Illuminating the Invisibility of the Other: Fargo Jewish Cemetery Chapel
View/ Open
Abstract
When we unravel the stories of Jewish people in North Dakota, we see that they intersect with
layers of Jewish experience across history. This community is both one of the most obscure
and exemplary examples of the Jewish American story throughout the world and time - a
scattered people, continually the “other” of society, whose future rests in the sacred rituals of
remembrance that have sustained the culture for thousands of years.
In the late 1880s, Jews were a notable minority among the waves of ethnic immigrant groups
flocking to North Dakota. In the 1950s, the population of Fargo, alone, was around 500 people
(Jewish Virtual Library, n.d.). Yet in 2022, it is estimated there are no more than 400 Jewish
residents in the state of North Dakota.
This number suggests the reality that the Jewish community in North Dakota is nearly invisible,
dwindling and in need of a reinvigoration of communal memory. A cemetery chapel here holds
the potential to become a destination of remembrance and an opportunity to participate in
Jewish life. The fundamentally spiritual and communally mnemic nature of cemeteries holds
the potential to illuminate the invisibility of Jewish stories in North Dakota while uniting them
with Jewish experiences throughout history.