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the early jewish community of boston's north end
Gc 974.402 B65wie
wieder
GENEALOGY 974.402 B65wie
ALLEN COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY 3 1833 01232 3215
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the
early jewish community of
boston's north end
BY ARNOLD A. WIEDER
A SOCIOLOGICALLY ORIENTED STUDY OF AN EASTERN EUROPEAN JEWISH IMMIGRANT COMMUNITY IN AN AMERICAN BIG-CITY NEIGHBORHOOD BETWEEN 1870 AND 1900
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY JEROME HIMELHOCH
BRANDEIS UNIVERSITY 1962
COPYRIGHT 1962 BY BRANDEIS UNIVERSITY WALTHAM, MASSACHUSETTS
PUBLISHED BY BRANDEIS UNIVERSITY UNDER PROVISIONS OF THE ETHEL BRESLOFF FUND WALTHAM, MASSACHUSETTS
PRINTED OFFSET BY STATE STREET PRESS, BOSTON TYPE SET IN MONOTYPE AMERICAN GARAMOND BY TYPOGRAPHIC HOUSE, INC., BOSTON BOUND BY ROBERT BURLEN & SON INC., BOSTON
acknowledgements
THE RESEARCH PROJECT which led to the writing of this book was conducted under the provisions of a grant to Brandeis University by the Ethel Bresloff Fund, of which Colonel Bernard L. Gorfinkle of Boston is the executor.
It was the wish of the late Miss Bresloff, herself originally from the North End, to have the memory of her native community perpetuated through literary means. It was left to Col. Gorfinkle, also a distinguished former North Ender, to accomplish this aim.
When the book was written, another respected former resident of this neighborhood, the late Miss Fanny Goldstein, former Curator of Judaica at the Boston Public Library, conducted an extensive search for the fine old photographs included in this volume. In addi- tion, the author is grateful for her comments on the text.
In the scholastic sense, the writer is deeply indebted to Professor Jerome Himelhoch who guided the study from its inception and provided invaluable advice dur- ing many conferences; to Dr. Abram L. Sachar, presi- dent of Brandeis University, who originally outlined
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the project, and Professors Abraham G. Duker, Hyman B. Grinstein, Oscar Handlin and Isidore S. Meyer, each of whom shared his time with the author. Col. Gorfinkle helped in many ways, especially by making contact with prospective interviewees. He followed the project with close attention throughout. Dr. Benjamin Halpern, then of Harvard University, now Associate Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Brandeis University, read the typescript and made many very valuable suggestions. Mr. Harry Dubinsky contributed many insights and valuable materials.
The typing was expertly done by Mrs. James Zung.
Mr. Henry Selib, who was in charge of publication on behalf of the University, helped solve the many prob- lems connected with the final preparations for printing and with seeing the book through the press.
The writer also wishes to thank Dean Eisig Silber- schlag of the Hebrew Teachers College, Brookline, Mass., for permission to complete this work while serving as a member of his faculty.
Above all, everyone concerned with the project is grateful to the many men and women who shared their memories with us. We trust it will please them to find within these pages what we learned from them.
6
table of contents
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 5
INTRODUCTION 9
1 Scope and Methods 13
2 Immigration 17
3 Making a Living 25
4 Homes and Family Life 35
5-Religious Life 45
6 Raising a New Generation 53
7 Summary and Conclusions 63
NOTES 71
GLOSSARY . 79
APPENDICES 81
7
introduction
RABBI WIEDER'S fascinating history of the early Jewish community of the North End of Boston will appeal to several groups of readers. To the layman he tells a lively story of immigrants escaping from the shtetl* of Eastern Europe to create a new Jewish and American way of life in the streets of Boston. To the social historian it is the account of the migration of one ethnic group to a Boston neighborhood during the last three decades of the nineteenth century and at the same time it is part of the larger epic of the great Atlantic migration of Europeans to the New World. This monograph also contains material of sociological, anthropological, and economic interest. The author discusses, among other things, intergroup contacts, acculturation, value con- flict, social change, family structure, the economics of peddling, and the sociology of religion. These phenom- ena and their interrelations are presented in five chap- ters : Immigration, Making a Living, Homes and Family Life, Religious Life, and Raising a New Generation.
