Charles Reznekoff, poet, novelist, and student of American history, has long wished to try his hand at developing a method for recording Jewish experience in the United States through portraits of some typical Jewish communities. This represents a kind of trial flight.
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Captain Nichols was right, perhaps, when in answer to Ezra Stiles’ question he said, in 1762, that there were no Jews in New Haven, although the Pintos had then been living there for at least three years. And so, perhaps, was Dr. Hubbard of New Haven when in 1763 he wrote Ezra Stiles, his son-in-law, that five “Papists” but no Jews lived there.
For the first Jews to settle in New Haven were—when we first hear of them from the Reverend Dr. Ezra Stiles in 1772—no longer Jews: at least, to use the words of Dr. Stiles in his itinerary of a journey to New Haven, the “two Jew Brothers Pinto” had “renounced Judaism and all Religion.” Ralph Isaacs, a member of the Church of England, who had settled in New Haven in 1763 as a merchant and was afterwards unfavorably known as a Tory, was certainly no Jew. (His father, although “of Jewish extraction,” was one of the founders of the Episcopal church in Norwalk and had married a Rumsey of Fairfield. Isaacs’ daughter, Grace, was described as “a tall handsome woman and very dressy”; she and her sister as “the handsomest ladies I ever saw.” His sister, Esther, had been, perhaps, just as handsome. She married a Woolsey and her daughter married Timothy Dwight, president of Yale College from 1795 to 1817.
Certainly Ezra Stiles, doctor of divinity (president of Yale College from 1778 until his death in 1795)—an ardent “Hebrician” who had begun the earnest study of Hebrew at the age of forty, ashamed that a doctor of divinity should not know the sacred language—did not think of “real” Jews except as believers in Judaism. And he welcomed a visiting rabbi or frequented the synagogue in Newport (when he was pastor of the Second Congregational Church) to learn all he could of Hebrew and Aramaic and the books of the Jews—commentaries and books of mysticism—to find in these and in the Bible and in Jewish ritual what corroboration he could of his own Christianity. Of this interest in ritual, George Alexander Kohut in his book, Ezra Stiles and the Jews (1902), has an example from Stiles’ diary. At the synagogue in Newport, Ezra Stiles had asked “a little Jew Boy” the use of “the strings” at the corners of “the white Surplice” worn by the Jews at prayer; told “the strings” were kissed three times at the repetition of “the great” Shema or “Hear o Israel the Ld our God is one Lord,” Stiles asked himself: “Did this originally denote acknowlegt of Trinity in Unity?”
Well then, when the Reverend Dr. Stiles was in New Haven on that visit in 1772 (he had been made a doctor of divinity in 1765 by the University of Edinburgh upon Benjamin Franklin’s recommendation), he noted in his diary that a family of Jews had settled there the “Summer past,” “the first real Jews” in New Haven, to use his own words. They had come from Venice by way of the West Indies: three brothers, grown men, and their old mother, together with a widow and her children, and six or eight Negroes to serve them. They kept the Sabbath, Stiles notes, “worshipg by themselves in a Room in which were Lights” and “a suspended Lamp.” Dr. Stiles does not tell us the name of that family and we do not hear of them again. They went away, no doubt—to Newport, perhaps, or perhaps to New York: wandering Jews. But the Pintos stayed.
A proud name—Pinto. Portuguese originally, but afterwards the name of rabbis in Syria, of a captain in Surinam, of rich men and lawyers in Holland, and of American patriots in Connecticut. The names of Jacob and Solomon Pinto are found among a list of inhabitants of New Haven in 1759. Jacob’s name is also in the court records: Benjamin Douglas and Timothy Jones have chosen him and another to appraise some land; in 1768 he begins a proceeding to get back a warehouse “on the west side the long wharf” which he had conveyed as security to Michael Todd when Todd became a bondsman for Jacob and Solomon Pinto “to sundry persons in New York.” Mary Bellamy lists Jacob Pinto among her creditors (1772). And in 1775 he is a member of a committee of patriots to enforce compliance with the measures of the Continental Congress. In 1776 he joins in a petition to the Council of Safety for the removal of certain Tories.
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By this time there were probably other Jews in New Haven. (Few today—Jews as well as Nazis—will limit “Jew,” as Dr. Stiles did, to believers in Judaism. But no Jew will call a convert to Christianity “a Jew.”) John Warner Barber, for example, in his Connecticut Historical Collections (New Haven, 1856) reprints an advertisement from the Connecticut Journal by a firm of distillers in New Haven who offer to distill the juice of cornstalks into rum: dated 1777 and signed Jacobs and Israel. As early as 1772 Dr. Stiles, in his reference to the Pintos and the family of “real Jews,” had also written: “Besides these there is a few in Town that belong to none of these Meetings but are Separates and associate with others scattered in the neighboring parishes.”
However, business and study in the little town of New Haven (population ten years later less than 5000) was to be interrupted. About two o’clock in the morning of July 5th, 1779, two British men-of-war from British-held New York, with tenders and transports, anchored off West Haven and at dawn 1500 troops, British and Hessian, landed. A handful of militia and a few plain citizens tried to stop them. (The Reverend Dr. Naphtali Daggett, who had been president pro tempore of Yale College, shoots at the British with his musket, is captured, and soundly beaten.) By noon, the British and Hessians, with a Tory to guide them, are in New Haven, helping themselves to provisions and clothing, feather-beds and silver plate, taking money, watches, shoe-buckles, and knee-buckles from the men, snatching earrings from the women, ripping up the featherbeds they did not carry away and breaking looking-glasses. But the West Indian rum that the traders have in their cellars proves a worthy ally of the Americans, and some of the English have to be carried back to the boats in wheelbarrows. It was a hot sunny day. General Tryon, a short stocky man, opened his umbrella—so it is reported—and carried it above his head as he went through New Haven. The English suffered twenty-seven dead and nineteen wounded. The Americans had twenty-three dead and seventeen were wounded.
