Welcoming Jewish Americans ELLIOT ZASHIN
Philip Seman’s Chicago Hebrew Institute helped Jewish immigrants adapt to American life during the early 1900s.
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early one hundred years have passed since the founding of the Chicago Hebrew Institute (CHI), which played a major role in the acculturation of thousands of eastern European Jews (and their children) who migrated to Chicago between the 1880s and the early 1920s. Today the CHI lives on as the Jewish Community Centers of Chicago, a vibrant organization that comprises seven centers located in the several pockets of Jewish populations in the metropolitan area. Many individuals collaborated to make the CHI an important institution for Chicago’s largely immigrant Jewish community, but CHI general director Philip Seman developed the goals and programs that made the CHI a highly successful experiment in mass acculturation. In detailed CHI annual reports, Seman expressed his observations concerning the Jewish immigrants and their children and put forth his views on the best ways to improve their lives. Born in Warsaw, Poland in 1881, Philip Seman came to the United States when he was twelve. He graduated from Adelphi College in Brooklyn and taught at the Jewish Orphan Asylum in New York City for two years. He moved to St. Louis to become superintendent of the Jewish Educational and Charitable Association in 1905; while in St. Louis he also taught in the school of social economics at Washington University and acquired a law degree from that institution in 1910. He then returned to Brooklyn to become executive director of the Federation of Jewish Charities. Philip Bregstone, author of Chicago and Its Jews: A Cultural History, remembers meeting Seman in Chicago in the summer of 1908. Viewing the Taylor Street property that the Chicago Hebrew Institute had recently purchased from a Catholic institution, “Seman mused aloud 4 | Chicago History | Spring 2000
Chicago Hebrew Institute general director Philip Seman (above) chronicled his views on Jewish acculturation in detailed annual reports, such as this one from 1941 (below).