Jewish populace remains close as numbers shrink
RAPID CITY, S.D. — The first Jews to settle in what is now South Dakota established themselves in Deadwood during the Gold Rush more than 150 years ago, finding a niche selling hardware, groceries, dry goods and more. By 1920, the state was home to about 1,300 Jews.
That community has dwindled to an estimated 390 people — less than a tenth of 1 percent of South Dakota’s population. No state has fewer. It’s a small but tightly knit flock that makes do without a permanent rabbi and worries too few children are coming along to sustain it.
“Nobody wants to be the last one to turn the lights out,” said Steve Benn, a neonatal doctor who serves as lay leader at Synagogue of the Hills in Rapid City. He orchestrates bar mitzvah ceremonies, performs ritual circumcisions and conducts funeral services.
The reasons for the decline vary. Some members stationed at Ellsworth Air Force Base in western South Dakota transferred elsewhere and took their families, some doctors working on Indian reservations were eventually reassigned, and other Jews simply left in search of better opportunities in more populous areas.
There are two active synagogues, one in Sioux Falls and another in Rapid City. A third synagogue in Aberdeen sometimes hosts services and Torah study groups. Rapid City’s synagogue was once a family home that was donated to the community by Stan Adelstein, a state senator who occasionally officiates weddings.
South Dakota is the only state without a permanent rabbi, which Benn says is because of “market forces.”
South Dakota’s last rabbi, Stephen Forstein, arrived in 1979 after the rabbi at the Sioux Falls synagogue died. Forstein was a part-time rabbi who also operated a lighting supply business that took him around the state.
“I’m out to sell a product, be it like lightbulbs or Judaism, and I make no bones about it — I’m selling Judaism,” he said in a November 1980 interview. But Forstein moved to Michigan years later. Since then, the community has been served by lay leaders and student rabbis from Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati who travel to the state regularly.
Young Hasidic rabbinical students who are part of a global community-outreach training program known as the Roving Rabbis also come to the state every summer, making in-home visits.
Benn worries that the Jewish community will continue to diminish. The Rapid City congregation has just one schoolaged child.
In September, the congregation welcomed Sara Eiser, its new student rabbi. She quickly identified her priority: cultivating the Jewish faith in the congregation’s only child.
Eiser said she wants the child “to be able to walk into a classroom and say ‘I’m Jewish, and I’m proud of it.’ ”