Benjamin D. Lazarus

Merchant and reformer

Home of steamship agent and merchant Benjamin Dores Lazarus (1800–1875), who ran B. D. Lazarus & Co., a hardware store on East Bay Street. He and his brother Michael Lazarus were among the forty-seven young men who signed the 1824 Convention of IsraelitesA group of forty-seven mostly young men, who, in 1824, wrote a petition to the adjunta of Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim in Charleston calling for a variety of changes, including English-language sermons and an abbreviated service. When their petition was denied, they founded the Reformed Society of Israelites, the first organized effort to modernize Judaism in the United States. petition to the adjunta.Council or governing body of a synagogue. B. D. Lazarus lived on Tradd Street near the home of his parents, Marks and Rachel Lazarus, until 1840, when he married Cornelia Cohen (1805–1886) and moved into a larger house, also on Tradd, with his widowed mother and his two unmarried sisters. Despite their relatively advanced ages (he was in his 40s, and she five years younger), between 1841 and 1849, B. D. and Cornelia Lazarus had six children who survived to adulthood. Cornelia C. Lazarus became a wealthy woman in her own right when the estate of her father, Mordecai Cohen, was settled after his death in 1848. She received in trust for her life, with her children to inherit, three store buildings on Dewees Wharf, land in Cheraw, South Carolina, and Fayetteville, North Carolina, and one-fourth of her father’s remaining property, including slaves, real estate, and personal goods.

Benjamin Dores Lazarus (1800–1875)

Benjamin Lazarus’s hymnal

Hymnal page, Day of Atonement

Hymnal page, New Year

Lazarus bill of sale for an enslaved woman