Almost every Jew has an opinion about what the future holds for Jewish life in America—and usually a program to go along with it. Indeed, the number of opinions and programs is in inverse proportion to the facts available; we really know very little, concretely, about the changing patterns of Jewish life in the various cities and regions of this country. Here, David and Adele Bernstein offer their report on what seems to them to have happened to the Jews of Richmond, Virginia—by no means a typical community, even for the South, but also by no means unique.
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Social change is seeping through Richmond, Virginia, as quietly and pervasively as the aroma of tobacco from the mills down near the James River. Old-established patterns are reshaping themselves in a kind of middle-class revolution—an altogether respectable revolution, however, with an “r” so faint as to be almost indiscernible. The war brought new industries, new labor markets, new wealth, as well as new human experiences and values to the whole South. Du Pont has put up a huge new cellophane plant just outside Richmond, and there is an unlovely but lucrative factory district spreading along the farther reaches of Broad Street. The riverfront mills turn out more than sixty billion cigarettes a year, one in every six smoked in America. Since people smoke most when they worry most, this is one of the few American cities stable enough to ride out a possible depression.
Altogether, Richmond’s standard of living is higher now than ever before. The Bureau of Labor Statistics recently chose three cities, Richmond, Washington, and Manchester (New Hampshire), for a study of annual savings by middle-income families: Richmond’s average was $260, Washington’s $36, and Manchester had an average deficit of $148.
A breeze of liberalism has poked into the musty corners of local politics. Last year, for the first time in Richmond’s history, a Negro, Oliver Hill, was elected to the City Council; it took more white than Negro votes to put him there. For the past two years, Negroes have been on the municipal police force. In the gubernatorial primaries last summer, a mildly liberal politician named Francis Pickens Miller lost to the candidate of the ancient Byrd machine; but the protest vote was larger than ever.
The city has changed. Its drabness is not less drab, nor its little eddies of antiquarian loveliness less lovely. But the business district bustles as never before. On the streets people look, if not fashionably, at least solidly well dressed. Department stores now emphasize “gracious living”—a term taken very seriously here—for everyone. The old families, with their fixed, inherited wealth, still dominate local affairs, but without the old assurance. Society leadership still is theirs, but not in the way it used to be before the war, when they also controlled the city’s politics, dominated the civic and welfare activities, and set the social tone. Today the recently rich nudge them with social aspirations of their own; and a newly emerging Richmond of Negroes who vote, of factory workers who join unions, and of a secure white-collar group, is seeking a voice in its own affairs.
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Nowhere—except perhaps among the Negro third of Richmond—are all these signs of change so marked as among the Jews in the city, who number something less than eight thousand in a population of nearly a quarter of a million. For nearly two centuries their history has woven itself into the Richmond story; their roots are deep, and all the myths and shibboleths of this stronghold of Southern romanticism are theirs. There were Jewish slave-holders, and Jewish warriors in the Confederate cause, and Jews who suffered during the Reconstruction years. These were the old Jewish families, and it was quite natural that they should have dominated the Jewish community—as old families dominated the entire community—until the new Southern revolution began.
For fifty years past, Jewish newcomers have been absorbed by Richmond, not in the sense that they were accepted by the old families with open arms, but in the sense that they themselves willingly accepted a subordinate, if not submerged, status in the structure of the community. In Virginia, where only two per cent of the population is foreign-born, all newcomers are strangers for a very long time. And the inexorable, though slow, tempo of integration might have continued undisturbed along the lanes rutted by time, had it not been for a double impact—first, of the explosive changes in the South itself, and second, of the even more explosive effect on the Richmond Jews of events in the outside world.
The Jewish tragedy in Europe, the arrival of refugees, the resurgence of Jewish consciousness, the widespread Zionist agitation, reached Richmond later than most other American cities. Roving speakers, fund-raising campaigns, and the local headlines created a new Jewish-consciousness here as in the rest of the country. In Richmond, however, there had been no preparation. The visiting speakers found audiences apathetic; the appeals for funds were only meagerly met; and the headlines were being offset by accounts of the numerous activities of Dr. Edward N. Calisch, for half a century the leading Jewish citizen and rabbi of the most fashionable congregation in the city.
Because this is an atmosphere where change is greeted grudgingly, and only when there is no well-mannered way of resisting it, even the emotional impact of events abroad was slow to stir the Richmond Jews. In the end, however, it was to change their whole communal way of life.
