Jewish Montanans: Rebecca Brinig

1857-1943

Butte, MT

Brinig's tombstone, picture from obituary

When the prolific Butte author and suffragist Helen Fitzgerald Sanders profiled the deceased retailer Moses Brinig in her “History of Montana,” she also devoted several sentences extolling his widow Rebecca’s business acumen, “wifely ministrations... [and being] a patient and noble mother...” to her seven sons and one daughter. 

But Rebecca Labovitz Brinig’s life, as detailed in an unpublished memoir and interviews with her youngest child, novelist Myron Brinig (also featured here), was laden with discontent, anxiety, and her self-agency denied. Born in 1857 in Romania, Rebecca was first charged with the care of her ten motherless siblings until she entered into an arranged marriage with Moses at the age of eighteen. As noted in an earlier MJP post, Moses and their oldest child left Rebecca and four younger children behind as they traveled to the US in about 1886, winding up in Minneapolis where Moses peddled produce. After three years’ separation, the family reunited and expanded as three more sons, including Myron, were born in the Milling City in the intervening six years. 

A 1994 University of Montana M.A. thesis, “Myron Brinig’s Butte: Jews in the Wide Open Town,” recounts Rebecca’s reaction in 1900 when Moses determined that, without any  consideration or input from her, the family of ten would relocate to Butte: “Rebecca alternately pouted and threatened suicide, all of which was wasted on Moses who thrilled at the notion of moving west...’Your father act[ed] like we’re on our way to heaven,‘ she later complained to son Myron, and then she added, ‘If this is Heaven, where is Hell?’”  

The prevalence of Reform Judaism in Butte presented another source of anxiety for the Yiddish-speaking Rebecca who kept a kosher household. Given most Butte Jews emigrated from eastern Europe and were Orthodox, it would have followed that A’dath Israel, housed in a renovated German Lutheran church on West Silver Street, would have more congregants than B’Nai Israel, the Reform synagogue, up the hill. But, to the detriment of A’dath Israel, the Mining City’s Reform congregation continued to grow as its less rigorous rituals and observances attracted Jewish families. 

In 1905, the Brinigs moved into a diminutive one-story brick cottage at 814 West Granite Street.  Rebecca lived there for another 38 years, enjoying occasional visits from her renowned novelist son, until her death at home in 1943.