Keeper and Allied Families Papers

In March 1906, following the infamous Kishinev pogroms of 1903 and 1905, Joseph Leon Keeper and his brother Julius (ages 18 and 16) emigrated to the United States from Kishinev in the southern Russian Pale of Settlement. In 1910, Joe traveled south by steamship from New York City to New Orleans and then overland into east Texas. In Palestine, Texas, Joe found employment as a bookkeeper with the IG&N Railroad, eventually moving to Houston in 1912. A lifelong socialist, Joe became part of the early Houston secular Jewish community and helped found the Houston chapter of the Arbeiter Ring (the Workmen’s Circle).

In 1898, Rose Bumar, then three years old, emigrated from Minsk with her parents and siblings, to Buffalo, New York. While in Buffalo, the Bumar family learned that one of the Houston grocer’s supply organizations would provide an upstairs residence to any family who would agree to operate a small grocery store downstairs. The Bumar family accepted the offer, and in 1903 they moved - sight unseen - to the east side of early downtown Houston.

In 1907, Rose’s mother died. With three young siblings still at home, Rose dropped out of elementary school to raise them and to keep house for her father. In her spare time, Rose worked at Foley Bros. as a wrapping clerk. She also participated in Houston’s nascent secular Jewish cultural life. In 1912, at a meeting of Ivrioh, a Houston Jewish literary society, Rose was introduced by Rabbi Cohen of Galveston to her future husband, Joe. Rose and Joe were married in 1916 and eventually raised three children, Zelda, David, and Samuel.

As members of the Arbeiter Ring from the nineteen-teens through the nineteen-fifties, the Keeper family was active in the organization’s day school, lecture society, and theater program – all in Yiddish. They hosted Norman Thomas, long-time Socialist Party presidential candidate, in their home. They developed close friendships with other Houston Jewish families, including the Bell family, the Gerzovsky family, the Atlas family, the Gardner family, the Fargotstein family (of Galveston), the Krakower family, the Green family, the Henkin family, the Nathan family, the Block family, the Goldberg family, the Shapiro/Ely family, the Peters family, the Greenfield family, and the Gerson family, among others. The Arbeiter Ring’s chapters around Texas, including those in Galveston and Waco, gave the Keeper family the opportunity to make friends within the state’s small but growing Jewish community.

In the early 1910s, the Keeper family began their relationship with what would become Rice University. From their second home near downtown Houston, the Keeper family watched the construction of the Rice Institute in the low-lying prairie near Hermann Park (known locally as “William Rice’s marsh”). The family knew William Nathan, a member of Rice’s first graduating class. Over the years, Rice professors and graduate students rented the Keeper family’s garage apartment when the family moved to West University Place. And each of the three Keeper children attended Rice. Zelda graduated in 1936 and David in 1943. Although Sam was enrolled at Rice, the United States Navy transferred him to the University of Texas near the beginning of WWII.

In the Pacific during WWII, David served as an officer aboard a wooden minesweeper, the YMS-314, during the invasions of the Philippines and Borneo. His letters home, including his photographs, provide a stark record of American naval history in that part of the conflict.

After the war, Zelda and her husband Robert, an architect, moved from Houston to Victoria, Texas. David, also an architecture graduate of Rice (1943/47), opened one of Houston’s first design and build firms, Keeper Company, focusing on the building of hospitals. Sam initially worked as a journalist and then moved into public relations with Ruder & Finn. Rose and her children were active in social justice work throughout their lives, including Jewish Family Service and the National Council of Jewish Women.

Beginning in 1925, Joe practiced as a public accountant for forty years. He died in Houston in 1966 at age 77. Rose continued to live at her home in West University until 2001, when she died at the age of 105. During her more than one hundred years in Houston, Rose recorded her thoughts and memories of early Houston. She saved newspaper articles, photographs, letters, drawings, and biographical information about her family and about almost everyone she knew. Rose’s archives include autobiographies by her husband Joe and by her children David and Zelda. Rose saved tape recordings and her writings about her life in early Houston.

At Rose’s death, her grandson Paul began organizing her collection of family records. This project has taken more than ten years and continues in 2025. Included are the records not only of Joe, Rose, David, Zelda, David, and Sam Keeper (and their families), but also those of Joe’s parents (who emigrated to Israel in the 1930s), Joe’s brother Julius (who became active in Yiddish theater and later in vaudeville), Joe’s sister Manya Morris (who became a translator for the early United Nations in San Francisco after WWII), and many others.