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The weight of the past hangs heavy over Richmond—the memory of the great, gay days before the War Between the States, when Poe walked its streets, his head full of morbid ratiocination; when its society counted among the most elegant in the country, and Thackeray, visiting on a lecture tour in the 1850’s, called it “the merriest and most picturesque place in America.” And the memory, of course, of the desperately romantic days of the Confederacy, when Richmond was the political headquarters of the violent struggle which pitted states’ rights, plantations, and slavery against the irresistible industrial revolution.
The past is real here, and until a few years ago it almost overshadowed the present. The WPA guide to Virginia solemnly relates: “The city’s social season, from late fall to Ash Wednesday, retains its old ritual, with the Monday germans as highlights. Tea in darkened drawing rooms, dinners served by tradition-trained butlers, frosted mint juleps in ancient goblets, and Smithfield hams and beaten biscuits, are part of the ceremonial that has continued with no deviation. It is still proper in old Richmond to refer to a guest as So-and-So’s granddaughter, or the descendant of a founding father.”
At least one Jewish family in ten can trace its local ancestry back to the 1850’s or earlier. In Richmond, this is synonymous with aristocracy. Until recently the bridge between them and the other nine-tenths was narrow and rarely crossed. In a community where “visiting” is the principal recreation, the two groups exchanged little hospitality; nor, certainly, did they belong to the same societies or share in social diversions. The scions of the old families inherited the first positions in the Jewish community along with their names and wealth—positions which involved communal as well as social leadership. They retained exclusive possession of their synagogue, Beth Ahabah, and of their rabbi, Dr. Calisch.
It is not altogether possible to understand what has happened to the Jews of Richmond without knowing something about Rabbi Calisch, who came to Richmond in 1891, at twenty-six, from a briefly held Reform pulpit in Peoria, Illinois, and spent his life creating an image of the assimilated Richmond Jew.
He was handsome and robust, something of a scholar, an eloquent speaker, and a sophisticated but enthusiastic participant in civic affairs. He exchanged pulpits with Protestant clergymen; he delivered patriotic speeches during both World Wars; he lunched with President Taft at the White House and with Lord Reading at the viceregal palace in India; he was treasurer of the English Speaking Union, president of the Richmond Peace Council, and president of the Richmond alumni chapter of Phi Beta Kappa; in 1939 the Richmond Times-Dispatch put his name on its Roll of Honor as one of the ten outstanding men of Virginia.
He was equally active in Jewish affairs: he was on the executive committee of the local B’nai B’rith lodge; he lectured for the Jewish Chautauqua; he was president of the Central Conference of American Rabbis. In his maiden sermon at Beth Ahabah, Rabbi Calisch had said: “I shall endeavor to expound a religion that shall not flinch before the light of science nor cower beneath the flash of research, yet shall be loyal to the core to the grand old mother, Judaism.” He instituted the practice of uncovered heads at worship; and on the rare occasions when he visited an Orthodox synagogue, he refused to don a skull cap. He modernized the Beth Ahabah ritual in accord with his Reform philosophy, revised the prayer book, and wrote a Child’s Bible. He introduced progressive education techniques in his Children’s Religious School, with arts and crafts classes, a dramatics class, a stamp club, and a photography club. Thirty years ago, at the height of the rabbi’s prestige, the president of his congregation made some notes on “oldtime observances” that were now “hardly known by any of the present generation.” The list was long: “Wearing the tallis; separation of the sexes in the synagogue; fasting on Tisha-b’Av as well as on Yom Kippur; a strictly kept shabbes; unleavened meals on Passover; laying tefillim; a Kosher household; Sabbath blessing on Friday evening.”
In his relations with Christian neighbors, the rabbi created in himself the most ingratiating of Jewish stereotypes—the man completely unaware of any personal problem as a Jew, at ease and unselfconscious, articulate but not argumentative, intelligent but not arrogant, worldly but not cynical. In 1907 he addressed a joint session of the House of Bishops and House of Clerical and Lay Deputies of the General Convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church, and the next day a Richmond paper exclaimed editorially: “His lofty, dignified, and graceful address was in every way worthy of the man, of the great race he represented, and the illustrious conclave that listened with respect to his words. For ourselves, we know not which most to admire, the spirit that moved the House to invite the address, or the manner in which that address was delivered. Both were admirable.”
