The integration into American society of the German Jews who came here as refugees from Nazism took place with a speed and thoroughness unparalleled in the history of immigration. Nevertheless, like all immigrant groups, the German Jewish newcomers of the 1930’s developed in the process a distinctive social coloration: Ernest Stock tries here to describe it, with special reference to the Washington Heights section of New York, named by the German Jews themselves (with somewhat heavy-handed jocosity) the “Fourth Reich.” 

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At a party given by a New Jersey Jewish community, a Princeton undergraduate mentioned that he knew Professor Einstein. “Tell me,” one of the community leaders asked the young man, “is Einstein as conceited as the rest of the German Jews?”

The undergraduate happened to have come from Germany himself; and he could not help wryly reflecting upon how many disparaging remarks about “those German Jews” he had been subjected to. They are “conceited,” they “stick together and won’t mix with the rest of us,” they are “arrogant,” they are “schemers,” they are “mercenary”—a long list of accusations sounding not too much unlike the ideas about Jews generally harbored by anti-Semites.

In part, this attitude undoubtedly stems from the fact that the old-established Jews in Germany have a long record for looking down their noses at Eastern European Jews, whose kin and descendants now make up the bulk of the American Jewish population. One young German immigrant said flatly, “They have never forgiven us for July 1938.” He was referring to the Nazi deportation of Polish Jews to the No Man’s Land between Germany and Poland—a measure which some of the native-born German Jews regarded with apathy and even, it has been said, with a certain feeling of relief at its affecting “only the Polish Jews.” Needless to say, this particular speaker was oversimplifying the matter; and most American Jews are, of course, happily unaware of the details of this and similar episodes.

There is, it is said, a small minority of the new immigrants who even here still persist in being contemptuous of Eastern European Jews. Some especially, who left Germany in the early days of the Hitler regime under no personal duress and with most of their property intact, expected that they would be readily accepted in “Aryan” circles here. When their hopes were disappointed, they made no real effort to find an entry into American Jewish circles, and haughtily confined themselves to their own group.

But among the post-1938 immigrants a decidedly different attitude prevails. They never deluded themselves that they came by choice, that they did not have to emigrate. It is true that many of them, too, were disappointed when they encountered social barriers between Jews and Gentiles: they had expected to find American society equalitarian in every sense, and it came as a shock to discover how much it is a series of rather tight ethnic enclaves. Although Jews in pre-Hitler Germany were organized in legally constituted religious communities (Gemeinden), the social relations of the German Jew were by no means restricted to his fellow Jews; German Jewish professionals frequented the homes of other German professionals, whereas, in New York, Jewish doctors and lawyers tend to visit the homes of other Jewish doctors and lawyers. But as the newcomers became more aware of the structure of American society, the initial disappointment lost significance, and they were more and more ready to seek the company of American Jews without inquiring too closely as to what side of the river Oder they came from.

There are, finally, the relatively few survivors of the death camps, and those who spent the war years in such places as Shanghai, living on the generosity of the American Joint Distribution Committee. These people identify their fate with that of Jews from Eastern Europe, and some now feel closer to the Eastern Jews than to their former countrymen.

But varying dates of arrival constitute only one differentiation in the many-stranded make-up of what is called the German Jewish group. (Incidentally, the expression “refugee” from the lips of an American has a most distasteful sound to the immigrant; nevertheless, the word is freely used by the immigrants themselves—almost all of them by now American citizens—when they refer to one another. In its English form, it has become a part of their German vocabulary.) One of the most trenchant distinctions is that between the Germans and the Austrians. The Austrians refer to the Germans as “Yeckes”; for the Germans the Austrians are simply “die Wiener.” The gulf between the two groups is very wide. They have their separate clubs and congregations, and their members rarely mix socially. They don’t even live in the same neighborhoods. In New York, where perhaps two-thirds of the immigrants are concentrated, the main Viennese districts are midtown Manhattan between 72nd and 96th Streets and some sections of Queens. The Germans, for their part, have moved en-masse to the uptown section of Manhattan known as Washington Heights, settling in an area that lies, roughly, between 160th and 180th Streets and west of Broadway, and that the immigrants themselves have dubbed “das vierte Reich.”