Jacob Pinto’s sons, Solomon, Abraham, and William, were among those who fought the British and Hessians. Solomon, a friend of Ebenezer Daggett, youngest son of Dr. Daggett, had been graduated from Yale College in 1777. In that year he became an ensign in Captain Baldwin’s company, Second Regiment of the Connecticut Line. He was made a prisoner at New Haven and taken, with thirty or forty others, to New York. But the next year he was back in New Haven and an ensign in the Seventh Regiment of the Connecticut Line. A year later, he was in the expedition that captured Fort Slongo, Long Island. He served until the end of the Revolution and became a member of the Society of the Cincinnati.
William Pinto was graduated from Yale College in the same year as Solomon (1777). William had become known for his penmanship and made a copy of the Declaration of Independence for Dr. Daggett and another for Governor Trumbull. After graduation, William taught for a while at Groton. When Abraham Pinto was wounded defending New Haven (he had enlisted in 1775 in the Tenth Company of the Seventh Regiment of the Connecticut Line), it was his brother William who carried him from the field—and the bayonets of the British. (Some of the American wounded, it was said, were killed when captured. Certainly the dead in this engagement, strangely enough, outnumber the wounded. And Brigadier-General Garth, in command of the landing force, is reported to have said to one of the prisoners that he was sorry his men had not killed him, instead of taking him, and that he would not have his men give quarter to one militiaman taken in arms.) Later, William Pinto was stationed at Fort Trumbull, New London, and when Benedict Arnold landed in 1781, William was sent to Governor Trumbull with the news. William, like Solomon, too, served until the end of the war. He became a merchant in the West Indian trade and died in New Orleans, an old man (1847).
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II
But if there was a Jewish community at all in New Haven, religious or irreligious, when Dr. Stiles visited there in 1772, dissolution was in store for it. We hear nothing of Jews in New Haven for many years after the War of Independence, except for the application for a pension under the Act of 1818 by Solomon Pinto. Perhaps other Jews—if any—went to New York. Jews must have been among the students of Yale College. (Its seal has the Hebrew words urim and thummim in Hebrew characters across an open book in the very center. Meaning literally “lights” and “perfections,” or “doctryne and trewthe” as Wyclif translated, or whatever the urim and thummim meant on the breastplate of the high-priest to show the will of God.) We know of one Jewish student who left Yale College without a degree in 1827 to become a good lawyer and secretary of state of the Confederacy—Judah Benjamin.
New Haven, “the City of Elms” (officially a city since 1784), and Yale College grew in numbers and in buildings. The population of the “city” in 1787 with 466 dwelling places is given as 3,540, including the 176 students at Yale College. In that year the first elm saplings were planted. By 1790 the population of New Haven had become 4,448; in 1840, 15,820. Yale College had added brick building after brick building, four stories in height. The three churches en the Green—Center Church, Trinity Church built of stone brought from West Pock, the brick North Church (with its beautiful windows) now known as United Church—were built during the War of 1812.
By this time, Ezra Stiles, short, thin, with his bright eyes and long pointed nose, like Chaucer’s clerk that would gladly learn and gladly teach, had long been dead. In 1815 there was an epidemic of dysentery among the children of New Haven. The summer of 1816 was cold—not a month without frost. General Lafayette in his tour of a grateful country visited New Haven in 1824. In 1825 the Eagle Bank of New Haven stopped payment. IN 1832 twenty-six died in New Haven of the cholera. The winter of 1835 was bitterly cold—the harbor frozen for six weeks. In 1837, that year of panic, all the banks in New Haven but one stopped payment in specie. Most of the houses in the city were now two stories high, of wood, “in a neat, handsome, but not expensive style.” Many new houses were of stone or brick. It was now a long time since the Indians caught round clams in the harbor with their feet. (The last sachem had been found frozen to death a century before about a mile from the Congregational Church in East Haven.) In 1839 the cars of the New Haven and Hartford Railroad began running to Meriden, and the next year to Hartford.
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In 1840—hardly more than a century ago—the present Jewish community of New Haven had its beginning. A few Bavarian Jews, at least two it is supposed, had settled in New Haven a year or so before. Other Jews came, almost all from Bavaria: friends, acquaintances, kinsmen, younger brothers, cousins, and second cousins, and in a year or two there was certainly a minyan—the ten Jews necessary for a congregation. Talk, too, of the need for a cemetery if—God forbid!—a death among them, and in 1843 an acre and a quarter was bought out in Westville for fifty dollars. That year the statutes of Connecticut were amended to permit Jews to join in a religious society just like any Christians.
Congregation Mishkan Israel (literally “the dwelling,” but rather “the tabernacle,” of Israel), if informally organized and nameless before, now had a legal status. About twenty families, some say only fifteen, most of them, if not all, from Bavaria, met for worship: the second congregation of Jews in New England (Newport’s Jeshuat Israel was the first), and the fourteenth Jewish congregation in the United States. They worshiped, among other places, in Todd’s Hall. But in three years, debate as to ritual divided the congregation as it was dividing all German Jewry. Some of the members for “reform” left to form their own congregation under the leadership of young Leopold Wassermann—or Waterman as he now called himself.
Isaac M. Wise, who had landed that year (1846) in New York with his wife and child and was making but a poor living by tutoring until he could find a post as rabbi, came to New Haven to dedicate a hall for the new congregation. So small a place, he felt “childish” preaching there. He also preached to the old congregation and was complimented by a peddler from Albany who said he had heard no better German preacher in Poland. But the trip was profitable for the rabbi, too: Leopold Waterman became a dear friend and gave him $60 for his services.
