New Jersey: Monmouth County Jewish Museum

InJersey.com is a place for everything and anything going on in the state. It's where I found out about the Jewish Heritage Museum of Monmouth County.

This post mentions one of the county's first Jewish philanthropists, its Jewish history and a program set for October.

The Jersey shore saw such rapid development in the 1800s that the museum calls the area the Jewish Newport. The story focuses on Sigmund and Bertha Eisner.

The first permanent Jewish communities in Monmouth County were established by German-Jewish immigrants arriving in the mid-1800's. By the end of the Civil War, sizable numbers of these businessmen and their families were well established in and around Keyport, Red Bank, Long Branch and Freehold. Synonymous with this development was the career of Sigmund Eisner, who was born in Bohemia in 1859.

The Eisner family eventually bequeathed their family home (photo at right) to the town of Red Bank to be used as a public library.

At the time when nearby Long Branch was America's premiere resort, Sigmund and Bertha Eisner joined the wealthy vacationing German-Jewish elite who made up the in-crowd of the "Jewish Newport on the Jersey Shore" as early supporters of the city's first synagogue.

The museum will present a program highlighting Eisner's career in"The Jewish Newport on the Jersey Shore," at 7pm, Thursday, October 8, at the Red Bank Public Library, 84 Front St., Red Bank, NJ.