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The Jewish Community of Pottsville

Schuylkill County’s Jewish community came as merchants, not miners. From the 1830s, German-Jewish families settled in Pottsville, the county seat, and in October 1856 organized Congregation Oheb Zedeck — the county’s earliest-documented Jewish congregation. A second wave from Russia and Poland followed after 1870. These were the families who supplied the coal towns from stores along Centre Street; their community produced the firm that became Phillips-Van Heusen (PVH Corp.) and was the birthplace of the Nobel-laureate economist Gary Becker. It grew with anthracite and declined with it, contracting through the twentieth century to a small remnant centered on Oheb Zedeck and the Jewish Museum of Eastern Pennsylvania in Pottsville.

Markers: ★ verified · ✔ corroborated · ✎ corrected in research · ⚑ single-source or open. A few present-day and mid-century details rest only on recent local newspaper reporting that cannot be independently re-verified here; those are attributed and dated in the text, and marked ⚑.

At a glance

A quick map of the article; each point is sourced in the section that follows.

  • Founded: Congregation Oheb Zedeck, October 1856, by about ten German Jews in Pottsville.
  • Two waves: a German/Bavarian wave from the 1830s; a Russian/Polish wave after 1870.
  • Economic niche: merchants — dry-goods and clothing stores supplying the mining towns.
  • Business legacy: Phillips-Van Heusen (PVH Corp.), begun in Pottsville around 1881.
  • Native son: Nobel economist Gary Becker (b. Pottsville, 1930) — birthplace only.
  • Population: about 400 (1907), peaking near 1,000 around 1927, then declining to about 120 by 2019.
  • What remains: the Oheb Zedeck and Ohev Shalom cemeteries, and the Jewish Museum of Eastern Pennsylvania in Pottsville.

Merchants, not miners

Unlike the Welsh, Irish, and Slavic groups whose story is one of labor underground, the Jewish community’s story is one of commerce on Main Street. As the literature on the coal region puts it, Jewish merchants “converged on bustling coal regions in the late 1800s, not to work in mines, but to provide goods to working families” — beginning as peddlers and then opening stores; “no Jews ever became actual coal miners” (Jewish Action, 2012). ★ The clearest emblem of the pattern is the Phillips story below: an immigrant selling shirts to the miners, not joining them.

Two waves of migration

German and Bavarian Jews (1830s onward). The Encyclopaedia Judaica places the first Jewish arrivals in Pottsville in the 1830s, part of the German-Jewish migration radiating out from Philadelphia. ✔ The anchoring family is the Strouses: the Jewish Encyclopedia (1906) records that the future congressman Myer Strouse was born in Germany in 1825 and that his parents emigrated and “settled in Pottsville, Pa.” in 1832. ✔ Reading the birthplace column of the 1860 U.S. Census for Pottsville directly confirms the founding families as German-state Jews — concentrated in Bavaria and Hesse-Darmstadt, with Saxony and unspecified “Germany” among their kin. ✔ (The often-repeated town attribution “Oberstrau, Bavaria” is only weakly attested and is not asserted here. ⚑)

The 1856 founding. In October 1856, about ten recently immigrated German Jews organized and chartered Congregation Oheb Zedeck (also spelled Oheb Zedek in period directories), meeting at first in members’ homes; by 1861 it counted roughly twenty families. Its first officers were Emanuel Strouse (president) and Jacob Schloss (vice-president). ★ This is the firmest fact in the record: it is independently documented by W. W. Munsell’s History of Schuylkill County (1881) — published 53 years before — and by the congregation’s own 1934 history. Two of the founders, Emanuel Strouse and A. M. Greenwald, already appear in a Pottsville Miners’ Journal merchant list of June 2, 1855 — placing them in town a year before the congregation organized. ✔

Oheb Zedeck is the earliest-documented Jewish congregation in Schuylkill County: it predates the later-documented congregations in Mahanoy City (Beth Israel, 1888), Shenandoah (Kehillat Israel, c. 1888–1892), and Tamaqua (1913). ✔

