MAINE’S JEWISH HERITAGE, by Abraham J. Peck and Jean M. Peck, Arcadia Publishing, Portsmouth, N.H., 2007, 127 pages, $19.99, paperback.

Jews throughout Maine and the world will gather with family and friends at Passover Seders on Monday night to answer the question, “Why is this night different from all other nights?”

The answer involves remembering and honoring a specific moment in Jewish history when God led Moses and his people out of Egypt and the Angel of Death passed over the houses of Jews, sparing their firstborn. It is a time to commemorate the end of their days as slaves and the beginning of their time as the chosen people of God.

Simply put, Passover is a history lesson.

Earlier this month, a thin volume focused on the history of Jews in Maine was released. “Maine’s Jewish Heritage,” part of Arcadia Publishing’s Images of America series, features photographs and documents that illustrate the imprint that Jews have left on the state’s religious, cultural and community life.

Abraham J. Peck and Jean M. Peck, a husband-and-wife team who live in Portland, scoured the state for images. The result is 127 pages teeming with the names and faces of people who, alongside their Christian neighbors, transformed the state.

The cover of the book shows the members of Congregation Beth Israel in Bangor as they carried their new Torah into their synagogue around 1930. A similar photo from 1933 in the section on religious life shows the congregants of Beth Abraham doing the same thing.

The synagogues now are across from each other on York Street.

Inside are photos of the early 19th century peddlers such as Israel Goodman of Old Town and Simon Epstein of Biddeford. Many in the next generation of Jews are shown in photos outside their stores. A print advertisement from the 1950s for Unobskey’s in Calais promises silk dresses marked down from $15 to $2.98.

Historian Abraham Peck, 60, who is the son of Holocaust survivors and grew up in New York City, married into Maine Jewry. His wife, Jean Peck, 59, has 100-year-old roots in Portland. When they met in college, he did not believe she could be both Jewish and from Maine, she wrote in the introduction.

The couple spent most of their married life outside Maine, but returned to Portland in 2001 where Abraham Peck is the scholar in residence of the Judaica Collection at the University of Southern Maine’s Jean Byers Sampson Center for Diversity. He is the author of 13 books. Jean is also a writer and editor.

The first record of a Jew in Maine concerned Susman Abrams, a tanner who lived in Union until his death at age 87 in 1830, according to Maine’s Jewish Heritage. The first recorded Jewish community was in Bangor when a synagogue, its name apparently lost, was founded in 1849. It would take another 25 years before Jewish communities around the state would take hold.

“Unlike Jewish life in Europe, where Jews were by far the most visible and persecuted minority over a 2,000-year period,” Abraham Peck writes in the book’s introduction, “Jews in Maine could be comforted in the knowledge that other groups, especially Roman Catholics, often stood ahead of them as victims and sometimes racial intolerance.

“That good will and affectionate esteem belied the fact that for nearly a century many places of lodging and certain social clubs were closed to the Jewish community of Maine. A kind of 9-to-5 atmosphere existed even between Jewish and non-Jewish business and professional partners, and neither group was eager to cross the lines of social interaction after the close of the business day.”

Jean Peck grew up in that atmosphere, which lasted well into the 1960s.

“Our world, back then, was nearly wholly Jewish,” she writes in the introduction. “We kept pretty much to ourselves, although we belonged to school clubs with our non-Jewish friends. Still when a club to which I belong planned a bicycle trip to the Portland Country Club, and I said I could not go because the country club banned Jews from membership, plans for the day were not changed.

“We could pretend it did not matter because we had our own clubs, our own sororities and fraternities, and our own parties and dances. We may have been excluded from certain places, but the Jewish community was all-inclusive. We were invited; we were in with our own in crowd.”

Today, there are about 10,000 Jews in Maine. Many of the synagogues in the book no longer exist, but the impact of their former members still is being felt in communities around the state.

“Maine’s Jewish Heritage” illuminates an important piece of the state’s history so that it too can be commemorated.

Holocaust service

A Holocaust remembrance will be held at 3 p.m. Sunday, April 15, at Beth Israel Synagogue, 144 York St. in Bangor.

Music will be provided by the Silver Duo. Speakers will include Alex Wilde, Sol Goldman and Eva Weitman.

A reception will be held after the event in the Epstein Room.

The event is sponsored by the Jewish Community Council of Bangor.