The Hmong Health Care Professionals Coalition (HHCPC) is a partnership of Hmong public health experts based in St. Paul. Since its founding in 1995, the HHCPC has grown to become a central health resource for Minnesota’s Hmong community. Its members and volunteers conduct research, educate patients, develop best practices, and provide leadership to other health groups.

Orthodox Jews concerned about Jewish children who were cared for in non-Jewish foster homes founded the Jewish Sheltering Home for Children in North Minneapolis in 1918. The founders felt that such children would become estranged from their religion and culture. The home they organized functioned as a Jewish institution through the early 1960s.

For the first half of the twentieth century, the Talmud Torah of Minneapolis had two functions. First, it was a religious school for Jewish youth. Second, it was a community hub. When Minneapolis Jews moved to the suburbs after World War II, the Talmud Torah returned to its original educational purpose.

A small, committed group of Jewish immigrants raised the funds needed to build the Labor Lyceum at 1426 Sixth Avenue North in Minneapolis in 1915. The two-story brick and stucco building was a hub for radical Jewish cultural, political, and social activities for the next thirty-five years.

During World War I, African American Minnesotans wanted to serve their state and their nation. Historically, however, the U.S. military had been racist in its recruiting. It allowed African Americans to serve only in segregated units. Facing this institutional racism, the African American community of Minnesota asked Governor J.A.A. Burnquist to form an all-African American battalion of the Minnesota Home Guard. The Sixteenth Battalion became the first Minnesota-recruited African American military unit in state history.

When the Minnesota National Guard was federalized in the spring of 1917, the state was left without any military organization. To defend the state’s resources, the Minnesota Commission of Public Safety (MCPS) created the Minnesota Home Guard. The Home Guard existed for the duration of World War I, and units performed both civilian and military duties.

Three Hebrew schools were founded in St. Paul between 1880 and 1920—the era of peak Jewish immigration to the city. Each had its own constituency and neighborhood. After much negotiation, they joined forces in 1956 and took the name Talmud Torah of St. Paul.

Mount Sinai Hospital in Minneapolis was among the first private hospitals in the Twin Cities to admit minority doctors on its medical staff. The Jewish community opened it in 1951; by the time it closed in 1991, local hospitals were open to doctors of all races and religions.

Women members of Mount Zion Temple in St. Paul founded Neighborhood House in 1897 to assist poor Russian Jewish immigrants. For its first sixty-five years, the settlement house operated in the West Side “Flats”—the neighborhood near the Mississippi River across from downtown where the immigrants first settled.

Small Jewish communities arose at the turn of the twentieth century in several southern Minnesota market towns. In each, Jews gathered for religious purposes. But it was only in Rochester that a formal synagogue, B’nai Israel, was established. The founding of Mayo Clinic in 1905 created a need for a local congregation that could serve Jewish patients. After almost a century of holding worship services in former residences, B’nai Israel built its first synagogue building in 2008.