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The accolades continued, in the press and pulpits and at civic gatherings, whenever he made a public appearance through the years that followed. Yet, shortly before his death, Calisch appears to have had some doubts about his career. “One thing in which I have failed was in developing a following among Jews such as I have among Christians,” he told a friend.
“By the late 1930’s and until his retirement,” a Beth Ahabah member recalls, “Rabbi Calisch would deliver his sermons on Saturday mornings—on the philosophy of Spinoza, or the ethics of Judaism, or some other subject like that—and there would be scarcely a dozen of us in that big, dim synagogue. I hardly know why—unless it was that somehow I don’t think Calisch was loved by the Jews here, or even greatly respected, during the last years of his life. It was a tragedy, in a way, and many of us wondered whether he was such a great success after all.”
Calisch was, on occasion, invited to visit the darkened drawing rooms of the First Families of Virginia. He was asked to address the annual breakfast of the Hunt Club. Through him, and through its respect for him, all of Richmond that “counted” showed how much it thought of the Richmond Jews. But neither Rabbi Calisch nor any other Jew was invited to join the Hunt Club. Indeed, social exclusion—the only tangible kind of anti-Semitism in the city, aside from a few recent cases of restrictive covenants—seems, if anything, to have increased during his halfcentury there. A hundred and fifty years ago, when as much as one-sixth of Richmond’s white population was Jewish, there was a good deal more social intercourse (with its inevitable result, intermarriage) and more active participation in municipal affairs than in recent times. When the most fashionable city club, the Westmoreland, was organized in the 1870’s, its membership included several Jews, and once it elected a Jewish president. Today the club excludes Jews, as do the Commonwealth Club, the Country Club of Virginia, the Hermitage Country Club, the Junior League, and the most fashionable women’s groups.
“The philosophy of the old Jewish families,” a Richmonder explained, “was that they ought to be as quiet and unostentatious as possible. They would not dream of making a fuss about the fact that they received no invitation to join a club or to attend a party, no matter how much they would have wanted to go. If they were invited to join an important civic or welfare committee of some kind, they accepted graciously and worked hard. But they did not think it proper to volunteer their services. They hardly ever ran for public office, for example, and frowned on other Jews who did. They just didn’t think a Jew should put himself forward.”
In any event, the well-born Jews did receive the outward forms of acceptance. But they would have been less than human if they did not, however unostentatiously, yearn for full social acceptance in the very circles which treated them civilly but distantly—and if they did not, in turn, practice a polite but firm form of exclusion on Jews whose ancestry was not so deeply rooted in the Old Dominion.
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The structure of the Jewish community lent itself easily to such stratification. The synagogues were—and still are—the very core of Richmond Jewish life. Beth Ahabah is the oldest; it was established in the early 1840’s by German Jewish immigrants who were either excluded from or uncomfortable in the Sephardic synagogue they found on their arrival. In time, the energetic new group absorbed the diminishing Sephardic families, and with them assumed unchallenged communal leadership.
Meanwhile, Polish Jews trickled into Richmond in the 1850’s, followed thirty years later by Russian Jews in larger numbers. The Poles, who had founded an Orthodox synagogue of their own, were a little snobbish toward the newer wave, and a second Orthodox synagogue came into being.
To the Beth Ahabah aristocrats, there seemed to be little difference between these two foreign-accented groups; and a basic, rigid, and none too friendly pattern of nobleman and commoner lasted well into the 20th century. By the 1930’s, however, some of the Polish Jewish families had reached the point where even Beth Ahabah was prepared to accept them; while the children and grandchildren of the wave of the 1880’s were ready to strike out on their own.
These groups—English-speaking, nativeborn, increasingly prosperous, uncomfortable with both Orthodoxy and Reform Judaism—created a new Conservative temple, Congregation Beth-El. This turned out to be the first real challenge to Beth Ahabah, or, more accurately, to the Calisch mentality.
The timing is significant. Beth-El began as the depression years were ending. Its members were the second generation of Eastern European Jews, businessmen and professionals who were beginning to feel a sense of communal responsibility—in a community which did not encourage them to assume responsibility. They enjoyed increasing economic security, but a decreasing Jewish security, principally because of the news from Europe. Unable to escape into identification with Richmond’s past, they made a virtue of the necessity to be Jewish.
