The Milford Chronicle of April 26, 1940 printed the following announcement:
“MRS. CECELIA WOLFSON a converted Jewess will conduct a two-week Evangelistic campaign in Goshen Methodist Church, Milton, beginning Sunday morning, April 28, and continuing through May 12. Everyone is welcome.”
Itinerant preachers were common in the Methodist churches of the 19th and 20th centuries. When special evangelizing services or a summer camp meeting were held, guest preachers were often invited by the organizing congregation to speak and win over the souls of as many attendees as possible. Cecelia Wolfson had preached all over the eastern U. S., and locally at Lewes, Ocean View, and Millville, but this was her first engagement in Milton. Over the previous fifteen years she had acquired a reputation as a straightforward, humble, and magnetic speaker.
This announcement received no further mention or promotion in the paper, and would have remained innocuous if not for the use of the strangely archaic word Jewess, which caught my attention immediately. The use of a loaded word like Jewess to refer to a Jewish woman grates on modern sensibilities. I was immediately reminded of Rebecca of York in Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, which I last read in high school fifty years ago.
Cecelia Minsky was born in Czarist Russia in 1899, to Mordechai Minsky (or Minsey) and Riva Epstein. According to Cecelia’s often printed biographical sketch, her father was a rabbi, though we don’t know for sure whether he was Orthodox or Conservative, or his synagogue. The spelling of Cecelia’s maiden name is uncertain, because her brother Max (probably her twin), a rabbi, spelled it Minsky and another brother Isaac, also a rabbi and cantor, spelled it Minsey. Her death notice on May 18, 1966 in the Philadelphia Inquirer used yet another variation of her maiden name: Munsey.
Although she often told her life story in her preaching engagements, there is very little to go on in the press. One of the few published accounts of the family’s history has them fleeing an uprising with nothing but the clothes on their backs, seeing their house burned down and their grandfather killed. Given the timing of their arrival in the U. S. in the year 1908, a decade before the Bolsheviks mounted their October Revolution, what drove the family out of Russia was most likely to have been the wave of pogroms throughout the Pale of Settlement between 1903 and 1906. Having arrived in New York in 1908, they were processed at Ellis Island and may have experienced delays in obtaining permission to enter the U. S., but ultimately they were able to reunite with Mordechai who had emigrated ahead of the rest of the family. In 1916, Cecelia Minsky became the wife of Abraham Wolfson, the American-born son of Polish Jewish immigrants. Possessed of a good singing voice, she had aspirations for a career on stage.
Her first appearance in the American press was in the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania Telegraph, July 25, 1918, and it reads like a press release. She was visiting her brother Isaac Minsey, a cantor at a local synagogue. She described herself as studying music while a member of the Metropolitan Opera Company in New York. She also submitted a photograph of herself in a Red Cross worker’s uniform that looked a lot like recruiting posters for military nurses and the Red Cross. Her husband was “attached to the New York military police;” this is all that was ever made known about him other than what could be found in U. S. Census enumerations.
Cecelia gave at least two accounts of what led to her conversion to Christianity and estrangement from her family. In both accounts she makes reference to “a lucrative stage career” which she gave up to engage in evangelistic and missionary work. One version of the story has her falling seriously ill and needing 22 months to recover; during her hospital stay, she read the Christian Bible and the New Testament, and conversed with missionaries from a New York society.
Another version of her conversion story was published in the Paterson Morning Call editions of October 3 and November 11, 1927. The two articles describe her conversion having taken place in 1924, and provide more of the story around it. According to these reports, she stumbled across a Bible on the street in Washington Heights; she picked it up and started reading it while riding a New York City subway train on her way to rehearsal in the theater district. She was grabbed by one line: “Ye cannot serve God and Mammon” (Matthew 6:24). Two new pieces of information appeared in these articles: the inevitable estrangement from her rabbi father, and her involvement with an actual theatrical production, Blossom Time. The production ran from 1921 to 1922, which helps in determining the approximate period of Cecelia Wolfson’s theatrical activity. A two-year hospital convalescence between 1922 and 1924 following a serious illness led to gradual involvement with a Protestant missionary organization and the end of her theatrical ambitions.
From what can be put together from these stories, it is clear that Cecelia did not have a “road to Damascus” type of awakening and a quick conversion. On the contrary, she wrestled with the plight of friends, family and countless generations of Eastern European Jewry – the Ashkenazim – victimized by violent pogroms and discrimination by the Christian population that kept most of them impoverished and powerless. Probably uppermost in her mind, however, was the rift that this would cause in a family that included three rabbis.
There are only sketchy details of what the break with her family was like. It was acrimonious at best, and painful for everyone; Cecelia spoke only of what happened with her father, who, furious with his daughter’s choice, spat on her and threw her out of the house. Nothing ever surfaced in the press regarding her two rabbinical brothers, Max and Isaac, but it is quite likely that they rejected her, if not as dramatically as her father did. Her husband Abraham, however, did not leave her; the 1930 Census still shows the family living together. She would end up a young widow in the 1930s.
We don’t know the exact date of her conversion, but the first account of her preaching to a Christian congregation appeared on October 16, 1926. Here she made it known that she sang on the Broadway stage before her conversion, and was the daughter of a rabbi. A second preaching event was announced in the December 24, 1926 edition of the Paterson (NJ) Evening News, and contains the first use of the term “converted Jewess” to appear in the press in connection with her activities. A brief biographical sketch mentioned her father and two brothers being rabbis.