This Leopold Waterman was the son of a well-to-do family of Bavaria. He had come to the United States only two years before (1844), as his elder brother had in 1841, not for bread, but “Freiheit.” The elder brother, Sigmund, was soon an instructor in German at Yale College (1844-47); turning to the study of medicine, he had his degree from Yale in 1848 and went to New York. (Here he lived the rest of his long and useful life: police surgeon during the Draft Riots of 1863, Professor of Urology in Eclectic Medical College, physician at the Hebrew Orphan Asylum. He died in 1899 at the age of eighty-one.) But Leopold stayed in New Haven. In ten years he was the head of a profitable business on Chapel Street, had his own house on Orange Street—other real estate, too—and left on a trip to England, France, and Germany to buy merchandise. (A visitor looking about on Chapel Street then would see many small wooden buildings—two stories and an attic, with roofs, for the most part, sloping towards the street; hitching-posts along the gutters; and, in front of Leopold’s store, probably, posts and beams for the awning that covered all the sidewalk in summer.) Only thirty-two, Leopold Waterman, on his way home, was lost at sea when the steamer he was on sank after a collision off Newfoundland.
Before that, when his congregation had rejoined Mishkan Israel, as it soon did, he became the president (now it was the Orthodox who were going to leave), and on the chief holidays delivered an address. In 1851 he had been on the committee of citizens that welcomed Louis Kossuth to New Haven. And, like his elder brother, he wrote verse in German. Some of it may be read in early numbers of Isaac M. Wise’s Die Deborah or in Guido Kisch’s article on the two brothers (Historia Judaica, Vol. IV, No. 1). Leopold’s picture hangs—in an ova? frame—in the office of Mishkan Israel. A young man with blue eyes and soft brown hair, a fringe of soft brown whiskers around his face—in the fashion of those days—wearing a good brown coat and a blue waistcoat, he eyes the visitor steadily, a slight smile on his lips, sure of himself and satisfied with what he has managed to do in America—“where,” as he had written home on his arrival, “one first learns to know the true dignity of man and in the free use of his own strength can become the creator of his own happiness.”
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Among the many bequests of Judah Touro (1775-1854, merchant of New Orleans)—to Jewish and Christian causes and institutions—Mishkan Israel received $5000. The congregation used it to buy the Third Congregational Church on Court Street for a synagogue. The building, with six Ionic columns, of wood no doubt and painted white, was—except for the steeple—like a Greek temple. A minister was hired. No longer lay-readers. And the congregation now had about fifty families. In a few years there was a religious school with confirmation for boys and girls; in a decade, an organ and a choir; in 1873 Isaac M. Wise’s “Minhag America” was adopted as the ritual; a new minister, in 1878, began to deliver weekly sermons in German; and in 1893, with another minister, the sermons and much of the service were in English (Edgar E. Siskin and Rollin G. Osterweis, The Centennial Volume of Congregation Mishkan Israel, 1940). The congregation was now rich enough to move to a larger synagogue and a better neighborhood.
The Orthodox members of Mishkan Israel had left the congregation long before. In 1857 they organized B’nai Sholem or, as the name is found in some histories of New Haven, Beni Shulem. Not so long ago the congregation went out of existence; the scrolls of the Law and the furnishings were given to the Jewish Home for the Aged, and of this congregation of Orthodox German Jews only their cemetery is left.
But Mishkan Israel prospered. The temple, now at Orange and Audubon Streets, was dedicated in 1897. It still looks a massive building: reddish brick ornamented with carved stone; two square towers on each corner of the front of the building with a cupola on each tower, Byzantine perhaps, in any event “Eastern.” There is a plaque inside to the memory of two who lost their lives in the First World War, and another plaque to Judah Touro, “a benefactor of this congregation.” The names in the memorial windows, and those in bronze along the wall in back of the auditorium, are also family names of many who still sit at the services. And are glanced at no doubt, often and fondly, by the children of the dead and their children’s children.
By 1885 New Haven had more than sixty thousand inhabitants. At least three or four of Congregation Mishkan Israel—Maier Zun-der, Max Adler, Lewis Osterweis, Bernard Shoninger—were distinguished among their fellow citizens. Maier Zunder had become head of the New Haven Board of Education in 1881; at his death, twenty years later, a public school on George Street was named for him; it is today abandoned as a school and the windows broken.
Max Adler, son of an umbrella-maker, was a partner in a corset factory that had 1000, and sometimes as many as 1500, hands. He had been an errand-boy, cash-boy, cashier, bookkeeper, and then manager of a dry-goods store. Now (1885), only forty-five, he was a stout handsome man with a Roman nose and he wore his mustache and an imperial like Napoleon the Third. When he signed his name, there was a twirl before the “M” and another before the “A” and the final “r” had a long upward curve to it—like a sickle. He was secretary of the Hebrew Benevolent Society of New Haven and of the Corset Makers’ Association of the United States. Before his death, he became president of the New Haven Chamber of Commerce.
Lewis Osterweis was a few years older than Max Adler. And much balder. He had heavy eyebrows, a long straight nose. He shaved his cheeks but his mustache was heavy and long; his beard was longer and much fuller than Adler’s and was beginning to turn gray. He had Adler’s shrewd earnest look. Osterweis had learnt the trade of cigar-maker in New York and had been manufacturing cigars in New Haven for twenty-five years (1885). He was now established in a two-story brick building on Church Street. A modest man, to judge by his small neat signature.
Bernard Shoninger, although born like Adler and Osterweis in Bavaria, looked more like a Polish rabbi, with his long full beard, high forehead, long flat nose, and scowl. He was the oldest of the three—fifty-seven in 1885 and had seven children and about ten grandchildren. He had begun to manufacture organs and pianos in 1850. The five-story brick building of his factory is still standing and his name is in heavy stone letters above the door. But the large painted sign on the side of the building is fading and the building itself is occupied by other firms. The cigar business of Lewis Osterweis and the corset business of Max Adler are still in New Haven—in solid buildings several stories high; but Max Adler is in his vault in a modest tomb on the neat grounds of Mishkan Israel’s cemetery, and near him is Lewis Osterweis under a heavy stone and Bernard Shoninger under a column.
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III
The first Russian massacre of Jews at the end of the last century took place at Elizavetgrad (afterwards Zinovievsk and now Kirovo) in 1881. Pogroms and oppressive laws sent Jews streaming to America from Poland, the Ukraine, and Rumania.