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The Jews of Washington Heights constitute the solid core of the wave of immigration from Germany. It is difficult to say exactly how many of them live there, but the circulation department of the German-language weekly Aufbau, which is read in almost every German Jewish family, reports that it sells some 6,000 copies in the area. If the average family has four members, an estimate of 25,000 persons might be fairly accurate. This constitutes about 20 per cent of the 129,582 persons admitted on immigration visas from Germany and Austria between 1933 and 1944,1 but it may be assumed that an additional ten or fifteen thousand arrived during those eleven years on vistors’ visas and later received permission to remain permanently. (Since 1944 the influx of German Jews has been negligible.)

Even so, the size of the German Jewish group is extremely small compared to earlier waves of immigration, when hundreds of thousands of immigrants arrived in a single year. But this numerically insignificant group has nevertheless managed to cause a flurry on the American scene within a very short space of time. One striking fact that may do much to account for the success of the group is that this immigration has been almost 100 per cent middle class, an entirely new phenomenon in American social history.

America usually expects its immigrants to start on the bottom rung of the economic and social ladder, and this is the one rule of the game that the German Jews have refused to accept. To cite one example: there were several thousand doctors in the group, and all of them were determined to continue practicing their profession. The great majority have done so, but they have had to face some real resentment on the part of their American Jewish colleagues, especially since the medical profession in New York is already, in the opinion of many of its members, overcrowded. There is also, on the part of those American Jews who remember the intense struggles of their own parents and grandparents, some feeling that the Germans are trying to have things too easy—and, what is worse, succeeding.

To be sure, the immigrants themselves have in some ways added fuel to the flames. Everyone has heard stories of German Jews boasting about their former glories and the virtues of the German way: “Bei uns war es besser.” Perhaps the most popular anecdote in this connection is the one about the dachshund who remarks to an American dog: “In Germany I used to be a St. Bernard.”

There is no doubt that a considerable number of the immigrants took a certain reduction in the living standard they were accustomed to, especially during the first period of their adjustment here. But there were also a great many others who tended to glamorize their former estate, which in reality was never so comfortable as life between Fort Washington Avenue and Broadway. In some cases these romancers manage to make their pretensions stick, but rarely with their more sophisticated fellow immigrants. Those who came from small towns and villages will be haunted by that fact to the end of their days, at least so far as their cosmopolitan cousins from Frankfort, Cologne, or Berlin are concerned. Many of the other social distinctions that prevailed among Jews in Germany have been effaced, but this one of small town against big city persists. It is not uncommon to hear children arguing among themselves about where their parents came from, and families that moved to the cities only a short time before emigrating will now informally claim their last residence. A few months ago, I was told of an elderly lady who looked at a furnished room on 180th Street and decided it was not for her because the bathtub did not quite suit her. “And do you know,” said the landlord, who was telling the story, “she comes from—, and I will bet my last penny there wasn’t a single bathtub in the whole village.”

Whatever nostalgia for the “good old times” actually remains is not to be confused with a longing to go back. The thought of returning to Germany is never even discussed, and probably no more than a hundred of the immigrants have actually gone. For most, the break is complete, much more complete than it was for immigrants from Eastern Europe; there are no letters going back and forth, no families to support, no wistful voyages to the old home town. Now and then someone with a claim to property flies over to speed things up, but these business visits are limited to the absolute minimum required, and invariably the travelers are glad to get “back home”—which means, without any mental reservations, back to the United States.

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What prompted the pioneers among the immigrants to settle up there in Washington Heights is now shrouded in the semi-legendary past of 1933 and the years immediately following. Perhaps it was the—at the moment somewhat shabby—gentility of the neighborhood, which, along with the style of the buildings, the parks nearby, and the cool breeze from the Hudson in the evening, carried vague reminders of the bourgeois residential sections of the German cities.

By now, of course, a number of the immigrants are established on the lower West Side, some even on Fifth Avenue and Park Avenue. Others were attracted to more outlying districts, especially Forest Hills and Kew Gardens in Queens, where the German Jews seem to mix more readily with their American neighbors, frequenting lodge meetings and community centers in much larger numbers than on Washington Heights. (The Queens group is younger on the average than the group in Washington Heights, and their very moving away often signified an intentional break with the restricted social environment of the Heights.) But most of the immigrants have stayed up there, south of Fort Tryon Park and north of where Fort Washington Avenue runs into Broadway. Perhaps more would have moved away if war and the housing shortage had not intervened. But the chances are that the solid core of them will stay on even when apartments have once more become plentiful, simply because they don’t like to move once they are settled down. And somehow those twenty or thirty blocks have by now taken on a very homelike quality.

