Robert Bloom (1878 – 1975)

Robert Bloom was born in Lithuania and brought up in Dublin, Ireland. He arrived in the Yukon in 1897.1) Bloom was a travelling salesman who loaded up his goods and merchandise and travelled out to the creeks to sell them.2) He was one of the Yukon’s first lay rabbis.3)

Bloom was a prospector and a peddler who sold his outfit from Seattle to other prospectors. He officiated at the funeral of Isaac Simons who drowned in the Yukon River, and this started a proposal to create a Jewish cemetery in Dawson.4) He moved to Seattle from Yukon and then settled in Alaska in 1903 or ‘04. Robert Bloom co-founded Fairbanks Airplane Co. and was the chairman of Alaska Jewish Welfare Board. He married Jessie Spiro Bloom from Dublin who he met on a trip to London in 1914.5) Robert Bloom founded the first synagogue in Fairbanks.6) He served on the board of trustees of the Alaska Agricultural College and the School of Mines from 1921 to 1925. These schools became the University of Alaska.7)

1) , 3) , 5)
2006 website: http://www.chalom-yukon.ca/
2)
Fia Jampolsky, “The pioneering Jews who went north to find riches in the Klondike.” 20 November 2019. The Canadian Jewish News. 5 May 2020.
4) , 7)
Fla Jampolsky, The Jewish Presence in the Yukon. Jewish Cultural Society of Yukon, 2023: 34-35.
6)
Martin Gilbert, The Story of the Jewish people: Letters to Auntie Fori. Rosettsa Books, 2014: ixvi.