Wieder's major contribution, as I see it, is to chal- lenge the traditional view of sociologists and historians
* A glossary of Yiddish and Hebrew expressions will be found on page 79. With few exceptions, Eastern European colloquial forms and pronuncia- tion were followed in transcription.
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concerning the relation between the foreign-born first and the native-born second generations. In the tradi- tional view, the fathers cling tenaciously to the Old World culture, while the sons bitterly rebel against their parents and their heritage. Wieder's evidence points to a different conclusion. He finds that the rapid accultura- tion of the second generation was of the making of the fathers - a direct result of the attitudinal changes of the first generation. The "revolt" of the second generation was only an overt manifestation of the unacknowledged wishes of the first. Behind their external traditionalism the parents often condoned and perhaps subtly encour- aged their children's lapses from orthodoxy. (Conform- ist parents, according to some psychologists, some- times unwittingly encourage their children to act out the parents' own non-conformist phantasies.) Inasmuch as many of the parents felt that a synthesis of Judaism and Americanism was impossible, they decided on the former for themselves and on the latter for their children.
The author further enhances our understanding of immigrant adjustment by tracing the unanticipated con- sequences of American freedom and economic oppor- tunity. The father's dedication to his arduous job, which devoured him from the end of one sabbath until the be- ginning of the next, turned education, religion, and child-rearing over to the mother and changed the au- thority structure of the family. Although the result was again unforeseen, the economic and prestige value of secular education diverted the traditional Jewish devo- tion to learning from religious channels. Secular educa- tional achievement, in turn, led to economic advance- ment, assimilation, and a rather extensive abandonment of dogma and ritual.
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Another useful observation of the author is his sug- gestion that more attention should be given to the small pilot community which precedes the formation of the large ethnic colony in an urban area. The early Jewish North Enders, dispersed among the Yankees and Irish, assimilated faster than the later arrivals. When the "greenhorns" came, they looked up to the veteran set- tlers as leaders, teachers, landlords, and employers. By transmitting their own blend of Jewish and American culture, the pioneers served as an agent of acculturation among the newcomers. The early ethnic community provided a reference group for the inhabitants of the larger ghetto of later years. Yet it is the relatively large and homogeneous ethnic colony which has received the major attention of social scientists.
Wieder culled many other significant observations from his lengthy, probing interviews with elderly Jewish men and women who formerly resided in the North End. While there are many possibilities of error in an historical reconstruction of this kind, the author has employed good methodological devices to minimize inaccuracies.
The author brought to his research an intimate famili- arity with Eastern European Jewish culture, Yiddish, Orthodox Judaism and the problems of immigrants. His personal history includes an early youth spent in a small Jewish community in Hungary; ordination for the rab- binate; hiding from the Nazis and confinement in con- centration camps; and, after World War II, two years of rehabilitative work among Jewish displaced persons After migrating to the United States in 1947, he con- tinued his Hebrew and secular studies at Yeshiva Uni- versity, earned his M.A. degree at Brandeis University ; and is currently teaching at the Hebrew Teachers College
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and completing his work for a doctorate in Near Eastern and Judaic Studies at Brandeis University .* In addition to these activities, he undertook the study of the North End Jewish community under my supervision when a grant for this research was made to Brandeis University by the Ethel Bresloff Fund, through the cooperation of Colonel Bernard L. Gorfinkle, Executor.
I have enjoyed working with Rabbi Wieder and watch- ing his rapid absorption of sociological theory and method - which were far removed from his previous scholarly training. It was no small feat for a man com- mitted to a sacred, traditional culture to master the aus- tere discipline of social science, with its canons of objec- tivity, skepticism, cultural relativity and suspension of value-judgment. Yet Wieder did just this in his role of scientist without in any way attenuating the rigor of his orthodoxy in his role of rabbi.
With the author as his guide, I urge the reader to travel back in the reminiscences of elderly men and women to Boston's vanished Jewish community of the North End.
