(Jewish Group) In remote North Dakota, endless sky, a few gravestones, and the remnants of a little-known Jewish history

In the northeastern corner of North Dakota, roughly three miles east of the well-named village of Starkweather, on a small patch of unfenced land under a boundless sky, huddles a handful of tombstones. Some are hewn from granite and others are hammered from rusting tin, yet nearly all are more than a century old. While this burial ground place is striking, it is hardly strange. Where else but on this sea of windswept wheat would one find the graves of homesteaders who, in the tens of thousands, flocked to the Dakotas in the late 19th and early 20th centuries?

In his book Bad Land, the travel writer Jonathan Raban, gazing at a North Dakota graveyard, wonders about the impact these vast and often violent plains had on European settlers who believed that America promised them a kind of redemption. “Looking at the fleet of lonely derelicts on the prairie, awash in grass and sinking fast, I could guess at how that faith had been shaken.” Raban’s wonder might have deepened had he visited this graveyard, though. The names on the grave markers are not Norwegian — the original home of many settlers — but instead Jewish. Some of the inscriptions, on wood or tin, are too faded to read, but others are carved in granite not just in English, but also Hebrew: Joseph Canter (1905-1918); Anna Canter (1902-1914); Mandel Hill (1860-1935); Joseph Adelman (died in 1907); Israel Greenberg (1892-1903) and Charlotte Greenberg (1902-1906).

Last year, I learned about this graveyard from Joyce Greenberg, a formidable student of American-Jewish history, who is also the widow of Jacob Greenberg, the brother to Israel and Charlotte Greenberg, and the youngest child of Philip and Mollie Greenberg, who had emigrated from eastern Europe a few decades earlier. The youngest of the nine surviving siblings — he never knew Israel and scarcely knew Charlotte — Jacob was born in 1904 on a homestead in the northernmost reaches of North Dakota. The homestead was so far from the nearest town that when Jacob applied for a passport, “North Dakota” had to suffice as his place of birth.

Joyce might as well have announced that her late husband had been beamed down from a UFO over Roswell, New Mexico. Yet, once I began to research the history of the Greenberg family, my astonishment only deepened. The Greenbergs happen to represent one of the most fascinating currents of the great river of East European Jewish immigrants — more than 2 million — that flowed in America between the early 1880s and mid-1920s. Though the great majority settled in New York, where more than 1.5 million remained, several thousand found their way to the Great Plains, staking claim to 160 acres with the promise that, after five years of back-breaking labor, the land would become theirs.


Jewish headstones in an abandoned graveyard in North Dakota. Courtesy of Joyce Greenberg

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