It was not long before they became the stronghold of Zionist feeling and activity in the community, with a large, resourceful membership that included an unprecedented number of young people. Unwittingly, perhaps, they had provided Richmond’s Jews with a station midway between Beth Ahabah and Orthodoxy. In doing so, they remade the social map of the community and provided the impulses which have changed Beth Ahabah itself.
To the Beth-El group, Beth Ahabah was not quite Jewish. It was “assimilationist,” in the unpleasant meaning of the word; it was cowardly; it was frightened; it was anti-Zionist. And as the Beth-El middle class increased in economic strength, as well as in numbers, their sentiments could no longer be laughed off. Beth-El and what it symbolized thus brought to Richmond the fermentation process that had taken place, many years earlier, in most other Jewish communities throughout the country.
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If Richmond had lagged behind the rest of the country, there were valid reasons.
First of these was the unusual size, wealth, and deep-rootedness of the old families. Indeed, it is hard to think of any American city, other than San Francisco, where so many Jewish families are so intimately identified with the earliest local history; and the evolution of the Jewish community in San Francisco is not unlike that of Richmond.
Secondly, the economic tempo in Richmond has been slower than in Northern cities. Tobacco kept Richmond fairly well off in hard times, but until recent years there were few opportunities for new enterprises to develop on an ambitious scale. In New York, Eastern European Jews were beginning to make fortunes forty years ago, and even to engulf the older families. In Richmond there are only a few such early success stories. On the other hand, this is a Jewish community without a working class, and without serious poverty (which means that there is little incentive toward a proletarian rebelliousness). The local Jewish welfare agency carries a maximum yearly case load of twenty, several of which are transients. A few years ago, the Orthodox congregation did boast of one impoverished member, an unemployable painter who worshiped regularly without paying membership dues. During the war, when prosperous congregants clamored for tickets for the High Holidays, the painter was asked to give up his regular seat and move down a few rows so that a large family could sit together. “I am the only poor Jew in Richmond,” he protested. “I deserve more respect.”
The third reason for the time-lag was Richmond itself. Nearly all its people, Christian and Jewish, tend to resist change; and the newest arrivals learn very quickly how pleasant it can be to put on the brakes.
With the war, however, the South as a whole began to emerge from its colonial economic status, and new opportunities for money-making came to Richmond. As it turned out, this Southern revolution began to stir almost exactly at the same time that outside influences affected the Richmond Jews. As the immigrant families began to build up their bank accounts, as the little tailor shop became the chromium-plated, neon-lit dress shop, as the young Jewish doctors developed large and lucrative practices, the papers were filled with daily stories of the Nazi persecution.
For the old families, this was a matter for polite if heartfelt horror. They could not possibly feel the personal involvement of the first or second generation Jew who realized that only a few years and miraculous good luck separated him from the possibility of the concentration camp and the gas chamber. The sixth generation Jew was more likely to feel the kind of sympathy felt by his Christian fellow-Southerners (for he dwelt in a region that was ardently anti-German and interventionist long before Pearl Harbor). But he was disturbed, too, by the fear that constant newspaper repetition of the unhappy events in Europe would have a harmful impact locally, that it would call attention to his Jewishness and give him a vulnerability that he thought had been buried with his ancestors. His reaction, in sum, was not unnatural in the circumstances: resentment, irritation, a certain embarrassment.
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For the more recently arrived Jews, there was a different but equally human reaction—deeper, more emotional, more outspoken, and perhaps more masochistic. They sought an outlet for their revulsion; if they could do little to stop Hitler by themselves, they demanded the minimum satisfaction of strong language—the kind of language which the minority, the leading old families, considered “bad public relations.” It was inevitable that the rising Jewish middle class should, at this point, begin to question the old leadership. By the time the war ended, it was possible to translate all their anxieties and resentments and guilt feelings into positive action. The remnants of Europe’s Jews were in the DP camps, desperately awaiting aid. The drive to build a Jewish state in Palestine took on a new, dramatic urgency.
Rabbi Calisch had sensed all this even as the war was going on, and, as one of his last activities, he helped found the anti-Zionist American Council for Judaism. With him, most of the old families tended to see in Zionism a threat to their own status in Richmond, and perhaps even to their hope that one day they would achieve full social equality. The concept of any form of Jewish nationalism was alien to their whole way of life. It was hardly surprising that they should have made of Richmond a stronghold of Jewish anti-Zionism.