Jews of New Haven had pledged themselves to help the refugees and work was found for some of them at shoveling snow and cleaning streets. They were also given the rags and waste paper at the Strouse-Adler Company’s corset factory. Almost all penniless at first, the Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe made their homes in the center of the city—near lower Congress Avenue—in one of the poorest neighborhoods. In 1877 the Jewish community had numbered about a thousand; in 1887 it was said to number 850 families. (When my mother, in 1893, went to New Haven to look for a job at Strouse-Adler’s, she found several families from her native city—Eliza-vetgrad. The most prosperous among them was a tailor who had—or was soon to have—a “misfit parlor,” in which he sold clothing not good enough for other shops.)
They lived, these Jews from eastern Europe, in a close community along Oak Street—no more than three blocks of it. Half a block away on Factory Street was the synagogue of Bikur Cholim B’nai Abraham, built in 1889, five years after the congregation was organized; half a block in the other direction on Rose Street was the larger synagogue of B’nai Israel, built in 1894, two years after the congregation was organized. (B’nai Jacob, older than either and organized in 1883, had its synagogue on Temple Street, two blocks from Chapel Street—just outside the Jewish quarter.) Along Oak Street were the stores: merchandise out in front in boxes and barrels or just heaped on the sidewalk. Somewhere along the street in winter would be found a man peddling hot sweet potatoes and, in summer, in front of every grocery was a can of “hot corn” (a penny each until the First World War).
Here was the meat market of Max Wax, whose specialty was Warschauer wurst (still for sale within fifty feet of the original store and sent all over the world). Here, too, was Zeiderman’s delicatessen; and here were fish stores and grocery stores and, in one block, the three bakeries of Pinya der baeker, Tanna der baeker, and Sorah di baekerka—two brothers and a sister-in-law competing with each other. Here lived Yaffe der shohet (butcher according to Jewish ritual), Davis der fisher, Labe der milchman, Shimmin der shuster, and Chaim der shmied, Tamára die baederka (the bathhouse woman who ran the mikveh, the ritual bath for women), Channa die vartshfru—or varts-froi (for all who know Yiddish know how the pronunciation differs in each country of Eastern Europe), Mrs. Barach, the midwife, and the lesser workmen in the life of the spirit: Yaffe der melammed, Frankfort der melammed, Wilensky, who wrote the Hebrew passages on slips of parchment for tefillin and mezuzahs, and Lifshitz der shammas.
Max Sachs, called Saechsel der kleiner (little Sachs the little fellow) to distinguish him from Sachs der shohet and Sachs der secretaer (who made his living as the secretary of synagogue and lodge), sold prayer books and prayer shawls, phylacteries and mezuzahs, Yiddish newspapers and magazines, and books in Yiddish; at New Year’s the cards to wish “a good year”; candles for the feast of Hanukah, and memorial lights for the dead. Saechsel der kleiner was about five feet, two inches in height. He had a shock of black curly hair; his short pointed beard, however, was reddish and so was his mustache. (In 1892 he was twenty-six years old.) In his store the writings of Yiddish poets and journalists were judged; socialism, as well as points of Talmudic law, argued; here the members of a congregation might weigh the merits of a cantor to be hired for the holidays or of candidates for office in the synagogue; here, too, a branch of the Workmen’s Circle was organized and a lodge of immigrants from a city or district in Poland or the Ukraine. In 1889 or 1890 Max Sachs himself had organized the first Yiddish theater in New Haven. The plays were given in a theater where the Bijou Theater is now. And about 1900, “Old Man” Taks, a shoemaker mad about the stage, gave plays in Yiddish in Germania Hall with the help of his three daughters.
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Some of the Jews of Oak Street were tailors; there were also shoemakers, blacksmiths, and carpenters among them. Some were peddlers: pushcart peddlers who sold fruit and vegetables from a wagon, and “customer peddlers” who carried a pack of dry goods from door to door. Others were dealers in old clothes, rags, and junk. (Two brothers, buying some machinery in 1910 or 1911 to break up, decided one item in the lot might still be sold as a machine instead of as metal: this was the beginning of the machinery business of Harris and Hyman Botwinik.)
Some of the young men of that first generation of immigrants from Eastern Europe worked for the O. B. North Company, manufacturers of hardware for carriages and wagons—now out of business—and many of the young women worked as sewing-machine operators at corsets in Strouse-Adler’s. And here and there, minding store or in one of the little rooms, a young fellow might be leaning over a page of the Talmud, or, more likely, with the help and blessing of his parents or an older brother, reading to become a lawyer or doctor in the world beyond Oak Street.
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A wedding in those days was seldom a private occasion on Oak Street. About 1900, and afterwards, it was usually held in Court Street—in Music Hall on the very site of Mishkan Israel’s first synagogue. There might be as many as three or four hundred guests, and the dishes for the feast were rented from Saechsel der kleiner. Oak Street, you may be sure, was not remiss in the celebration of the Jewish holidays. Simchas Torah (the day for public “rejoicing in the Law”), the Jews of the congregation Bikur Cholim, for example, marched in procession from the synagogue to the home of Rabbi Frommer on York Street—three blocks away.
And on Friday night the noise of Oak Street was hushed and its bustle ended; the passer-by, particularly in the summer when all the windows were open, would hear families at their meal singing the old zmiros—songs to welcome in the Sabbath.
In 1895 the horsecars were still running but so were the first trolley cars. About 1900, the Jews of Oak Street began to move from their narrow quarter: at first southwest, then west along Oak Street, and, after the First World War, northwest towards Westville. About a third of the Jewish population of New Haven is still in the center of the city. It may be noted here that in spite of poverty and poor housing, important factors in juvenile delinquency, the Jews of New Haven have had far fewer delinquents than other groups in proportion to their number.
