St. Mary’s Orthodox Cathedral, completed in 1906, was the home church of Rusyn immigrants to Minneapolis in the late nineteenth century. As these immigrants continued to arrive from the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the 1900s, St. Mary’s became the Mother Church of Eastern Orthodoxy in the Twin Cities region.

Mount Sinai Hospital in Minneapolis was among the first private hospitals in the Twin Cities to admit minority doctors on its medical staff. The Jewish community opened it in 1951; by the time it closed in 1991, local hospitals were open to doctors of all races and religions.

Women members of Mount Zion Temple in St. Paul founded Neighborhood House in 1897 to assist poor Russian Jewish immigrants. For its first sixty-five years, the settlement house operated in the West Side “Flats”—the neighborhood near the Mississippi River across from downtown where the immigrants first settled.