The Blogs: Vanishing Act

Here today, gone tomorrow. That’s the story of every town where my family has been in exile. Nadworna. Solotwina. Dukla. Grodno. Sejny. Chicago’s South Side. And now, Michigan City, Indiana, where I grew up.

I used to call Michigan City “that great center of Jewish art and culture”, tongue only partially in cheek, because the community, while small, was vibrant, intense, the center of our lives. As was the South Side of Chicago, where my 2x great grandfather, Tanchen Wilkes, lived and died after emigrating from Lazdijai, also vibrant, intense, and now gone.

The only still-thriving Jewish community where my ancestors lived is the one where I live now, Jerusalem.

We know what happened to those European communities, some of which I have visited. But the south side of Chicago – once the greatest concentration of Berksons in the world – and Michigan City, the Jerusalem of Northwest Indiana, how could those Jewish communities disappear?

On a visit to the U.S. in the summer of 2024, I corralled my brother and nephew to accompany me on a Chicago-area Tour of the Ancestors. Off we went with a list of ancestors, cemetery names, and as much information as we could find.

First stop was Oak Woods Cemetery on the south side of Chicago. Built in the 1850’s, it was one of the earliest designed lawn cemeteries in the U.S. And at the very back of Oak Woods is an unmapped, unvisited, and largely unknown Jewish cemetery. Established in 1874 by the Ohav Shalom Marijampol congregation in the Maxwell Street neighborhood, it largely served immigrants from Lithuania, like my 2x great grandfather, Tanchen Wilkes. This branch of my family was new to me and I wanted to discover everything I could about him.

Born 1819, he arrived in the U.S. in 1892, and was buried nine years later in Oakwoods Beth Hamedrosh Hagodol. Per family memories, he was a carriage maker and worked in ormolu. This is supported by his daughter Ita Gita’s birth registry, which lists him as being a carpenter (stolarz), and her death registry which lists him as being a wheelwright (kołodziej). He died at 814 62nd Street, the home of his daughter Perl Wilkes Berkson, my great grandmother.

The cemetery is unmapped and unvisited. We were the only living people there; and on the verge of giving up after hours of searching, we found him.

But the congregation that built this cemetery, the Maxwell Street community where they thrived, is gone. Vanished. All that’s left is the cemetery.

The Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago has produced a short film about Oak Woods, recognizing it as all that remains of a once-vibrant community, which moved west, north and to the northern suburbs.

Soon, I fear, the cemetery will be all that’s left of the Michigan City Jewish community where I grew up. I dragged my son on a tour of my personal landmarks: childhood home, children’s theater, dance studio, high school, and we made two stops: Sinai Temple and Sinai Cemetery. The president of the synagogue unlocked the door for us, and the moment we stepped inside, every inch came to life for me. Every room was loaded with memories, and the personalities so vivid. But now, we were told, the future of the synagogue is uncertain. A visiting rabbi comes twice a month. There are 30 people in the congregation on a good night. And everybody I knew is in the cemetery.

Trent D. Pendly, the excellent historian behind “A Jewish History of Indiana’s Dunelands”, says brain drain is behind the disappearance of the community; that the bright, well educated children of the first and second generation immigrants who settled here went off to college and never came back. There was nothing there for them.

And soon, there will be no there, there. Another Jewish community, gone.