We know that for the last 20 years of the 19th Century and the first few years of the 20th Century, more than a few pedlars made their way from various points in Central Canada down towards the Niagara Peninsula. These were men searching for a place to settle down where the local economy enabled them to make a living first and foremost. There were scores of towns in Southern Ontario that had a family or two listed in the various census results from those years who identified as Jewish. However, once in a while, as St. Catharines continued to grow in size, an itinerant pedlar would become a settler and put down roots. Such a one was Richard (Rachel) Nadell. We are not sure now where he came from but I am betting it was via Hamilton because he had family there and it was to Hamilton that he went to find a teacher for his son to prepare him for bar mitzvah. This was in 1902. By this time, Nadell had a growing family and had become a prominent merchant in the community.
Nadell thought it ridiculous that he had to travel the back roads to Hamilton for bar mitzvah lessons for his son so he instigated the search for a knowledgeable shul goer and teacher. He found one in Jacob Cooperman, pictured below of course as a much older man. Jacob Cooperman had come up to Buffalo from Boston, a widower, with five children at first but later accompanied by his niece whom he married. They moved to St. Catharines where Jacob became prominent as well, and helped the congregation move from rotating minyanim as needed for life cycle events and holidays to a new synagogue building to last for a century and more.
We know that Jacob Nadell stayed in St. Catharines long enough to see his family grown and his daughter Matilda marry another newcomer by the name of Maurice Morris who together raised their own family, the descendants of whom are still members of our community. Jacob Cooperman and his second wife Anna (Chana) had two children, one of whom became the founding president of the newly constituted Congregation B’nai Israel in 1960. In between 1902 and 1923, the Jewish families in St. Catharines banded together and created a congregation they called B’nai Israel.