The Jewish community of New Haven has hardly grown since the beginning of the First World War, which put a stop to emigration from Eastern Europe; and in 1924 the present draconic restriction of immigration into the United States began. However, New Haven as a distributing center for motion-picture films has brought some Jewish families to the city and others came after 1919 when, for a few years, small “open” shops making dresses, blouses, shirts, and the like were established by manufacturers who had been running union shops in New York. (The New Haven shops are now, for the most part, unionized.)
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As for the number of Jews in New Haven, a reader of the Bible who may remember incredible figures will not be completely surprised to learn that this number too is, strictly speaking, a guess. The United States census makes no inquiry as to religion. There is a census of religious bodies, but synagogue membership is not conclusive of the number of Jews in a community. Nor, for that matter, is the absence of children from school on the first day of the Jewish New Year or on the Day of Atonement. In 1905, after the pogrom of Kishinev (1903), the Jewish community of New Haven was supposed to number about 5,500 (population of New Haven 108,027, census of 1900); in 1907, about 8,000; in 1910, about 10,500 who spoke Yiddish; and in 1912 about 20,000 in all. In the late 30’s the Jewish community was numbered by one study at 19,000, by another at 24,700.
The community is now supposed to be about 23,000 according to some; others would place the number at about 18,000, and still others at 25,000; the total population of New Haven is around 160,000. (According to the records of the Jewish Center of New Haven, around 2,500 Jewish men and women of “Greater New Haven” were in service during the Second World War-eight “silver stars” among their many decorations, and fifty-seven young men lost their lives.)
Incidentally, it was noted that in 1920 two-thirds of the persons engaged in business in New Haven were either wholly or in part of foreign blood; in her History of New Haven County (1930), Mary Hewitt Mitchell concludes that the city owes much to the immigrant.
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IV
Mishkan Israel, today the only Reform congregation in New Haven, has 395 members: about three out of four of these—some say four out of five—are the children of Jews from Eastern Europe. Many joined, perhaps, to send their children to Mishkan Israel’s excellent Sunday school. Hebrew is among the subjects taught. (But, then, Ezra Stiles believed that even a good Christian should know Hebrew—to understand the psalms the angels are singing in Heaven.) The rabbi, Edgar E. Siskin, is also an anthropologist—just appointed a lecturer in anthropology in the graduate school at Yale—who has lived among the Washo Indians of the Far West and whose thesis for his doctorate was on the peyote cult. (The members of this cult eat a certain cactus, peyote, as a result of which they see visions in color.)
The congregation of Mishkan Israel is becoming less “Reform.” Perhaps this is because of the new membership of Jews who may remember the ceremonies of the Orthodox, or because the rabbi—a chaplain in the Marine Corps during the Second World War—had officiated at services that were meant to please the Orthodox as well as Reform Jews; most likely because Reform Judaism, since Hitler, is becoming more “Jewish” and finding the pageantry and symbolism of a discarded ritual not utterly useless.
So, although the rabbi of Mishkan Israel does not wear a skull cap and prayer shawl as he did when he was a chaplain—one or two Reform rabbis do, though the prayer shawl is called a “stole” instead of a “tallis“—the service for the Sabbath now includes the lighting of candles on the altar and the recital of the Kiddush. On Purim the Book of Esther is read aloud. (Reform Jews had given up the observance of Purim altogether because—in the liberalism of the last century—it seemed foolish to think there would ever be another Haman.) Some of the fourth generation German Jews who organized the congregation and ran it for many years do not like these changes and, indeed, are bitter about them.
The first congregation organized by the immigrants from Eastern Europe (1883), B’nai Jacob, with its present synagogue on George Street built in 1912, became “Conservative” instead of Orthodox in 1923. B’nai Jacob is said now to be the wealthiest of the Jewish congregations of New Haven; certainly, many of the largest contributors to the Jewish Welfare Fund are among its members. Louis Greenberg, rabbi of B’nai Jacob at his death in 1946, was writing a history of the Jews in Russia; the first volume, dealing with the struggle for emancipation, had been published by the Yale University Press (1944). Stanley Rabinowitz is the rabbi now.
The Orthodox synagogues of New Haven are eleven in all. A visitor on his way to the synagogue of B’nai Jacob may see a small synagogue on Broad Street that was once a wooden house but is now covered with pink stucco and the tin trim painted a bright green. A little farther on, on George Street itself in a sort of court, he will see a small red brick building that was once a church but is a synagogue now.
Still another Orthodox synagogue, Beth Hamedrosh Hagodol (“the large house of study”), is a sprawling building of red brick, built as a Methodist church and bought for the congregation in 1931. The rabbi is the son of Judah Levenberg (died 1938), who was head of the Orthodox congregations of New Haven for seventeen years. Rabbi Levenberg does not wear a beard. Thirty-two and born in the United States, he studied at the yeshivas of Grodno and Mir and also in the graduate school of Yale.
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But the Jews of New Haven—as in other communities—are united not only in religious organizations, but also as members of, or donors to, charitable organizations, and some, as Jews, belong or give only to these. When the Jews from Eastern Europe began emigrating to the United States in numbers after the Russian pogroms of 1881, the German Jews of New Haven organized the Hebrew Benevolent Society to help them. The new immigrants themselves organized the Hebrew Charity Society in 1885. The Sisterhood of Congregation Mishkan Israel, as a body, began to devote itself to charity in 1910: in 1913 they had an office for the purpose. The charitable work of the three organizations overlapped, however, and in 1919, after the First World War, it was merged in the functions of a new organization—the United Jewish Charities. The municipal Department of Charities now takes care of all who are in want. Jews among these have been very few. (Less than twenty families had to have charity to live, according to a community study of New Haven prepared for the National Conference of Jewish Social Welfare in 1943.) But in 1939 the New Haven Jewish Family Service was organized to be of help where more than money might be needed: finding homes for children, for example, or aid to refugees.