Russian and Polish Jews (1870–1888). According to the congregation’s own 1934 history, “a continuous influx of immigrants from Russia and Poland, between 1870 and 1888,” formed separate Orthodox congregations — one (Keneseth Israel) on West Market Street, the other on Eleventh Street. ⚑ (single-source: the 1934 history) The Eleventh Street congregation was associated with Moses Phillips, an immigrant from Filipów in the Suwałki district of Poland, who had served as a synagogue sexton (shammes) there; his later “rabbi” title appears to have been honorific. ⚑ Pottsville’s congregations are reported to have amalgamated into a single body around 1898. ⚑ (single-source: the 1934 history)

Congregation Oheb Zedeck and its synagogues

The congregation worshipped in rented quarters (Thompson Hall) from 1859, then in 1875 relocated a former frame church to the Arch Street site near Third Street as its first synagogue — corroborated by both Munsell (1881) and the 1934 history. ★ That first permanent home on Arch Street still stands today as the parish hall of Trinity Lutheran Church. ✔ (per the 1997 “Exodus” feature)

The 1934 history records that a new grey-brick synagogue was then built on West Arch Street — cornerstone laid December 28, 1913, dedicated August 30, 1914, at a cost of $25,000. ⚑ (single-source: the 1934 history) The congregation took the Reform side in an 1868 schism; modern listings describe it as Conservative, but the date of that transition is undocumented. ⚑

Later building history rests on local newspaper reporting. According to a February 22, 2026 Republican-Herald / Standard-Speaker retrospective, the congregation — then about 275 families — moved in 1960 into a 25,000-square-foot building on the 2300 block of Mahantongo Street. ⚑ (paywalled reporting) As membership fell, July 2008 Republican-Herald reporting records that the congregation sold the Mahantongo Street building in 2007 (to the Life Centre Foursquare Gospel Church) and in 2008 bought the smaller two-building complex at 2400 West End Avenue for about $300,000 — its present home. ⚑ (paywalled reporting; an earlier research draft had conflated the two buildings — they are different properties, sold and bought a year apart ✎)

Cemeteries. Two Jewish cemeteries survive. The Oheb Zedeck Cemetery sits on upper North Centre Street in Pottsville; Wikidata records its coordinates at roughly 40.697° N, 76.203° W (Q117589562), and Find A Grave catalogs roughly 741 memorials there. ✔ The Ohev Shalom Cemetery in Mount Carbon is a separate institution, tied to the Jewish community of Minersville rather than to Oheb Zedeck (Find A Grave). ✔ In July 2021 the Oheb Zedeck cemetery was cleaned by the Schuylkill County Historical Society — an outside body stepping in, a sign of the congregation’s diminished capacity (Republican-Herald, 2021). ✔

The community in numbers

The community’s size is best traced through the American Jewish Year Book, whose Pennsylvania directories were read verbatim for each decade (2019 from the Berman Jewish DataBank). The series shows a community peaking in the late 1920s and then following the textbook anthracite-region decline:

YearEstimated Jewish population
1907400
1919400
19271,000 (peak)
1937935
1948870
1983500
1991250
2019120

★ Figures read verbatim from the American Jewish Year Book volumes (1907) and the Berman Jewish DataBank (2019). No town-level Jewish count exists for 1960 or 1970 — the by-community series lapsed after about 1951 and resumed in the 1980s, a genuine gap in the record rather than a missing read. ⚑ The trajectory tracks Pottsville’s own: the borough peaked at 24,530 residents in 1940 and has declined since.

Main Street: the merchant economy

Phillips-Van Heusen. The community’s marquee business story begins around 1881, when Moses Phillips and his wife, Endel, began selling hand-sewn flannel shirts to Pottsville’s coal miners. By 1887 the firm was M. Phillips & Son; the family later moved manufacturing to New York, merged into Phillips-Jones, rode the success of the patented self-folding collar and the Van Heusen line, and in 1957 took the name Phillips-Van Heusen — today PVH Corp., the parent of Tommy Hilfiger and Calvin Klein (Encyclopedia.com; Phillips family memoir). ★ (Phillips’s wife is confirmed as Endel, not the occasionally cited “Ida.” ✎)

The merchant district. Period directories and newspapers document a cluster of Jewish-owned stores on and near North Centre Street — among them the Rohrheimer and A. S. Strouse clothing houses (1870s–80s) and, into the twentieth century, Bohorad’s, the Freedman’s jewelry store, Juliette Fashions, and Dolores of Goubaud, a women’s boutique on South Centre Street. ✔ (the twentieth-century firms per the 1997, 2007, and 2026 Republican-Herald features) A Pottsville-area metal-products firm, United Metal Receptacle, was led by Oheb Zedeck member Richard E. Weiss. ✔ (per 2007 Republican-Herald reporting) (The Refowich clothing family, sometimes linked to Pottsville, in fact operated in Shenandoah and Freeland — not Pottsville. ✎)