But the emotional stirrings among the newcomers were too vital to accept all this. The newly wealthy, the newly successful, the newly confident, could not be impressed with arguments that raising large sums of money for the United Jewish Appeal, for example, would antagonize their Christian neighbors. Having both money and energy, they began to assert their own leadership.
Before the war, a Jewish Community Council had been established under Beth Ahabah leadership to raise money in a modest way for various charitable causes. Now it was taken over as the vehicle for the highpressure fund-raising so familiar in other cities. There was an immediate response. In 1945, the Council collected $118,000; in 1946 the collections jumped to $309,000; last year the Council raised $431,000, with at least eighty-five per cent of all Jewish families contributing. These totals may not match other communities of equal size and wealth, which have had a psychological head-start; but it is the rate of increase that is significant. For this rate of increase stands in direct proportion to the shift in power from the old and settled families to the new and aggressive ones.
Several years ago the B’nai B’rith lodge (once a virtual Beth Ahabah stronghold, now no longer so) sponsored the creation of a Jewish Community Center, over the violent opposition of the old families, who considered the idea to reek of separatism. After much controversy, a small building was taken over, but it burned down recently. This year the Community Council is raising almost fifty thousand dollars for a new one; the Center and the “Jewish activities” planned for it are regarded by the new leadership as a victory over “the old way of thinking.”
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What is actually happening now, however, is that the two forces, the one stable and rooted and conservative, the other aggressive and new and emotionally involved, have begun to find a common meeting ground. The Council itself is no longer run by a tight little board of aristocrats; it now has twenty-eight members, from all segments of the community, who probably emerge from their wrangling with a close approximation of what the Richmond Jews as a whole would wish.
Nor do these wishes mean the disavowal of everything associated with the past. It is apparently possible to be a Zionist and at the same time to accept Richmond’s belief that, while everyone presumably has ancestors, only the privileged have ancestors who lived in Richmond. Both old and new families have so far resisted the arguments of the earnest young social worker who believes that the Ladies Hebrew Benevolent Association ought to change its name to something less redolent of 19th-century charity. The Ladies Hebrew Benevolent Association, after all, succored Confederate wounded in the War Between the States. If the name was good enough for those heroes, it is good enough for the leading Richmond Jewish social agency in our own prosaic time.
So the new trend is having its effect on the relative newcomers as well as on the oldtimers. The old-timers are not at all as anti-Zionist as they used to be; they have learned that no one in town will cut them dead if they contribute handsomely to the UJA; and they have learned to respect the drive and common sense of many of the new leaders. As for the latter, they have mellowed a little in their resentment against the cautious ideology of the aristocracy. Their Zionism, certainly, is by no means so melodramatic as in many other communities. Their attitude toward Israel is far more likely to involve disinterested and genuine sympathy than passionate devotion. The question of dual loyalty, which disturbs some people in other cities, would be ridiculous here. Both the old Jewish families and the new ones have, during the war and in the peace, played leading roles in city-wide civic and philanthropic activities, from war bond drives to community chest campaigns.
Curiously enough, the oldest old-timers and the newest newcomers among Richmond’s Jews seem to hold identical standoffish attitudes toward the Negroes, though for utterly different reasons. The old families have tended to adopt the classical-romantic posture of mammy-nursed paternalism toward “the colored element.” Among the newcomers, mostly small shopkeepers, there often exists the tradesman’s contempt for the Negro customer who is considered less trustworthy than the white; and the feeling is reciprocated by many Negroes, who waste no love on such contacts with the white world. But these are the extremes. Between the two, most Richmond Jews fall into what is now clearly an American Jewish pattern of liberal behavior as far as Negroes are concerned. The most striking case of tangible advancement in Negro-white employment practices is being conducted quietly and effectively by a Jewish merchant (who feels that its value would be vitiated by public discussion in the present experimental stage). And about one-third of the money contributed locally to organizations aiming to further Negro rights comes from Jews—an amount obviously out of proportion to the Jewish population.
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The synagogues remain the key to Richmond’s Jews. Beth Ahabah’s membership has swelled tremendously in the five years since Dr. Calisch’s death. Nearly every old Jewish family can still be counted among the six hundred or so that belong to it, but an increasing number are those who ten years ago would have been excluded on genealogical grounds. Conservative Beth-El, next in size, this year dedicated a new temple, an uncompromisingly modern structure of which its members are extremely proud. The Orthodox Beth Israel combines the remnants of the old synagogues of Polish and Russian Jews, and is now the smallest of the three leading congregations.
