Jewish families from Eastern Europe and Russia have been among the immigrants to call Butler home, with roots in the city for nearly 200 years.

In fact, Jewish settlers lived in Butler as early as 1829, according to researcher Alice Leeds, when the young town was home to only 500-some residents.

Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, more Jewish people would arrive in the United States, drawn with millions of others to burgeoning industrial centers such as New York and Boston. Many would make their way to communities farther west.

One of those immigrants was born in 1886 in the town of Vievis, in present-day Lithuania. The youngest of four children, Joseph Gureyovich moved with his family to the city of Uman, in today’s central Ukraine. But after his father died, the family members dispersed.

“I was 9 years old then and from that time on I was on my own in this wide world of ours,” he wrote many years later. Joseph went to a boys’ trade school, graduating as a machinist at age 12.

By 16, Joseph was stepping off the boat at Ellis Island. Now Joseph Hurwitz, thanks to immigration officials, he worked in a variety of jobs — in cigar and garment factories, as a streetcar conductor, as a postal worker — and took English lessons at night. Living frugally with relatives and friends, he saved enough money for one big purchase: a steamer ticket for his sweetheart, Bessie Miller, whom he had met in Russia at age 12.

“In March 1905, the girl of my dreams, my future wife and now the mother of our three children, arrived in the United States,” he later recalled.

Eager for new opportunities and fresh air, the couple left their third-floor Brooklyn tenement in 1917 and moved to Butler, where Joseph joined a brother in business and later started his own, the Joseph Hurwitz Co., a scrap metal yard serving industries throughout the region.

Joseph and Bessie were part of a strong Jewish community in Butler and members of Congregation B’nai Abraham, founded in 1906. The Congregation’s first synagogue opened in 1911 on Fifth Avenue. To accommodate Butler’s growing Jewish population, the Congregation opened its current facility, on North Main Street, in 1956.

Joseph was also part of a strong community of Jewish entrepreneurs who opened furniture, clothing and jewelry stores; dental, legal and medical practices; bars and restaurants, and even Butler’s first licensed radio station, WISR, founded by David H. Rosenblum in 1941. These businesses served all Butler residents and included familiar names such as Friedman’s Market.

Butler media personality Larry Berg, who lived in Butler “for only 59 years,” through June 2023, explains that the success of early Jewish businesses often sprang from necessity.

“Like other immigrants, Jewish families often started with nothing because they had nothing,” Larry said. “In the early 20th century, when many businesses wouldn’t hire Jews, they opened stores of their own. The smart ones and the lucky ones found success.”

Joseph and Bessie’s children moved into white-collar professions. Daughter Bella graduated from Slippery Rock Normal School with a degree in education. But with quotas on the number of Jewish and Catholic teachers who could be hired by Butler Public Schools during the 1920s, she found a position in Summit Township before moving into a career in retail. Son Alexander, known as “Lucky,” became a dentist, opening a practice on Main Street in Butler. Second son Hy became a science teacher at Butler Junior High School.

When World War II broke out, Uncle Sam came calling. The Jewish residents of Butler hosted a farewell party at the Nixon Hotel on East Diamond Street, where Joseph read a poem as his two sons left “to join the armed forces of our beloved country, the U.S.A.”

While Alexander served stateside, Hy’s unit, including other men from Butler, was sent overseas. He was wounded at the 1944 Battle of Anzio when shrapnel exploded over a foxhole.

Discharged from the military, Hy spent a year in a Butler hospital but was reunited with his wife, Sylvia, and their young son. Hy would join his father in the family business.

If the names of Hy and Sylvia Hurwitz sound familiar, there’s a good reason.

“They were involved in everything,” Larry Berg said.

Sylvia, who met Hy on a blind date, was the first person Larry met in the city. Founder of the Butler Welcome Wagon, Sylvia was also president of Hadassah, a women’s civic organization at Congregation B’nai Abraham, worked for Century 21 Real Estate and sold advertising at WISR radio, working into her 70s.

Among his many roles, Hy was president of the Rotary Club and Congregation B’nai Abraham, a board member of AAA and PNB Bank, a Boy Scouts volunteer and Chamber of Commerce president. He rubbed elbows with some of the era’s biggest celebrities — prominent opera singers Beverly Sills and Roberta Peters, and golf legend Arnold Palmer — who came to Butler for community events.

Hy and Sylvia later started a Stroke Club in Butler, so survivors could receive speech and paralysis therapy at the Butler VA.

Bessie and Joseph had been among millions of Jews seeking new opportunities or escaping antisemitic violence and oppressive regulations in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Though they didn’t often speak about Russia, their granddaughter, Roberta Gallagher, says they passed on their traditions and values in other ways.

“I remember sitting on my grandfather’s lap as he read Hebrew-language newspapers,” she said. “I didn’t understand the words, but the language — beautiful.”

Roberta, a member of B’nai Abraham and a learning support professional at Broad Street Elementary School, said Joseph was more than a businessman.

“He was a poet,” she said, writing poetry to commemorate important occasions such as his sons’ World War II departure and family births. He was also an author, who wrote his 1949 autobiography in both English and Hebrew.

Joseph and Bessie brought only a few possessions from “the old country.”

“My grandmother brought her brass candlesticks, a samovar (ornate tea urn used in Russia) and a menorah,” Roberta said. “She dropped the menorah when she first arrived, breaking one of its legs. She wouldn’t have it fixed until everyone in the world could worship as they want.”

Roberta still has that menorah, with its broken leg.

Food was another important way to preserve family culture.

Among grandmother Bessie’s kitchen specialties was cholent, also known as “Sabbath Stew,” a slow-cooked dish of meat, potatoes and carrots, simmered Friday through Saturday. She also made varieties of challah bread and hard cookies with cinnamon and sugar or dates and nuts. That second variety were called “rocks” by the family, Roberta said.

As the decades come and go, Butler’s Jewish community has changed. As in other faith traditions, interfaith marriages and a decline in religious affiliation have taken their toll on synagogue attendance. As some Butler businesses have closed, many young people have left to find opportunities elsewhere.

But family connections stay strong.

“The younger generations are interested in learning about their heritage,” Roberta said, “and it’s important. We stand on the shoulders of those who came before.”

Katrina Jesick Quinn is a professor at Slippery Rock University and an editor of two books on journalism history, “Adventure Journalism in the Gilded Age” (McFarland 2021) and “The Civil War Soldier and the Press” (Routledge 2023).