Therese Bloch Wise 

Henry Mosler (Germany 1841–1920 New York)
Oil on canvas, 1867
Cincinnati Skirball Museum

Therese Bloch Wise (1822–1874) was born in Grafenried, Bohemia to Herman and Nannie Rieser Bloch. The Blochs were the only Jewish family in their small village. Therese met her future husband, Isaac Mayer Wise, when he was her tutor. The couple married in Grafenried in 1844 before coming to the United States in 1846. Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise would become the leading figure in the establishment of Reform Judaism in America with the founding of such institutions as Hebrew Union College, the Central Conference of American Rabbis, and the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (today’s Union for Reform Judaism). The couple had ten children. Therese is buried in the Walnut Hills Jewish Cemetery in Cincinnati. 

In his book The Cosmic God, completed shortly after his wife’s death, Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise offered the following dedication: 

This volume is dedicated to the memory of a sainted Mother
in Israel, a peerless woman of sublime virtues, a spouse of
matchless affection, a parent of angelic benignity.
THERESE BLOCH WISE
She died Dec. 10, 1874, 51 years old.
To her, my beloved wife, who in life possessed my heart with
its best affections; I dedicate in eternity my best thoughts. 

Therese’s older brother Edward followed his sister and brother-in-law to Cincinnati, where he founded Bloch Publishing Company in 1854, the oldest Jewish publishing company, and one of the oldest family businesses, in the United States. Isaac Mayer Wise’s newspapers, The Israelite and the German language Jewish newspaper Die Deborah were both printed by Bloch Publishing Company. The Israelite, later renamed The American Israelite, is the longest-running Jewish newspaper in American and the second oldest Jewish weekly newspaper in the United States. 

Jewish American painter Henry Mosler immigrated to New York from Germany at the age of eight with his parents, who then settled in Cincinnati where the family eventually established the Mosler Safe Company, a firm that would become one of the largest safe manufacturers in the country. Mosler studied in Cincinnati with genre and portrait painter James Henry Beard, and then in Dusseldorf, Germany and Paris, France. He returned to Cincinnati between 1866 and 1874, where he married Sarah Cahn in 1869. He studied for three years in Munich, where he won a medal at the Royal Academy. In 1877, he moved to France. He received a silver medal at the Salons in Paris 1889, and gold medals at Paris, 1888, and Vienna, 1893. In 1894 he moved his family to New York, opening a studio in Carnegie Hall. He served as an associate in the National Academy of Design and continued painting well into the twentieth century. He died of heart failure at the age of seventy-eight.