Notable people

  • Gary S. Becker (1930–2014) — winner of the 1992 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, born in Pottsville on December 2, 1930 (Nobel autobiography; Wikidata Q191020). His family moved to Brooklyn when he was a small child. His Pottsville tie is his birthplace; no connection to the organized Jewish community is documented. ★
  • Myer Strouse (1825–1878) — a U.S. Congressman from Pennsylvania (1863–1867), raised in Pottsville after his family arrived in 1832; a lawyer who served as defense counsel during the Molly Maguires era (Jewish Encyclopedia). ✔
  • Moses Phillips — the Polish-Jewish immigrant merchant whose Pottsville shirt business became PVH (above). ★

Decline, records, and what remains

A merchant community attached to coal had little reason to remain once coal collapsed. The clearest articulated model — drawn from the coal region’s wider Jewish history — has three causes: the older generation died; the younger generation left for schooling and better work; and as mining ceased and the regional economy declined, no new Jewish families arrived to replace those who had gone (Jewish Action, 2012). ★ The retail dimension compounded it: the downtown “Main Street” that the merchants’ stores had anchored was hollowed out by malls and discount chains.

By the 2020s the congregation had become a small remnant. A February 22, 2026 Republican-Herald / Standard-Speaker retrospective described Oheb Zedeck as then having about 30 members and as the only synagogue still active in Schuylkill County, by then functioning largely as a by-appointment museum and archive. ⚑ (paywalled reporting; a current, fragile figure) No datable “final service” or formal dissolution has surfaced even in that retrospective — the congregation appears to have faded rather than closed on a fixed day. ⚑

The community’s records have not been dispersed. A June 2021 Republican-Herald feature reports that more than a century of congregation records has been kept by Dolores Delin, a longtime board member and acting president who has maintained the archive since the 1950s, housed with the Jewish Museum of Eastern Pennsylvania in the synagogue. ⚑ (paywalled reporting) The museum is the de facto record-holder for the county’s Jewish history.

Regional context. Pottsville’s was not the only Jewish community in the county, and its survival into the 2020s is the exception. In nearby Mahanoy City, Congregation Beth Israel ceased regular services around 2003; its synagogue’s wall collapsed in February 2026 and the building was demolished (JTA, 2026; Jewish Action, 2012). ✔ Shenandoah’s Kehillat Israel survives chiefly as a cemetery-maintenance entity, and Tamaqua’s small congregation had closed by the early 1960s. For the county-wide view of these communities, see the Jewish community profile in Cultures & peoples; for the immigrant and ethnic press that served them, see Historic newspapers.

Towns: Pottsville, Mahanoy City, Shenandoah

Sources

Frequently asked

When was the first Jewish congregation in Pottsville founded?
In October 1856, about ten recently immigrated German Jews in Pottsville organized and chartered Congregation Oheb Zedeck (also spelled Oheb Zedek), under its first president, Emanuel Strouse; by 1861 it counted roughly twenty families. The founding is corroborated by W. W. Munsell's History of Schuylkill County (1881) and the congregation's own 1934 history.
Did Jewish immigrants come to the coal region to mine?
No — they came as merchants. They began as peddlers and then opened dry-goods stores, clothiers, and shops that supplied the mining families; the literature on the coal region notes that no Jews became coal miners. The story is one of commerce on Main Street rather than labor underground.
What major company began with the Pottsville Jewish community?
Phillips-Van Heusen — today PVH Corp. The firm traces to around 1881, when Moses Phillips, a Polish-Jewish immigrant in Pottsville, began selling hand-sewn flannel shirts to coal miners; the business his family built became M. Phillips & Son, then Phillips-Jones, and was renamed Phillips-Van Heusen in 1957.
Was the economist Gary Becker from Pottsville?
Yes — Gary S. Becker, the 1992 Nobel laureate in Economics, was born in Pottsville on December 2, 1930. His family moved away when he was about four or five. His Pottsville connection is his birthplace; no tie to the organized Jewish community is documented.