There is, however, little that is aggressively German about this neighborhood, in the way that Yorkville is aggressively German, with its German restaurants, German movies, travel bureaus, and Bierstuben. True, the Staatszeitung is displayed on all the news stands, but so are Jewish Day and the Forward. (They are for the “natives”; the German Jews don’t read Yiddish.) The German Jews, although in some ways proud of their antecedents and still secretly convinced that it is a mark of distinction to have been born in Germany rather than in some Polish village with an unpronounceable name, have on the whole a very nice sense of tact. The shops they have taken over on Broadway and 181st Street, from candy stores to five-and-tens, are no different from any others except for the accent of the man behind the counter, and, perhaps, the fact that the windows of their bakeries contain some of the most succulent butter cookies produced in the Western Hemisphere.

These bakeries are among the most tangible manifestations of the German Jewish hold on Washington Heights; although they dutifully turn out a certain quota of sweet and fluffy American-style challah on Fridays, they devote their main efforts on that day to the production of the German batches, which has a hard crust covered with poppy seed and is not sweet in taste. Another tangible contribution of the German Jews to the Washington Heights scene is an excellent candy shop on 181st Street, the original store of the Barton chain which has since spread all over the city, setting an example of Orthodoxy by faithfully closing for Sabbath from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday. Apart from these shops, any citizen of the Heights must admit that it is a gustatory wasteland when compared to, say, certain districts of the West Bronx. The German Jewish cuisine differs but slightly from the somewhat stodgy German Kueche, and it has been modified only by the enthusiastic adoption of canned food by housewives who work during the day. Gefilte fish and other characteristically Jewish dishes are unknown.

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Nor can the women of Washington Heights compete with the West Bronx ladies when it comes to dress. One black dress, one brown dress, and one blue dress are considered an entirely adequate wardrobe by many. This is in line with the general strain of frugality that runs through the colony: a man will boast to a friend who is wearing a new suit that he has bought no new clothes since he came over here—though this boast is now heard less and less frequently from women.

If you ask a local resident what the outstanding contribution of his group has been to Washington Heights, he may smile slyly and point to the stylish new building of the Harlem Savings Bank at Broadway and 181st Street: “They built that with our money.” It is possible that the bank would have moved from its old ground-floor offices diagonally across the street even without the arrival of the immigrants, but anyone willing to take the trouble can see with his own eyes that the German Jews line up by the hundreds at the tellers’ windows every Friday afternoon to deposit a good part of the contents of their pay envelopes. And tight-lipped bank officials will come across with the information that a “substantial number” of the breadwinners have long ago reached the $10,000 maximum for federal insurance on savings accounts, and have started a second or third account in the name of another member of the family. Insurance salesmen, somewhat more talkative, assert that the percentage of lapses on policies taken out by the immigrants is zero.

Many families are still using the heavy German furniture they brought over in their packing crates twelve and fifteen years ago The center of the traditional living room is a massive table with straight-backed chairs around it; along one wall stretches the so-called “buffet,” a two-story cabinet used to store linen, china, and silver. In the top half, a glass showcase, knick-knacks and small antiques are exhibited. Part of another wall may then be taken up by a bookcase almost ceiling-high, with the books protected from dust and the mere browser by a locked, glass-paneled door.

With others, this type of furniture remained crated while the family settled temporarily in a small apartment. Later, as storage charges mounted, the oak, walnut, and mahogany was sold for what it would bring. Or sometimes it cluttered up the first dwelling place only to be thrown out on the move to the second, when the owner discovered that moving charges here are based on weight rather than cubic space. Today American furniture has replaced German neo-baroque in most of the living rooms; but where space permits, the vast German twin beds—each bed almost the size of an American double bed—have remained in the bedroom. They may not look very up to date, but they are too comfortable to be thrown out, and besides a bedroom is not meant to be a showplace anyway.

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The Jews of Washington Heights do “stick together.” It is in the very nature of such a neighborhood that it tends to keep social relations within the group. And it is in the nature of any group of new immigrants to settle in a place where the pioneers of their kind have already broken the alien ground. Then inertia and their inherent German conservatism keep most of them from seeking new vistas. The average German Jew over forty is most content in his home or with a circle of friends from his home town speaking German. Outside the home, he is likely to be happiest in a German Jewish social club, formed either for the purpose of playing Skat or merely for Kaffeeklatsch.

