Twelve Immigrants Found B'nai B'rith in a Lower East Side Café

On October 13, 1843, twelve German Jewish immigrants gathered inside Aaron Sinsheimer's café on the Lower East Side and started a fraternal order to look out for each other. Led by a merchant named Henry Jones, they called it Bundes-Brüder, German for Brothers of the Covenant, since English still felt like a second language to most of them. One founder, Isaac Rosenbourg, later explained the urgency plainly, describing what he called the deplorable condition of Jews in their newly adopted country. The group's constitution promised the basics that Jewish communities back in Europe had always provided each other and that a young, still-forming Jewish New York had not yet built for itself: sick visits, help for widows, care for orphans. Within a few years the meetings shifted to English and the name changed with them, to the Hebrew B'nai B'rith, Children of the Covenant, the name it still carries today.