By Andrew Muchin, Special to JTNews
You could excuse the Jews of this seaside peninsula community for feeling a little haunted by the local Jewish past.
David C.H. Rothschild, whom townsfolk called “the baron,” was a successful merchant and shipping executive until he put a pistol to his head on a local beach in 1886.
Israel Katz was a wealthy retailer and two-term mayor who disappeared from his house early one morning in 1917, never to be heard from again. Then there’s his widow, Adele, who’s said to rattle around occasionally in the couple’s former home.
However, the Port Townsend area’s corporeal Jews focus on celebrating the Jewish present and ensuring a Jewish future. Their Bet Shira chavurah is a trans-denominational group that meets for Shabbat and holiday worship, usually with a potluck dinner.
“We generally have one Friday night service a month [in rented space], all with lay leadership,” explains Barry Lerich, who lives on nearby Marrowstone Island. “We don’t have a rabbi or cantor.”
Bet Shira receives dues from approximately 65 households from as far away as Discovery Bay and Port Ludlow. Some 15 children attend weekly religious school, taught by a “really dedicated” volunteer, according to Lerich.
Bet Shira was founded in the 1980s, says Lerich, who moved to the Olympic Peninsula in 2001. That’s about a century after Port Townsend’s previous Jewish apex — a productive but rough-and-tumble era evoked by some of the town’s finest buildings.
In the mid-19th century, Port Townsend was a well-situated port city on the west side of Admiralty Inlet at the northern point of Puget Sound. A booming frontier town, Port Townsend attracted German Jewish immigrants who found their niche selling dry goods, fresh food and hardware.
Rothschild (1824-1886) was a Bavarian who arrived in Port Townsend in 1858, according to With Pride in Heritage: History of Jefferson County (1966) by the Jefferson County Historical Society. He claimed to be an unmoneyed member of the famous European banking family.
Rothschild established the Kentucky Store, featuring general merchandise, on Water Street, Port Townsend’s main drag. (Rothschild had lived in Kentucky.) The store grew to supply goods to retailers in along the sound and to outfit ships. The business came to be called Rothschild & Co.
A remnant of the Rothschild store today is the power-blue-painted wooden building that houses Nifty Fifty’s Soda Fountain on Water St.
In 1868, the elder Rothschild built a two-story wooden house atop the first bluff overlooking the city and waterway. Port Townsend’s oldest house and one of Washington’s oldest Jewish landmarks, Rothschild House is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It’s open for tours in summer.
Cream-colored with light brown trim and dark brown shutters, the house is surrounded by a lush garden and sits on a half-acre lot bordered by a white picket fence. The house and its furnishings indicate that the Rothschilds lived comfortably but not lavishly. No Jewish ritual items are apparent.
Most of the furniture dates from 1860-1886 and was made of inexpensive wood hand-finished to look more upscale. Visitors will also see a charcoal drawing of the elder Rothschild, Rothschild’s camphor wood chest that predates the house, a circa 1870 doll and doll clothes, and dining room chairs with claw marks and chewed knobs from a pet parrot.
No explanation of Rothschild’s suicide has been found.
Rothschild House affords a remarkable view of Admiralty Inlet and downtown Port Townsend, including the three-story red brick Waterman & Katz building on Water St., which was erected in 1885.
The building, still in use, is labeled “W & K” in front and features legible signage on the side of the building painted in the early 20th century, including one for the former Waterman & Katz Department Store.
Sigmund Waterman and Solomon Katz, both German Jews, arrived in Port Townsend in 1861 from San Francisco, after a failed attempt at running a sawmill in Port Orchard. They founded a store in 1862. But Katz, his brother and Waterman had all died by 1888, leaving the entire business to Katz’s son, Israel (1851-1917).
Israel Katz arrived in Port Townsend in 1868. He married in 1887 and soon built a large house at 933 Tyler St., up on the bluff.
“He was a fairly simple man, but his wife was a debutante, so he built her this mansion,” says David Hero, a Port Townsend businessman who owns the former Katz house.
“The story is that the wife had a torrid love affair with a military man and left Israel and moved with her lover to San Francisco,” Hero continues. The lover eventually left Adele.
Meanwhile, Israel had expanded his business interests to banking, timber and real estate, and served on the City Council, as well as as mayor for two terms. On Jan. 14, 1917, two weeks after leaving office, he mysteriously disappeared.
Author Thomas Warner Camfield, in Port Townsend: An Illustrated History of Shanghaiing, Shipwrecks, Soiled Doves and Sundry Souls (2000), depicts Katz as “reportedly… in high spirits the day prior to his disappearance.” He had visited with his sons and an old friend, Max Gerson, a Jewish businessman who had also served as the mayor of Port Townsend.
Israel saw his son at 3:20 a.m. as the younger Katz left the house to catch a steamer. At 7 a.m., a girl employed in the house heard Israel Katz’s dog barking. She knocked on Israel’s bedroom door, but found only the dog. Phone calls around town failed to locate Katz. A search of his room turned up his watch and eyeglasses. His overcoat was downstairs.
The disappearance remains unexplained.
However, Port Townsend may possess traces of Adele Katz.
“I don’t believe in ghosts, but people claim to have seen one in the old Katz house,” Hero says. “People who claim to have seen a ghost have seen a female one, so it must have been his wife.”
The Katzes, Rothschilds and Waterman all hid their Judaism. In fact, after a newspaper described Mayor Israel Katz as Jewish, he wrote a letter to the editor arguing that the paper had no right to print the information.
The members of Bet Shira don’t run Port Townsend like the earlier Jews did, but they’re comfortable enough with their Judaism to announce their activities in the local newspaper. These proud Jews have rid themselves of all sorts of ghosts.
Milwaukee, Wisc. resident Andrew Muchin writes about Jewish history and culture for the Jewish and general media.