Professor Davie’s study, mentioned above, states that in a nationwide cross section, 46.8 per cent of the recent immigrants had mainly other recent immigrants as friends, 40.3 per cent had mainly American friends, and 12.8 per cent had friends equally divided between the two. Among those living in New York, however, 61.3 per cent had only other recent immigrants as their friends. (Those living in small towns and any but the largest cities are more or less compelled to go outside the immigrant group for their associations; although there are occasional instances of immigrants in the smaller cities being given the cold shoulder by the established Jewish families, easy adjustment is the rule.) Probably the count for Washington Heights alone would be higher still. And within the section itself association is to a high degree governed by place of residence. For instance, a twenty-year-old girl reports that when her parents lived near Yeshiva College on 185th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, where the “natives” outweigh the immigrants, all her friends were American Jews, but when they moved to the corner of Fort Washington Avenue and 170th Street, a section where 75 per cent of the tenants in most apartment houses are immigrants, she gradually lost track of her American friends and began to associate with “my own kind.”

Of even greater importance than place of residence in determining the immigrant’s associations is the age at which he came to the United States. As was to be expected, the high school generation—those who were still young enough to start high school or at least to complete a substantial part of it in this country—had the least difficulty in “assimilating.” Professor Davie estimates that 15 per cent of the immigrants were in this “under sixteen” category. Many of them showed an unusual degree of adaptability, and the records of George Washington High School, on 190th Street, abound with the names of immigrant youngsters who after one or two years in the country reached the head of their class. In 1943, an immigrant boy set the all-time mark for scholastic achievement at this school.

These children quickly lost their German accents and became generally indistinguishable from their native-born classmates. The importance of this can hardly be overestimated: often the German accent makes the difference between complete integration in American life and permanent status as an “outsider.” As a rule, the children speak German only at home, or they reply in English when their parents speak to them in German. Yet fundamental estrangement between the old and the younger generations, once the rule in immigrant families, seems to occur very rarely in this group. The parents encourage their offspring to imitate American customs and are proud to see them become such complete Amerikaner. True, they may shake their heads when Johnny (formerly Hans) remains glued to the television set all afternoon watching the Yankees, or when Joanie doesn’t come home from the movies until eleven, but they are in general resigned to the fact that “children are brought up differently over here.”

Middle-class Jewish homes in German cities (and what home wasn’t middle-class?) had about them a certain aura of great warmth and security. That atmosphere is largely lost in America. With women working outside the home, the tight family structure is broken up and parental authority suffers, especially as the children become the authorities on American ways while the parents remain in many respects perpetual “greenhorns.” The home in Germany was the mainstream of culture. The same home on Washington Heights is not yet rooted in anything that might be described as American culture. For one thing, there isn’t so much reading any more—work and subway travel are too demanding. The books that do get read are not on a level with the German works that still fill the bookshelves, and immigrants who were as a matter of course well read in modern German and European literature are likely to know nothing about, say, William Faulkner or Ezra Pound or F. Scott Fitzgerald. (Hemingway was popular in Germany in translation.) This is true even of men in the intellectual professions, such as doctors and lawyers. The only exceptions are the few men who teach on the college level, and those professionals and artists who have achieved general recognition in their fields, and with it a circle of professional friends and associates outside Washington Heights.

Occasionally boys or girls from cultured homes are frustrated because they cannot find companions at school with whom to share their interests, if these go beyond movies, cars, and sports. This problem is of course not peculiar to young immigrants, but belongs to adolescent intellectuals in general. In the German Jewish group, however, it is somewhat intensified by the desire to leave the German background behind and assimilate to American life; many young people are anxious to move out of their parents’ circle, and yet find the social life of the YMHA’s and other American youth groups unsatisfying. Some have remained outside all organized social life; some, naturally enough, have found their way into organizations within the Zionist movement.

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The decisive step towards integration is always marriage into the established group. Professor Davie’s researchers found that 62.4 per cent of the male German Jewish immigrants married German Jewish immigrant girls, leaving 37.6 per cent who married outside the group—an exceptionally high proportion for a recent immigrant group. The bulk of this large minority is, of course, supplied by the high school generation; in most cases, the boys take the initiative by dating and then marrying American Jewish girls, though it sometimes also works the other way. In either case, the couple gravitates inevitably away from the German and toward the American environment; no more German is spoken, and the American parents are usually more favored by the couple.

