the gold rush crowd left, the Blooms were often the only Jewish family left in town, and they kept Jewish life going for decades. During World War II they opened their home to Jewish servicemen for services and Passover Seders, which earned them the title of unofficial chaplains.
Ike Bayles moved on to the next strike. By 1910 he had a clothing store in Fairbanks with Abe and Charles Isaacs, and in 1911 he opened another in Iditarod, where a new gold find had pulled in a fresh crowd. He served on Iditarod’s first city council and chaired its fire committee. In 1909 he had helped organize a Jewish congregation, Chevra Bikur Cholim, and served as its first president. He bought a Sefer Torah and prayer books for the community, led services at the Isaacs store in Iditarod, and presided over the community Seder each Passover.
The pharmacy next door to his store belonged to a young man named Zachary Loussac.
Loussac was born in 1882 in Pokrov, Russia. He studied engineering at the Imperial Polytechnical Institute in Moscow, where the faculty marked him as a revolutionary for taking part in socialist activities. When he learned the government was watching him and had put him on a list for exile to Siberia, he crossed the border into Germany. He reached New York around 1899 and found work running errands for a drugstore on the Lower East Side.
Around 1901 he heard about the Klondike and headed west with his savings, but he ran out of money in Great Falls, Montana, and took a job at a local drugstore to pay his way home. Back in New York he studied at the College of Pharmacy, graduated in 1903, and became the pharmacist at the Waldorf-Astoria’s drugstore. In 1907, two U.S. senators from the West stopped by his counter and encouraged his western dreams. He bought a train ticket to Seattle.
That summer he reached Nome and tried mining for three months. It didn’t suit him, and he went back to pharmacy. In 1909 he followed the Iditarod rush and opened a drugstore with a partner, right beside Ike Bayles’s clothing store, and the two men became lifelong friends. A fire destroyed Loussac’s pharmacy in 1911. He rebuilt it, and in 1912 the rush ended and he went bankrupt.
He took a job at the Owl Drug Company in San Francisco, then went to Juneau in 1913, where the widow of his late partner lent him $3,500 to open a pharmacy of his own. In 1915 he set his sights on a place along Knik Arm where the federal government was building a railroad.
Anchorage began in 1915 as a railroad construction camp at Ship Creek, a town of tents and temporary buildings that grew as the Alaska Railroad brought in workers, merchants, and families. Bayles and Loussac bought a lot at Fourth Avenue and D Street and built side by side, a men’s clothing store for Bayles and a drugstore for Loussac. By 1916 Loussac had two drugstores in town.
They weren’t the only Jewish pioneers there. Leopold David was born in Nordhausen, Germany, in 1881 and grew up in Brooklyn, where his family ran a soap factory. He served in the Army in the Philippines and then at Fort Egbert in Alaska, where in 1905 he went to Circle City to help during a diphtheria epidemic and earned a Certificate of Merit. After his discharge he worked as a pharmacist in Seward, where people called him Dr. David, earned a law degree in 1909, and served as U.S. commissioner at Knik. When Anchorage incorporated in 1920, the city council appointed him its first mayor. His wife, Anna, became the town’s first librarian. The house he built in 1918 on West Second Avenue has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1986.
Bayles became the town’s financial anchor. He served eight terms on the city council as chairman of the finance committee, and his policies kept Anchorage largely out of debt in its early years. He chaired the Fourth of July celebration for twenty years, invested in the Anchorage Times in 1925, and served as the paper’s president for fifteen years. He retired to San Francisco in 1950 and died in 1956. In 1977 the city renamed two streets near the site of his store Ike Bayles Way and Bayles Plaza. The ceremonial start of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race happens at Fourth and D, in front of where his store once stood.
Loussac gave much of what he made back to the town. During World War II he handed out free stationery to anyone who wanted to write a letter home. He served as mayor in the late 1940s, and in 1946 he and the banker Elmer Rasmuson set up the Loussac Foundation, which he endowed with at least half of his fortune. In 1951 the foundation agreed to pay to build a modern library on Fifth Avenue, at a cost estimated between $350,000 and $500,000. It opened in 1955 with Loussac in the crowd. That building was torn down in 1981, and the current Z. J. Loussac Public Library opened in 1986. He also left Anchorage twelve paintings by Sydney Laurence and four by Eustace Ziegler. The University of Alaska gave him an honorary doctorate calling him a pioneer Alaskan philanthropist. He died in Seattle in 1965 at eighty-two.
The Jews who built Anchorage had no synagogue in those early years and no resident rabbi. They held services in homes and businesses and relied on visiting clergy. Congregation Beth Shalom formed in 1958, joined the Reform movement in 1960, and built its first synagogue in 1964.
In 1906, a Russian Jewish immigrant in Fairbanks named Abe Spring proposed settling Jews fleeing the pogroms in Alaska. Congress rejected the idea, and nobody took it seriously again for more than thirty years.
In November 1938, just after Kristallnacht, Interior Secretary Harold Ickes told reporters that Alaska might shelter refugees from Germany. In August 1939, his undersecretary, Harry Slattery, released a report called The Problem of Alaskan Development. It argued that the territory was underpopulated and that settlers from Europe, refugees among them, could build it up. It proposed setting aside four areas for settlement and pitched the idea as economic development rather than rescue. According to Ickes’s diary, President Roosevelt wanted to bring 10,000 settlers a year to Alaska for five years, half of them immigrants.
Families in Germany read the report closely. Bruno Rosenthal wrote from the town of Neustadt on behalf of twenty-one Jews, among them eight children, a doctor who spoke three languages, and an expert in trout fishing. His family had registered with the American consul and been told to expect a wait of about a year, and he said they didn’t have that long. Joachim Hein wrote from Breslau…