In 1928 the New Haven Jewish Community Council was organized with Hyman Jacobs as its first president, and, from 1936 to 1939, when it became more than a paper organization, Isidor E. Offenbach, secretary. This was the first Jewish community council, it is said, in the United States, and it is now the chief Jewish agency of New Haven (Louis Sachs, son of Saechsel der kleiner, president, and Norman B. Dock-man, secretary). Any Jewish organization of Greater New Haven may belong to it and more than sixty do—religious, charitable, fraternal, or ideological. Each organization, according to size, has one or more delegates in the Council, and these elect an executive committee of thirty and also the officers and board of directors of the Jewish Welfare Fund. A committee of the Council on community relations will protest against any act of local anti-Semitism and cooperates with other local groups in teaching the principles of democracy.
The Jews of New Haven as a community, then, speak and act through the Council instead of, as in the past or in other communities, through one or two men of wealth or other importance. Non-Jewish agencies, such as the Community Chest, call on it for cooperation—if needed. But the Council has not affected the autonomy of the organizations represented in it. This may not be altogether a virtue, for there is as yet in New Haven no federation of Jewish social agencies, no common budget and no joint planning. Each of the social agencies has its own contributors and appeals to a community fund only in case of a deficit.
The Jewish Welfare Fund—Bernard P. Kopkind, who is vice-chairman of the National Community Relations Advisory Council, was campaign director—had, in 1946, 4,505 Jewish contributors and 358 non-Jewish contributors. It raised the sum of $761,000 (goal $736,000), of which about $20,000 was from non-Jews. This sum of more than three-quarters of a million dollars is about as much as the entire city of New Haven raised last year for the Community Chest. To that, of course, Jews also contributed. Eighty-six per cent of the money raised by the Jewish Welfare Fund was allocated to the relief of Jews overseas. It may be noted here, with respect to Jewish contributions to the New Haven Community Chest—certain Jewish agencies are members but no distinction made, of course, between contributions from Jews and non-Jews—that the first president of the Chest was a Jew—Isaac M. Ullman. Five Jews are now on the board of the Chest. (In 1940 Richard M. Thalheimer was president of the Council of Social Agencies, in which all the social agencies of the city are represented, and Max Livingston is president now—since 1945.)
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In 1945 die New Haven Bureau of Jewish Education was organized by the Jewish Community Council. The bureau (Joseph I. Sachs, another son of Saechsel der kleiner, chairman), in addition to supervising the work of the religious schools, has succeeded in forming a number of groups for adults. Many study Hebrew and some Yiddish. (About a thousand families still buy a Yiddish newspaper from a local dealer, and some, no doubt, are subscribers.)
As in the case of the number of Jews in the community, an estimate of the number of children receiving instruction in Hebrew and Judaism is only a guess. For example, about 700 children of elementary-school age were enrolled in the week-day schools and Sunday schools of the synagogues in 1944; 940 were so enrolled from 1945 to 1946; and about a thousand are enrolled today. But many, no doubt, received instruction at home from an old man with an untrimmed beard and a cane with all its varnish rubbed from the handle—the rebbe.
There is now an organized attempt in New Haven by the Committee for Jewish Education of die Jewish Community Council, and its Bureau of Jewish Education, to lequire attendance at a religious school and a certain minimum of instruction in Hebrew before permitting a Bar Mitzvah (the rite by which a Jewish boy of thirteen becomes “a man”). Certain congregations, B’nai Jacob for example, have additional requirements: attendance at services and, in addition, participation in the services upon the platform four Friday nights before Bar Mitzvah.
Among the seven Jewish religious schools of New Haven is one that has “an English department”-an “all day” school, In the corridor, the visitor may find a little boy with pink cheeks walking up and down; intoning to himself, as he waits for his class to begin or playmates to come out, the ancient melody of a prayer.
The three leading Jewish institutions of New Haven—other than religious institutions—are a home for the aged, a home for children, and the Jewish Center. The home for the aged, completed in 1923, is a five-story brick building with a solarium on the roof, caring for ninety-three (capacity ninety-four). The Jewish home for children, built in 1924, has cared for forty-seven during this last year; it is a two-story red-brick building with wide grounds: playgrounds, flower beds, and a rock garden. The Jewish Center of New Haven was originally the Young Men’s and the Young Women’s Hebrew Associations; they united with the Hebrew Institute in 1938 to form the Jewish Center for Jewish—and other-studies as well as for gymnastics. The Center is to have a new building for which half a million dollars was raised in 1946.
Among the charitable societies of New Haven are the Women’s Assembly (primarily a self-educational group at the Jewish Center), active in various community projects and in helping the “displaced persons” of the camps in Europe, and the Women’s American Ort (Organization for Rehabilitation and Training), organized to help Jews abroad seeking to learn a trade. There are also certain societies based on a common origin in Europe, such as the Independent Vilner Lodge and the Warshaver Relief Society. B’nai B’rith has a local organization-Horeb Lodge. The Workmen’s Circle (Arbeiter Ring) has now seven branches in New Haven and about 900 members (the first branch, Number 17, was organized in 1901); and the Jewish National Workers Alliance of America, a Labor Zionist as well as a fraternal organization, also has a branch (about eighty members) in New Haven and a club for women. The Zionist organizations have many members: more than 3,500, including the membership of the Zionist District, Hadassah (about 2,100 in the senior organization and, in the junior, about 250), and the Labor Zionists. Jews opposed to Zionism are not without representation, too: a branch of the American Council for Judaism has just been organized in New Haven with about 135 members, men and women.
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One of the chief industries of New Haven was the manufacture of carriages. In 1840 the leading industry was tanning leather, but by 1890 the manufacture of carriages and with it the manufacture of hardware for carriages and wagons, as well as the shipping of oysters, were the three chief industries of New Haven. Of these, only the manufacture of hardware remains.
Of the “ethnic” groups into which the city may be divided, about a third of New Haven is Italian and a little more than a fifth Irish; the Jews outnumber all others as owners, or managers, of stores. One of the banks in New Haven, though, to be sure, not one of the large banks, is owned by Jews, and of the four department stores Jews own two. They own many of the furniture stores and women’s wear or men’s wear shops. Many Jews are in the jewelry business and in the laundry business and in the following trades: textiles, paper and waste paper, machine tools, and scrap metal.
