The Ladies Hebrew Benevolent Society and the benevolent-society era

c. 1861 — minutes survive 1894–1916

What it was: Fort Wayne's Jewish women organized benevolence early. The Ladies Hebrew Benevolent Society's minutes for 1894–1916 survive, and in 1911 the society celebrated its fiftieth anniversary with a jubilee luncheon at the Anthony Hotel — putting its founding about 1861, a generation before the city's tax-supported institutions. Mrs. M. Lamley, one of three surviving charter members, read the society's history at the jubilee: quiet works of charity, in the newspaper's phrase, carried on for fifty years.

The wider pattern: The society was one of dozens of membership benevolent associations — church aid societies, fraternal relief orders, ethnic mutual-aid societies — that carried Fort Wayne's relief work through the 19th century, the era historians call organized charity: relief investigated and given by societies rather than by the county alone. Indiana's own organized-charity movement was led from Indianapolis (the Rev. Oscar McCulloch's Charity Organization Society there dates to 1878, and the State Board of Charities to 1889); no Fort Wayne Charity Organization Society chapter founding is documented in the sources reached, and none is asserted here. What Fort Wayne demonstrably had, from the minutes themselves, is the work at household scale: bills allowed, garments sewn for charity, donations sent as far as Turkey in 1912 for sufferers there.

Sources:

1. Ladies Hebrew Benevolent Society, minutes 1894–1916 (Internet Archive) — the 1911 fiftieth-anniversary jubilee, charter members, officers, and the society's charitable disbursements.
2. Indiana Historical Bureau, Indiana History Blog, "poverty" — McCulloch, the Charity Organization Society movement in Indiana, and the Board of State Charities context.