As a rule, the German parents are at first mildly opposed to this type of “inter-marriage,” feeling that their child would be happier with a mate of their own background. The mothers are convinced that German Jewish girls make better Hausfrauen, and that German Jewish boys are more stable and more predictable. But usually everything works out all right in the end. (Intermarriage between German Jews and Gentiles, it might be mentioned, is an extreme rarity.) At some of the “mixed weddings” the gulf between the two parties is accentuated by the practice of having the bride’s and groom’s relatives and friends sit on separate sides of the aisle, and later the German and American Jews tend to cluster in their own little groups. At one such affair recently, the rabbi in his speech recalled the story of Ruth—which may have been somewhat farfetched.

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Those young people who were too old to go to high school when they came, and started to work immediately, have found it a good deal harder to make social contacts among Americans. The most telling indication of this is the fact that very few of them marry outside the group. Most of these young men and women at one time made a determined effort to break down the barrier, did not quite succeed, and then retreated. Many of them have never entirely got rid of the German accent. It is the members of this age group, now in their late twenties, who will prolong the collective life of the German Jewish group after those who came here as mature men and women are gone. Most of the young men served in the army, which in many cases gave them their first contact with “real Americans,” but, with a few exceptions, they came back to Washington Heights, literally or figuratively. The exceptions were in the main the veterans who took advantage of the GI Bill to go to college (the majority of these had had some American high school training before they entered the army).

Some of this generation went to evening high school or college, but that experience yielded few American contacts. They have formed a plethora of clubs of their own: soccer clubs, hiking clubs, social clubs, etc. The youth group of the New World Club alone sponsors half a dozen of these. The members of these clubs have often felt uneasy about the way they have isolated themselves, and have made some efforts to widen their social horizon. A characteristic manifestation was the formation of an American Veterans Committee unit, called the New World Club Chapter, and exclusively German Jewish, which was later merged with a Washington Heights group of a more mixed membership and renamed the Ernie Pyle Chapter. The new chapter was militantly leftist in its stand on social and political issues, and shortly after the 1948 elections it was expelled from the national AVC because its chairman had publicly endorsed Henry Wallace. Here as in so many other areas, the Wallaceites, though in the minority, were the most active group. The other German Jews vote dutifully, and with pride in their citizenship, but active participation in local politics is the last thing anyone thinks of. Although there were, of course, Jewish politicians in Germany, they just don’t feel at home in the American political climate. Few of them have ever set foot in the Heights Democratic or Republican clubs.

A number of the German Jewish community organizations do function within larger American Jewish organizations, which seems an ideal way to assuage the desire for general recognition and affiliation to the larger community while at the same time retaining the advantages of being “among ourselves.” Examples of this type of group are the Leo Baeck Lodge of B’nai B’rith, the newly formed Daniel Frisch Lodge of B’nai Zion, and a Theodor Herzl Society which in due course became District 81 of the Zionist Organization of America, one of the most active Zionist Districts in New York. A group of World War I veterans of the German army, known as the Jewish Veterans Association, has a large membership in Washington Heights. It cultivates friendly relations with the Jewish War Veterans of America, but the fact that the members of the two organizations once fought on opposite sides remains an obvious obstacle to outright affiliation.

Somewhat of a class apart within the older group are intellectuals. As a rule they move in a small circle of other German Jewish intellectuals, including those who used to be lawyers, journalists, or teachers on the other side and are now either manual or white-collar workers. Their attitude might be summed up as follows: they have no hostility toward the American environment, no prejudice or snobbishness, but their outlook on life is different from that of their American counterparts, and thus they feel more at home among themselves. Many of these men have also sensed at one time or another that Americans don’t feel completely at ease in their presence. They have been, at first encounter, the object of polite interest, but there was often hardly enough common ground to keep it up. A favorite topic of conversation among the Germans is still the incongruities and, from the European point of view, the amusing aspects of the American scene, which they discuss more freely and with more gusto among themselves. The Germans do nevertheless admire a great many traits in the “typical American”—his energy, his lack of social inhibitions, his good humor, etc.—but they feel themselves just a little too worldly-wise ever to be like that themselves.

