8 Things About Jews In Kansas
1) Approximately 17,775 Jews live in Kansas.
2) The nation’s only Kansas City Barbeque Society-sanctioned kosher barbecue festival takes place in Kansas City.
3) The Midwest Center for Holocaust Education was founded by Holocaust survivors, Isak Federman and Jack Mandelbaum, and is located in Overland Park, Kansas.
4) 2,000 Jews attend the University of Kansas.
5) From 1882 to 1886, there were seven attempts to start Jewish agricultural communities by Russian Jewish refugees who fled persecution under the czar. They did not last long, and disappeared by 1900.
6) The first Jewish congregation in Kansas, founded in 1862, was located in Leavenworth (famed site of penitentiaries).
7) In 2000, Kansas high school students wrote and put on a play about Irena Sendler, a Polish social worker who smuggled hundreds of Jewish children out of the Warsaw ghetto during World War II. The play, “Life in a Jar,” has been performed 315 times in America and abroad.
8) Arlen Specter, Jewish senator from Pennsylvania, was born in Wichita. His family later moved to Russell, hometown of future Kansas senator Bob Dole.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.
We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.
If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
