Author and researcher Austin Reid -- Contributed

A local history project recently completed documents Steubenville and Weirton’s Jewish heritage.

And that undertaking was important to Austin Reid, a native of Lancaster, Ohio, who is working toward his master’s degree in public administration at Cornell University in New York with a concentration in public and nonprofit management.

It was during his undergraduate studies in history and political science at Capital University, where he graduated from in 2018, that a discovery served as the springboard for Reid’s project.

“Growing up in Lancaster, I noticed traces of the town’s former Jewish community, including a former synagogue building downtown and a Star of David on a war memorial,” Reid wrote in an e-mail to the Herald-Star in hopes that his story would be of interest to local readers, in part, as Passover approaches, or perhaps as inspiration to people interested in pursuing other local history projects utilizing local archives as he did.

Realizing that very little was written about Lancaster’s Jewish heritage, Reid documented the Jewish history of Fairfield and Hocking counties in 2017 as his capstone history project at Capital University.

But his interest didn’t stop there.

“While working on this project, I learned that many other small towns in Ohio were once home to organized Jewish communities,” he commented. “Most of these communities, however, had not been documented.”

Reid has worked to change that, having also written about Ashtabula County, Athens County, Chillicothe, Coshocton, Fremont, Piqua, Zanesville and other areas.

“While Chillicothe is the oldest Jewish community I have profiled, Steubenville and Weirton is the largest one,” he noted. “At one time the Jewish population of the area numbered as high as 1,000 people.”

Since graduating from Capital University, Reid has continued to research Ohio’s small-town Jewish life as a hobby. “I moved to Ithaca, N.Y., in June 2018 to take a position with Hillel at Ithaca College, a Jewish campus organization,” he explained, adding that he worked at the college until May 2020.

“This ongoing history project has allowed me to keep connected to my home state and engage with new people,” he commented of an undertaking important to him for two reasons — it “documents the contributions small-town Jewish communities made to American Jewish life, and it preserves a piece of Ohio’s history that risks being forgotten as many small-town Jewish communities fade.”

All of Reid’s research has been done remotely. “Primarily, I have utilized online newspaper archives, available through Cornell University or digitized material from the Digital Shoebox Project,” he explained of the latter being a project that aims to preserve historic artifacts from Southeastern Ohio.

It was largely through local and state newspaper archives that Reid uncovered the more than 170 years of local Jewish history, now included in the collections of the Rauh Jewish Archives in Pittsburgh and the Weirton Area Museum and Cultural Center. The Columbus Jewish Historical Society also has digitized the work: https://columbusjewishhistory.org/histories/steubenville-weirtons-jewish-heritage/

The Steubenville-Weirton history is 35 pages, according to Reid, who pointed out that “Jewish families are known to have lived in the area by 1850 and the last service held at Steubenville’s Beth Israel occurred in 2013.” Today, that’s home to the Prime Time Senior Center in Steubenville.

Reid corresponded with the Jefferson County Historical Association while working on the project, initially making contact in April 2021, and left with the impression that “It is believed to be the only work of its kind that documents the Jewish community from its earliest beginnings until its formal dissolution.”

The Weirton museum, he commented, has the full history paper in its collections along with some artifacts from the former Beth Israel of Weirton synagogue, long since razed, and the Steubenville museum is believed to have the history as well.

Reid’s introduction to the history notes Steubenville and Weirton “shared some communal services” that included a cemetery and “close familial and social ties.” The early history of Weirton’s Jewish community was documented in the book “West Virginia Jewry: Origins and History 1850-1958,” but “much of the early Jewish history of Steubenville has gone unrecorded” and “many developments in each community since 1958 have not been documented publicly,” Reid observes.

“The need to preserve this history becomes even more critical as some of the physical reminders of the area’s Jewish presence fades,” Reid wrote. The site of Weirton’s synagogue, for example, is a grass lot. The former Temple Beth El located at 608 N. Fifth St., Steubenville, is privately owned and was last used as a house of worship by the Phillips Chapel Christian Methodist Episcopal Church.

Reid ends the introduction with a goal: “While this work is too limited in its scope to profile every Jewish family that has lived in the Steubenville-Weirton area, it is hoped that it will provide a sense of how the area’s Jewish community developed and the contributions its members made to the region’s civic, economic and social life.”

The history is divided into sections that include Steubenville’s early Jewish families; Steubenville’s first synagogue, B’Nai Israel; Weirton’s first Jewish families and the establishment of Beth Israel; the Steubenville-Weirton Jewish community during World I and the Roaring ’20s; developments in the Steubenvlle-Weirton Jewish community during the 1930s; World War II and the early post-war years; Jewish life in the Tri-State Area from 1950 to 1964; the merging of Beth El and B’Nai Israel and the closure of Beth Israel of Weirton; and the closing of Beth Israel of Steubenville.

The stories of veterans are what Reid identified as among the information he most liked to single out in a story about his Steubenville-Weirton work, but other communities, too.

“When I write these history papers, I am always sure to document stories about veterans that I find,” he noted. “The first Jewish veteran mentioned in the paper is Henry Altman, who served in the Spanish-American War with the 2nd West Virginia Volunteer Infantry. Thirty-six local Jews served in World War I, including three sons of Rabbi Moses and Rebecca Peiros. Their names were David, Jacob and Joseph,” he pointed out.

“During World War II, an estimated 100 local Jews served in the armed forces. Two individuals who grew up in Steubenville — Leslie Caplan and Morris Denmark — were taken prisoner by the Nazis during their periods of enlistment. Both survived their time in prisoner of war camps,” Reid commented.

“Following the war, Caplan was awarded the Legion of Merit due to his efforts to provide for the medical needs of approximately 2,600 other prisoners of war from Feb. 6 to April 16, 1945. Caplan had been taken prisoner after the aircraft he was on was shot down while on a mission to Vienna. Caplan also was a Purple Heart recipient.”

Reid converted to Judaism in 2015.

“When I lived in Columbus, I was a member of Congregation Tifereth Israel. I was not raised Jewish. While my studies of Judaism have given me a greater familiarity with Jewish customs and history, what motivates me to write these history papers is that in many places these stories have gone unrecorded,” Reid noted.

“It is a piece of local historic preservation that I can contribute to.”

Reid can be contacted by e-mail to adr89@cornell.edu.