1884 was a big year for Jews in Leadville, Colorado.
Go back 140 years and travel to this flourishing mining town, and you will meet a group of Jews who have organized a temple association—Congregation Temple Israel. They might even ask you to contribute to their efforts to build a pioneer reform synagogue that would seat 250 people.
Workers laid the synagogue cornerstone on August 11, 1884, and—with breathtaking speed by today’s standards—finished the building 33 days later at a cost of $4,000. It was dedicated on September 19 on a Shabbat that also coincided with the start of Rosh Hashanah.
Today, 140 years later, we know all these details thanks, in large part, to the commitment of one man who is passionate about the preservation of Jewish history in Leadville. He would modestly try to divert your attention away from his contributions as president of the Temple Israel Foundation and point instead to the artifacts that distinguish the Temple Israel Museum or to the online biographies of all the Jews who called Leadville home or to the need to preserve the Hebrew Cemetery in Leadville.
But the simple fact is that none of this would exist without the efforts of Bill Korn, a one-time motorcycle mechanic and self-described “landlord” who discovered Leadville in the late 1970s at the same time he was toying with the idea of getting a PhD in history.
“I was teaching in the Business School at CU Boulder, and I decided I would rather teach history,” Korn says. “In the end, I decided to make a living being a landlord and do history on the side. At Temple Israel Museum, we hire historians now, so I’m pretty sure I made the right choice because I can be a historian on my own terms.”
Korn would like to see everyone make a trip to Leadville to visit the Temple Israel Museum and the Hebrew Cemetery. He would be happy to share with you the many ways Jewish history and Leadville history are inextricably intertwined. But you may also be interested in learning more about Bill Korn’s Leadville history.
Motorcycles, a cemetery, and a temple
Motorcycles brought Korn to Leadville for the first time in the 1970s. He had friends who owned a motorcycle shop there, and he came to the mountains from his home in Boulder to tune motorcycles for altitude racing in Aspen.
“The Leadville I came to in the 1970s was not that different from the 1920s in that attitudes had not changed,” Korn says. “It was a good party town.”
Bill Korn
Korn came for motorcycles, stayed for skiing and biking, and in 1983, bought a duplex for $10,000 to use on weekends. He needed help renovating it and, by chance, found a Jewish contractor. That contractor took him on a trip to see what remained of Leadville’s Jewish cemetery where 130 Jews were buried.
“It had been engulfed by the forest,” Korn says. “It had nearly vanished beneath the overgrowth because no one had maintained it, and I felt someone should be taking care of the cemetery.”
Korn started buying more properties in Leadville and was told that one of the buildings he owned had once been a synagogue.
“It was a three-story private residence with no sanctuary so it couldn’t possibly have held a congregation,” Korn says. “But I started looking into it and found the correct building down the street one block.”
The more Korn investigated, the more he learned about the significant role played by Jews in the history of Leadville. At its peak in the 1880s, 400 Jews were living there out of a total population of 25,000. The Jewish population was large enough to support a second synagogue led by Orthodox Jews.
“In the early 1880s, Leadville was the second largest city in the state and the richest per capita,” Korn says. “It was an exciting place to be, and Jewish merchants saw opportunities.”
Portrait of David May, Founder of the May Company department stores
But by 1940, the Jewish population had dwindled to three as the boom town transitioned to an industrial community, and Jewish merchants left to look for business in other cities. By the time Korn found the correct synagogue building, Temple Israel had been turned into a four-unit apartment building.
“There were two significant properties associated with the Jewish community—the cemetery and the synagogue,” he says. “To me, this seemed really unusual for a relatively small town, and I felt they should come back to Jewish control.”
To take back control, Korn incorporated the Temple Israel Foundation in 1987. But that was just the beginning of his mission.
The Foundation and its mission
In its mission, the nascent Foundation had a problem. Korn had found the cemetery and the temple, but the Foundation had no money. To complicate matters, there was no record of ownership of the Jewish cemetery.
Korn figured out where the boundaries of the cemetery were within the larger cemetery and successfully petitioned the court to give the Foundation the title to the cemetery.
He connected with B’nai B’rith Colorado, and for the past 27 years, hundreds of B’nai B’rith and additional volunteers have spent a summer weekend cutting back the forest and repairing and maintaining the cemetery. The cemetery is now fenced. Sixty missing grave markers have been replaced, a new section has been opened for modern burials, and it has been reconsecrated.
“When you have that many people, you can get a lot of work done,” Korn says. “It has been amazing.”
Cleanup of the cemetery in 1972
The Temple Israel building presented its own challenges. It took 14 years for Korn to pay off mortgages on the building, but when he finally did, he worked with the Colorado State Historical Fund to fulfill his original vision—turning the temple into a museum.
Visitors to the museum will see some of Korn’s favorite artifacts—including one of the three stars of David that had originally adorned the steeple, discovered when workers were installing a French drain around the building. Also, the museum holds the original deed—found in the basement of the county courthouse—showing that the silver baron Horace Tabor donated the land for Temple Israel in the name of David May, as trustee for the Congregation, the same David May who later founded the May Company department stores.
Temple Israel Museum also has engaged in a sophisticated and unique mapping project that identifies 1300 Jews who lived in Leadville between 1860 and 1940, along with their biographies, place of residence, and work history.
There are no historical examples of antisemitism in Leadville, Korn says. He or the professional historians and docents would be happy to tell you more if you stop by the museum next time you are traveling through Leadville.
“The most interesting thing about Leadville in general is that it is a good example of the industrialization of the American West,” Korn says. “Learning about the Jewish community gives you insight into that process because they were so integrated with the rest of the town.”