The Jewish immigrant from Eastern Europe, like the Jewish immigrant from Central Europe before him (with few exceptions), had to turn at once to the work of his own hands, or the sale of merchandise, to make a living. But a number of the immigrants, as soon as they could, as well as some of their children or grandchildren, turned to the professions: more so than the non-Jews. According to Samuel Koenig’s study, about 22 per cent of the physicians of New Haven are Jewish (but, it is also said by others, no more than 15 per cent); 24 per cent of the dentists; of the lawyers, 33 per cent; of accountants, 28 per cent; and of architects, 10 per cent.
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Jews of New Haven have also been, and are, officials of the city or state. (Few Jews, according to Koenig, are in the civil service except as teachers: about one in ten of these, he estimates, is Jewish.)
Among the Bavarian Jews who settled in New Haven before 1850 were Morris Ull-man and his wife Minnie. A Morris Ull-man is listed in Benham’s New Haven directory for 1860 as a coachman. In 1875 or so his son Isaac, twelve years old, left high school to help support his mother—then a widow with five small children—and became an office boy for the corset company of which Max Adler was to become president. Fifteen years later, Isaac Ullman was superintendent of the factory. He married Max Adler’s daughter and, after the death of his father-in-law, was president of the company. On the staff of one governor of Connecticut with the rank of colonel and of another as quartermaster-general, Colonel Ullman, like his father-in-law, became president of the New Haven Chamber of Commerce (1909); he was also a member of the New Haven Board of Education, and chairman of the board of the New Haven Hospital. Until his death in 1930 he was treasurer of the American Jewish Committee.
A leader in the Republican Party and a close friend of William Howard Taft, Colonel Ullman joined him and other distinguished gentlemen (seven had served as presidents of the American Bar Association) in opposing the appointment of Louis D. Brandeis to the bench of the Supreme Court in 1916. There is a somewhat faded picture of Colonel Ullman in the outer office of the Jewish Family Service of New Haven, and the visitor, after a hurried glance, may remember vaguely a plump face with a mustache.
Many have spoken of Isaac Morris Ullman—not without the spice of malice, perhaps—as a “political boss.” No doubt he was. But in this connection it may be noted that George Dudley Seymour, a public-spirited citizen, dedicated his book New Haven (1942) to the memory of Ullman as one of three “men of vision.” (The colonel had then been dead for twelve years and, it may be supposed, no longer had any political influence.) In the preface Seymour praises him for his generosity “in advancing city planning and harbor improvements”; and he quotes Colonel Ullman’s speech on “the true function of a Chamber of Commerce”: to secure new industries, Ullman said, the city should be made attractive—not only to manufacturers, but to all—by the beauty of its streets, by its school system, its health, and a rate of taxation not inconsistent with the needs of the community.
Colonel Ullman’s brother, Louis, was married to the daughter of Lewis Osterweis. Louis M. Ullman was a major on the staff of three governors of Connecticut and, like the colonel, not without influence in the Republican party. Another brother, Jacob B. Ullman (married to the daughter of Morris Steinert who gave Yale the Steinert collection of old musical instruments) was a judge of the Court of Common Pleas.
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Isaac Wolfe was a justice of the Superior Court. He was also a member of the legislature of the state. Jacob Klein and Jacob Caplan, once judge of the City Court, were likewise elected to the legislature. Charles Henchel (Democrat) was a member of the legislature and minority leader of the lower house at the last session. Harold Alprovis is one of the four state senators from New Haven. Abraham Ullman is state’s attorney for New Haven country. Samuel Campner was acting mayor of New Haven (1917-18). Samuel A. Persky was corporation counsel and Mrs. Frances L. Roth assistant city attorney in charge of domestic relations. Silas Greenberg is city treasurer. Joseph Linde has been health commissioner for a number of years under Democratic and Republican administrations and is still in office. Charles Kleiner, for many years corporation counsel of New Haven, was workmen’s compensation commissioner for the third congressional district and Louis Sachs, president of the New Haven Jewish Community Council, is commissioner now.
From among the Jews of New Haven have come: Sam Schwartz, the champion heavyweight wrestler of the National Amateur Athletic Union in 1916; Lilyan Tash-man, the motion-picture actress; band leaders “Artie” Shaw and “Charley” Spivak; a singer of popular songs, Barry Wood; and, just to show that the old enthusiasms are not quite dead, Israel Knox, teacher, among his other subjects, of Yiddish and—in Yiddish—of philosophy and letters, today a member of the department of philosophy at Ohio University. To the Jews of New Haven has come as a resident, Abraham S. Yahuda, born in Jerusalem, once a professor in the university of Madrid of the Hebrew of the Jews in Spain and now teaching Arabic and in charge of the Center for the Near East at the New School for Social Research in New York.
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Most Jews find New Haven “a nice place” in which to live. A few of those who have grown gray in the city may feel, indeed, that it is becoming too large—too many strangers, but that is true of every growing community. Certainly, there is little overt anti-Semitism in New Haven. Of course, young men and women have left New Haven for New York, but most stay.
Like Jews everywhere in the United States, some Jews of New Haven are concerned about Jewish problems; perhaps, in view of the contributions of the Jews of New Haven to Jewish causes, it would only be fair to say many; others are more or less indifferent, smug and comfortable. Some feel their Jewishness a burden and a handicap and would like to shuffle it off; others glory in it. According to Raymond Kennedy, professor of sociology at Yale, who has made a study of the city records from 1870 on, only 6 per cent of the marriages of Jew or Jewess were outside the “ethnic” group, and this percentage has varied only a fraction of one per cent from that year to this.
