Archives West Finding Aid

Washington State has a large and active Jewish community that has been part of its history for nearly 150 years. Jews were among the first settlers in Seattle; merchant Bailey Gatzert opened a grocery and hardware store in 1869 and by 1875 was Seattle’s sixth mayor. Jews settled elsewhere in Washington as well; Marcus Oppenheimer arrived during the German migration of the mid 1800s, settled on the banks of the Columbia River, and in 1862 named a town (Marcus) after himself. The original town of Marcus was destroyed for the construction of the Grand Coulee Dam, but the town still exists in a nearby location.

By 1889, when Washington Territory became the forty-second state in the Union, Jewish citizens and businesses throughout Washington had been contributing to its development for four decades. Though the population of Jews in Territorial Washington numbered less than one percent of the area’s total population, their impact on the commercial and civic life of the territory was significant. Washington’s early history includes a Jewish Territorial Governor, Jewish state legislators, and Jewish mayors of several Washington cities. In Seattle’s non-Jewish community, Jews have had a leadership role disproportionate to their numbers. Though only about 2 to 4 percent of the total population, Seattle Jews have been influential in the city’s political, business, civic, and cultural past.

German Jews arrived with the first wave of settlers to the Northwest in the early to mid part of the nineteenth century, and Eastern European Jews arrived in the 1880s. By the first half of the twentieth century, strong Ashkenazic Orthodox and Reform communities had taken root in Seattle. The city’s two early Orthodox synagogues included a large number of learned men committed to traditional values, an extraordinary trait for a relatively small, remote Jewish community.

Unlike like most other American Jewish communities, Seattle also became the home for a large number of Sephardic Jews (Jews who trace their ancestry back to Spain and Portugal). The Sephardim who immigrated to the Northwest (mainly Seattle) in the early twentieth century came from Turkey, Greece, and the Island of Rhodes. By 1913, the six hundred members of Seattle’s Sephardic community made it the largest Sephardic community in any U.S. city outside of New York. Today, Seattle has the third largest Sephardic community in the U.S., after New York and Los Angeles.

This collection includes Washington State Jewish Archives photograph collections which contain ten or less photographs. WSJA photograph collections that contain more than ten photographs have been given separate individual finding aids. Each collection that has its own individual finding aid is noted in this finding aid. If there is a related manuscript collection it is also noted.

Forms part of the Washington State Jewish Archives.