(There is a fourth, a little shul named Aitz Chaim, where a few old folks pray without benefit of rabbis holding theological doctorates or of sermons on current events of a Sunday morning. Aitz Chaim has no great significance in the social scheme; the young folks are not attracted to it, and its dwindling membership is content to be left alone with the old-time religion. Besides, everyone in town knows that sooner or later Aitz Chaim will be absorbed by Beth Israel.)
The three synagogues are what count. Their combined membership probably runs as high as sixteen hundred families, a larger percentage of the total Jewish population than is usual in Northern cities. Services are generally well attended. The rabbis of all three are young and ambitious, with smooth faces and a remarkable similarity in sonorous pulpit diction.
By and large, you can still identify nearly any Jew in Richmond by his synagogal affiliation. It is not entirely an economic yardstick, for there are frayed aristocrats who show themselves at Beth Ahabah to hear the Sunday sermon, just as there are wealthy Russian-born Jews who attend Friday evening services at Beth Israel. The scale is social, and, therefore, still genealogical: Beth Israel harbors most Jews born in Eastern Europe, and many of their children; Beth-El is predominantly second and third generation; and Beth Ahabah consists mostly of people whose grandparents, at least, were born in the United States.
Like all human relationships, of course, these distinctions are too flexible and fluid to be quite as simple as this. In a single family, you may find members of two different synagogues (though rarely of three); and indeed there are a few Richmond Jews who, for reasons of their own, hold membership in two congregations. More significantly, there are many families in which the parents belong to one congregation, while the children, having grown up and established families, belong to another.
As for the young people who are not yet settled enough to think in terms of social barriers and hesitations, they are the purest evidence of the revolution that has taken Richmond. In school and college, and during the war, they mixed easily with people from other backgrounds, ignoring the old constricting patterns. The rate of intermarriage with Christians, as well as of intermarriage among Jews from differing social backgrounds inside Richmond, has in consequence been high in the past five or six years.
These intermarriages are, in most people’s opinion, usually successful. The city absorbs nearly any new development having to do with marriage and family and children, for these bespeak stability and continuity. The city also keeps a firm hold on most Jewish young people, whether intermarried or not; for the changing social pattern has been accepted by them as a matter of course, and the prospect of business and professional opportunity in Richmond is altogether attractive (more so, apparently, than for many ambitious young non-Jews who go north to seek their fortunes).
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Nevertheless, for the Community as a whole, the three synagogues are steps in the social ladder, progressing from Orthodox Beth Israel to Conservative Beth-El to Reform Beth Ahabah. Since the barriers to Beth Ahabah have been lowered, the congregation has become the largest in the community. Similarly, the Jefferson Lakeside Country Club, once a Beth Ahabah stronghold, has opened its doors to relative newcomers—hampered only by lack of space to absorb the flood of membership applications.
The new content of Richmond’s Jewishness thus lies almost wholly in synagogue membership for social purposes, and in the giving of funds for humanitarian purposes. The ghost of Rabbi Calisch may shudder at the implication of social climbing, or at the uses to which these funds are put. But the change has come, and no one could stop it now. Neither does anyone know where it will end. If Rabbi Calisch, as has been claimed, did not succeed in giving his coreligionists the “inner Jewish content” with which to cope with the calamities and the ideologies of the past ten years, neither have the new communal leaders so far provided Richmond’s Jews with anything newer than a crisis psychology which is stale by now.
This, perhaps, is why no new Jewish image has emerged for the Richmond Christians. The whole South is changing; Richmond is changing; and the Richmond Jews are changing too. But the changes are still so fluid that Richmond, with its adherence to the past, prefers to adhere to the recognizable symbols.
“Dr. Calisch continues to represent the Jew for most of us,” said Virginius Dabney, the distinguished editor of the Richmond Times Dispatch. “Everyone admired him. He was a fine man.”
“But Dr. Calisch is no longer alive. What has replaced him as the symbol of the Jew in Richmond?”
“Well,” said Mr. Dabney, “after all, it has been only a few years since Rabbi Calisch died.”
Who will wear the mantle in the new Richmond of the generation ahead?
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