The Paterson Morning Call of November 11, 1927 printed a brief mention of Cecelia Wolfson’s conversion, stating that she was a Christian only 3 years. That dates the pivotal events of her life – conversion and estrangement from her family – to about 1924.
Announcement of her preaching engagements appeared throughout 1927 and 1928. By this time, she was connected with the City Missionary Society of New York. From 1929 to 1931, there is nothing in the press about her activities.
By 1927, what we know of Cecelia is that she had a son, Stanley Robert, born in 1919. What was not reported at the time was that she had had two other children, both of whom died very young. Stanley also fell seriously ill and caused his mother great despair, and it is possible that she took a hiatus from preaching to nurse him back to health. The other possibility is that she was evangelizing in England, which she claimed to have done, although no trace of this activity can be found in any newspaper.
In 1932 announcements of her preaching engagements, she is referred to as a “woman evangelist” and the other labels are dropped. After 1932, the other labels reappear, summing her up as a converted Russian Jewess and ex-actress. To be fair to the press, her highly effective preaching gets more than equal exposure. One can speculate that the return of the labels “Russian Jewess,” ex-actress, and rabbi’s daughter may have been a deliberate move to increase interest in her preaching engagements.
What would have been the reasoning for the interest in the preaching of a “converted Russian Jewess” and rabbi’s daughter? Given all of the accolades she received for the simplicity, power and empathy of her sermons, wouldn’t this have been enough to establish her credentials in the world of evangelists?
One possibility is rather cynical but quite plausible: differentiation from the crowd of preachers, and the attendant good publicity. Jews in the early twentieth century were still “the Other” and subject to increasingly vicious attacks by some newspapers and radio personalities like the notoriously anti-Semitic Catholic priest, Father Charles Coughlin. For a Jew to undergo conversion and actively evangelize, in the face of historic and modern anti-Semitism, was rare and extraordinary.
Then there is the character of Rebecca of York in Ivanhoe. Walter Scott’s novel is highly romanticized and not terribly accurate historically. The character of Rebecca typifies the way Jewish women were treated in literature of the 19th and early 20th century: exotic, alluring, with an often corrupting sexuality. While Rebecca is exotic, in appearance and in her Middle Eastern dress, and is a temptation to both Saxon and Norman knighthood, she remains a paragon of courage and virtue in most other respects. She is a healer who nurses the severely wounded Sir Wilfred of Ivanhoe, but rejects conversion even though she is drawn to the Christian Saxon knight; she also spurns the lovelorn Norman knight, Bois de Guilbert. By the story’s end she leaves England with her father, remaining steadfast in her loyalty to her religion and to her father, despite the conflicting passions that trouble her. In Walter Scott’s mind, this denial of the flesh is more Christian and admirable, and his view of the Jewish characters in the novel, and especially that of Rebecca of York, is in the main quite sympathetic.
In the case of Cecelia Wolfson, she did more than just adopt Christian qualities; she became one, at great personal cost.
Did the people who came to hear Cecelia L. Wolfson – the Russian Jewess, the ex-actress with the rabbi father– come to hear someone who had found her calling and a spiritual voice, or did they come to view her with a Western (i.e. Christian) gaze as someone rescued from perdition? One can make the case that the archaic label Jewess, which could be viewed as a pejorative or as the exotic “Other,” and the dubious morality of a stage actress would pique the curiosity of at least some of the people that came to hear her sermons. What we may never know is whether the use of these labels was at Cecelia’s instigation, a shrewd calculation perhaps picked up in her brief show-business career, or whether they were imposed on her by promoters. Unlike Rebecca of York, she did not remain steadfastly loyal to her faith or her father. She was, however, “exotic” in her origins, and a unicorn among evangelists; converts among Jews were infrequent and usually accompanied an interfaith marriage, but a convert like Cecelia with a flair for sermonizing and a fascinating back story was rare indeed. She certainly benefited from telling the dramatic story of her conversion and the subsequent rupture with her family; it drew crowds and was a successful tool in the evangelist’s kit. She was also, like Rebecca of York, a healer – of the spiritual variety. Ivanhoe was still widely read in the U. S. in the 1930s, and it is tempting to think that Cecelia Wolfson’s audience drew parallels between her and Rebecca. There is nothing available in print to support this speculation, and much of what drove Cecelia’s life story will never be known.
By the time of her Milton engagement in 1940, her career had peaked. There were sporadic notices of her engagements throughout the 1940s, but by the 1950s she is no longer in the public eye. She died in Philadelphia in May of 1966.
Sources
Schulkins, Dr. Rachel, University of Liverpool https://www.academia.edu/99923438/NINETEENTH_CENTURY_GENDER_STUDIES_ISSUE_12_1_SPRING_2016_Immodest_Otherness_Nationalism_and_the_Exotic_Jewess_in_Sir_Walter_Scotts_Ivanhoe
Milford Chronicle, 1936 – 1940
Paterson (NJ) Morning News, October 16, 1926 and November 11, 1926
Paterson (NJ) Morning Call, December 24, 1926
Milford Chronicle, 1926 – 1950