Women’s History Month, celebrated in March in the United States, is an annual observance to highlight the contributions of women to events in history and contemporary society. Each Friday during March, we will cast a spotlight on a woman leader who contributed to the sustainability of Jewish Buffalo. Our first spotlight is on Rosa Coplon, born Rosa Berman in 1855, in Shavl in the Russian Pale Settlement (now a part of Lithuania).
In 1878, Rosa married Samuel Coplon, a skilled glazier, and began raising a family in Shavl while working as a fishmonger. She had six children with her husband, only four of whom survived to adulthood.
European countries suffered major economic hardship and famines during the nineteenth century, including Russia in the 1890s. At the same time, demand for both skilled and unskilled labor rose in the United States largely because of industrialization. These circumstances created incentives for immigration from Europe to America. Many found jobs in the factories of Buffalo, and other cities around the state, or founded businesses that earned them prosperity.
Seeking an escape from economic privation, the Coplon family emigrated and moved to Buffalo in 1890. They lived on the East Side, first on Mortimer Street, then on Jefferson, and settled eventually on Broadway in 1900, living above their family business, S. Coplon & Sons Paper Hangings (and) Paints, Oils & Glass. Ten years later, David Coplon created D. H. Coplon Wallpaper and Paint Company at the same location.
The Coplons were successful and became philanthropists, best known for gifting their family home for use as the first Daughters of Israel Jewish Old Folks Home, later known as the Rosa Coplon Home.
At this time, before a nationally funded social security framework existed, elderly family members were cared for either with their family members or in charity and private nursing homes. Some of the Jewish residents of private nursing homes were Yiddish speaking. They experienced institutional frameworks that were only English speaking as isolating and lonely places. Many of the elderly Jews who came to America from Eastern Europe had lived within Orthodox Jewish traditions and wanted to maintain those customs including eating kosher food and observing Jewish practice.
The plight of elderly immigrant Jews isolated in private elderly facilities troubled Rosa Coplon and other Jewish women who knew this situation was likely to grow over time. This group of like-minded women banded together to help Jewish elders experience a life that was more supportive, and where familiar language and customs were part of their lives. In 1910 they created the Daughters of Israel Jewish Old Folks’ Home.
The group expanded when it joined with another group of Buffalo Jewish women from the West Side of the city in 1912, who also wanted to support a Jewish home for the elderly. Tragically, after a decade of involvement in the planning, fundraising, and opening of a Jewish Old Folks Home, Rosa’s own life was cut short when she died at home following an accident in 1920. Family members, however, took up her work, and the Jewish seniors’ home was renamed in her memory: Rosa Coplon Jewish Old Folks Home (RCJOFH): Orthodox Jewish Home for the Aged in 1924. It expanded its functions to include nursing to become the Rosa Coplon Jewish Home and Infirmary during the 1950s. In 1993 a new Campus form of the home relocated to the suburbs and was subsequently renamed Weinberg Campus in 1994.
Rosa Coplon is buried in a family plot in Cheektowaga at the Temple Beth El Cemetery on Pine Ridge Heritage Boulevard in Erie County, New York.
Excerpts of today’s Spotlight are courtesy of The Jewish Buffalo History Center.