There has been—and increasingly so—intermarriage between Jews of German Jewish descent and those of Eastern European descent. But Jews of German Jewish descent, whose ancestors in New Haven were also peddlers or plain workingmen, perhaps, are still inclined to look down upon the descendants of Jews from Eastern Europe. The descendants of Jews from Eastern Europe, however, now control the affairs of the Jewish community: Louis Sachs, for example, is president of the Jewish Community Council; Samuel Botwinik is chairman of the Jewish Welfare Fund.
It has also been said that the Jews of New Haven have a certain gentility of speech and manners because of the influence of Yale University. That is an explanation not generally upheld by the Jews of New Haven themselves. Perhaps this gentility of speech and manners—for it exists—is no more peculiar to the Jews of New Haven than to many Jews everywhere.
To the visitor from New York who has caught up his brief case and hurried to New Haven by express, the quiet streets (except those with the large department stores), the easy-going politeness of waitress, stenographer, and clerk, the assurance and courtesy of workingmen in leather or khaki jackets, of the conductor on the street-car or the driver of the bus, Italian, Irishman, or Jew—all this is pleasant. The visitor may try to remember lines he has read in Walt Whitman and say to himself this self-respect and respect for others is American and very good.
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A university is chiefly its own community, and few of Yale’s students, and perhaps not all of the faculty, expect to spend the rest of their days in New Haven, as most of the other residents do. Still, Yale University, like any other American university, is certainly not without influence upon the life of the community about it.
There are a number of Jewish professors on the faculty of Yale University: chiefly in the law school and as clinical professors in the medical school. Harry Shulman has held the Sterling professorship of law since 1940. He has long worked for peace between labor and management by arbitration of their differences, and among his other posts, is that of umpire between the Ford Motor Company and the United Automobile Workers (CIO). Milton Charles Winternitz, professor of pathology, was dean of the medical school (1920-35). Eugen Kahn, Sterling professor of psychiatry and mental hygiene, has been head of the department of psychiatry for many years. An early worker in the science of nutrition who did much for the study of vitamins, Lafayette B. Mendel (died 1935), was Sterling professor of physical chemistry.
But the undergraduate faculty of Yale had no Jew on it for a long time. (Meyer Wolodarsky taught Russian about 1902 or 1903 and so did Max Mandel twenty or so years later.) At present Paul Weiss is professor of philosophy. Rollin G. Osterweis (of the old New Haven family), a fellow of Jonathan Edwards College, author of Judah P. Benjamin, Statesman of the Lost Cause (1933), is in the history department with the rank of instructor. (He was commissioned this year by the New Haven Colony Historical Society to write the history of New Haven.)
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Edward Sapir, who died in his fifty-sixth year, was at his death Sterling professor of anthropology and linguistics and head of the anthropology department (1931-39). His father had been a shohet as well as a cantor and rabbi of Orthodox Jewish synagogues in New York City. As a child Edward Sapir hated the regulations and restrictions of his father’s Judaism but afterwards he included among his many interests—for he was a pianist and poet, too—the study of Yiddish and Hebrew. He had also come to think and argue that the problem of each Jew did not call for the same answer but, depending on local circumstances, economic and cultural, life in Palestine might well be the answer for many—among several answers—and assimilation for others. Leonard Bloomfield has been Sterling professor of linguistics since 1940.
An unofficial, but not unimportant, adjunct to Yale has been the Rosenbaum Tutoring School—”Rosie’s”: a “cram” school that, by engaging brilliant graduate students (most of them qualified by talent, though, perhaps, not by “race,” for teaching in universities), has taught as well as “crammed.” It was directed by Abel Cugell and some say he was perhaps the best known and best liked of New Haveners by the students of Yale for three decades.
Jews, too, have been coaches in athletics at Yale: “Izzy” Winters, many years the wrestling coach, for example, and “Mosey” King, instructor in boxing. (As for Jewish athletes, Al Hessberg was halfback on the football team in 1935—among his rewards, the only Jew ever elected to Skull and Bones. Arthur J. Loeb, the hammer-thrower, was captain of the track team in 1936. Dick Marcus was baseball captain in 1938. Basketball may be played in a gymnasium and Jews, generally the residents of cities, are good at it: Eddie Horowitz was a captain of the Yale basketball team and so, in 1924, when Yale won the championship of the Eastern Collegiate League, was Sammie Pite.)
It has been estimated that 9 or 10 per cent of the students at Yale are Jewish, but these are from all parts of the country. (According to the “study” of the Jewish Welfare Board in 1926, the Jewish students of the university numbered that year 372-10 per cent of the enrollment; 146 were graduate students, and about 60 per cent from out-of-town. In 1946-47, with a much larger enrollment, the Jewish students—upon an incomplete tabulation made only from cards showing religious affiliation—numbered 625 students: 157 graduate students and 468 undergraduates; a later, and still incomplete, roster showed 725 students.) Yale University Hillel Foundation (Rabbi Samuel Sandmel, director) of die B’nai B’ridi Hillel Foundations had about 130 members this year but about half of the Jewish undergraduates—almost all from out-of-town—took part in the activities some way or other.
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Some Jews of New Haven have had to go far to study—particularly medicine: a few have gone to Scotland and one or two to Switzerland. Many Jews of New Haven now go to the University of Connecticut at Storrs—formerly the Connecticut Agricultural College. Yale College, not to become merely a New Haven institution, has a quota for all residents of the city. It has been said that it has a particular quota for Jews; else why ask for a photograph and ask about an applicant’s religion, and the birthplace of his parents, and his mother’s maiden name? However, it is also said that this quota is generous. And unusual ability is readily helped, if need be by scholarships.
Reuben Moulthrop’s painting of Ezra Stiles shows him with his right hand lifted. Of this painting, President Angell of Yale (1921-37) told George Dudley Seymour (as reported in Seymour’s book New Haven) that President Hadley (1899-1921) had told him that President Stiles was saying: “Shut the door!” A Jew would be inclined to mull over this and conclude, on the basis of what is known of Doctor Stiles, that the hand was raised in welcome.
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