Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Back to Opinion

8 Things You Didn’t Know About Jewish Maine

Camp Modin, in the Belgrade Lake district, is New England’s oldest summer camp. // Courtesy of Camp Modin

1) Jewish population as of 2012: 13,890

2) The Portland JCC opened in 1938.

3) Camp Modin, established in 1922 in the Belgrade Lake district, is the oldest Jewish camp in New England.

4) Susman Abrams (1743-1830., a native of Hamburg, Germany, was the first known Jewish resident of Maine. He came to the state in the post-Revolutionary period and lived in Waldborough, Thomaston, and finally in Union, where he operated a tannery. Abrams married a Christian woman but did not himself convert to Christianity.

5) Captain Harold H. Gordon, Jewish chaplain for the North Atlantic Division, Air Transport Command, took a Torah, on loan from the Beth Israel Synagogue in Bangor, on his rounds in 1945. Gordon and the Torah racked up more than 75,000 miles on a circuit that covered bases as disparate as Reykjavik, Iceland and Bermuda.

6) Nearly two-thirds of Maine’s resorts refused to accept Jewish guests in the 1950s, the highest percentage of any state in the union.

7) Shaarey Tphiloh was the first synagogue in Maine, built in 1904. Etz Chaim Synagogue came into being because of a dispute that started in 1915 between Rabbi Chaim Shohet and the board of directors of Shaarey Tphiloh Synagogue over the dismissal of Cantor Lebovitz. Rabbi Shohet’s support of Cantor Lebovitz culminated in the rabbi’s dismissal in 1917. According to popular legend, the rabbi’s chair was removed from the sanctuary and placed in the bathroom.

8) The Maine Jewish Film Festival is held every March in Portland, the smallest city in the nation to host an independent and professional Jewish film festival.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.