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The New World Club is probably the most remarkable of the one hundred and fifty or so organizations the German Jews have set up for themselves. The club started its career in 1924 with the descriptive but somewhat unimaginative name of German Jewish Club. In December 1934, the renamed club began what was to become its most important activity: the publication of a monthly newsletter, Aufbau. Today Aufbau, a 36-page weekly, can be found on most news stands from the Battery to Spuyten Duyvil Creek, and on a good many others from Johannesburg to Stockholm to Montevideo, and its subscription list includes addresses not only in all forty-eight states, Canada, and South America, but also in the Belgian Congo, Nyassaland, and New Zealand. The paper seems to have found the right formula for acting as a link among German Jews everywhere.

The contents of Aufbau show plainly that, however restricted its readers’ contacts with American Jews in the flesh, they feel very much affected by what happens in the Jewish community at large. Aufbau has had a Zionist orientation from the beginning, though it might be called a moderate one, and Jewish community activities on behalf of Israel have received full coverage in its columns. Similar coverage has been given to non-Zionist community activities. Among the paper’s regular features are political commentaries by the editor, Manfred George; they are well informed, sober, and in the best tradition of European journalism. There is also theater, film, and art criticism on a fairly high level, a column dealing with the doings of refugees in Hollywood, a women’s page, community news, and a “News from Israel” section. Outside contributors of the paper have included such figures as Thomas Mann, Fritz von Unruh, and the late Franz Werfel, and the columns of Walter Lippman and Harold Ickes were regularly featured for years.

The advertisements in each issue mirror the business success of a portion of the group, in such fields as summer resorts, furs, women’s wear, furniture, books, jewelry, insurance, shipping, investment, automobiles, cameras, etc. On the other hand, the ads do not reveal how many former businessmen—big and small—have failed to gain a foothold in the intensely competitive business world here; Professor Davie reported that only one out of six former businessmen had a business of his own, the rest were employed. As in American society as a whole, financial success has pretty much become the determinant of status in the community. With former peddlers become factory-owners and former factory-owners putting clothes on the racks of department stores, it is hardly surprising that all but the subtlest of social distinctions have been blurred.

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What of the religious life of the immigrants? At first glance, it appears to be flourishing. Every week, twenty German Jewish congregations, most of them on Washington Heights, publish the schedule of their services in Aufbau. But all twenty together have fewer than 10,000 members, and a great many of those never come to shul except on the High Holidays.

Contrary to the widely held notion that the Jews of Germany were the most “assimilated,” a vast section of the German Jewish middle class formerly adhered to a conservative brand of Judaism, which included strict observance of the Sabbath with regular visits to the synagogue. In the cities of Germany all Jewish life had revolved around the Gemeinde—the community—and in order to be a recognized member of the community one had to take part in the religious observances. In the United States, however, religious observance, which had been part of the pattern of life in a fairly homogeneous community, has been gradually abandoned. At first, some people worked on Saturdays; those who had businesses of their own kept them open. The fight for a living in the new country, they claimed, was too exhausting; they had neither time nor energy left to practice religion. There was also the argument that in a world where one’s relatives are burnt to death, there could be no God. For these and other reasons, religious observance declined, and today the German Jews of New York are perhaps less observant than their American Jewish neighbors.

In New York, the German Jewish congregations—for they are no longer “communities”—are almost all of the Conservative type; there is only one nominally Reform congregation, Habonim; its services, however, would be called Conservative by American standards. Most of those who had been Reform in Germany either dropped the whole thing or else they joined an American Reform synagogue. A few of the German synagogues are Orthodox, the most important of these being that of Rabbi Breuer, who headed the great Orthodox congregation in Frankfort. The members of this congregation—more than eight hundred of them—constitute the most closely knit community within the German Jewish faction; it is said that their children only marry the children of other members. Doubtless this is an exaggeration, but it is true that this Orthodox congregation is one of the few in which the younger people actively participate in religious life; in most of the others, the rabbis complain that “the young people don’t come”—a familiar enough complaint in American Jewish life as a whole.

Nevertheless, some of the congregations are expanding, remodeling old quarters, and building new ones. One rabbi, who is also the president of his congregation, has just negotiated the purchase of the $400,000 property in which his synagogue is situated, financing the purchase pardy through a bond issue to his members—a sign, perhaps, of the sense of stability which has succeeded the first anxious efforts to “get settled.”

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1 This figure is from Refugees in America, a study compiled under the auspices of the Committee for the Study of Recent Immigration, directed by Professor Maurice R. Davie of Yale University, and published by Harper.

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