JEROME HIMELHOCH
Goddard College Plainfield, Vermont March, 1960
*The doctorate was awarded in June, 1962, subsequent to this writing, on the basis of a dis- sertation titled JEREMIAH IN AGGA-DIC LITERATURE.
Dr. Himelhoch is Professor of Sociology and Director, Vermont Youth Study, at Goddard College. He was formerly associated with Brandeis University as Assistant Professor of Sociology.
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I scope and methods
THE SUBJECT of this study is the history of the East- ern European Jewish community of the North End in Boston during the last three decades of the nineteenth century. We shall focus upon the social tendencies and religio-cultural attitudes prevailing among the immi- grants in that area during the period mentioned.
Our study is based primarily on material gathered by interviews with a number of Boston Jewish citizens of advanced age who were formerly residents of the North End. These people reported both their own recollec- tions and what they remembered having heard from their elders.
There was little in professional literature to guide us in defining the proper technique for such retrospective interviewing.1 The nature of the subject matter and the age of the respondents made it necessary to make the interviews as informal as possible. At the home of the respondent or at his private business office the inter- viewee would be encouraged to reminisce aloud for a while about the years he spent in the North End, after which a series of specific questions would be asked.
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Interviews lasted from 50 to 130 minutes, with an average length of 80 minutes. A tape recorder was used, but only when permission by the respondent was granted without hesitation. In a few cases when the use of the machine noticeably inhibited the interviewee, the machine was disconnected after ten to fifteen minutes. Twenty people were interviewed in this manner. Shorter less formal interviews were given to an addi- tional large number of old-time Boston Jewish resi- dents.
The selection of interviewees was not based on any detailed pattern established beforehand. North End residence before or around the turn of the century and advanced age were the only requirements we set. Thus, our group of respondents did not constitute a represen- tative sampling of the overall North End Jewish popula- tion according to the rigorous standards of present day sociological surveys. For one thing, their advanced age (averaging 79 years) indicated that in respect to physical vigor they were above the ordinary in their generation. Secondly, in this age group our search for would-be in- terviewees had to be done by recommendation. People would understandably point out to us the more intelli- gent survivors of those days, especially those who be- came known in the city by virtue of their profession, their standing in the business world, or their participa- tion in public life. Thus, most of our interviewees were among the more successful former North Enders.
The fact that the object of our scrutiny was a com- munity that existed sixty to ninety years ago created various problems. We were aware of the limitations present in every fact-finding endeavor in which one is to depend on statements made by subjects about their
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ancestors and the society of their younger years. Forget- fulness, involuntary retrospective distortion and the utterance of evaluative descriptions were some of the possible pitfalls. On the other hand, a genuine readiness on the part of the respondents to help the project and the fact that most of them obviously enjoyed the inter- view were in our favor.2 Good rapport was facili- tated by the acquaintance of the interviewer with European shtetl life as well as with immigrant experience in general.3 The interviewer's contact with elderly first generation Jews, maintained professionally for years, as well as his ability to use the Yiddish language4 with ease further contributed to an atmosphere of mutual un- derstanding. Thus, respondents could speak to the in- terviewer rather freely without the inhibition (or attempted embellishment) frequently present when aged persons try to introduce "the good old times" to a younger man who is a stranger in their world. It is hoped that by this analysis of the society of an early Eastern European Jewish Community in a large American city, some contribution is being made to the study of the sociological processes that have been operating within American Jewry.
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2 immigration
THE PARTICULAR SECTION of the Old North End of Boston in which Jews settled during the last three dec- ades of the nineteenth century was a triangular area, each side of which measured about one fourth of a mile. The approximate boundaries of the Jewish neighborhood were Hanover Street on the southeast, Endicott Street on the west and Prince Street (in later periods Sheafe and North Bennet Streets) on the northeast. Salem Street crossed this area in a southwest-northeast direction. Smaller thoroughfares, remembered well by former North Enders, which connected these major streets in- cluded Cross Street, Morton Street, Stillman Street, North Margin Street and Parmenter Street. In addition, contemporary maps show and interviewees recall a large number of "places," actually blind alleys, such as Bald- win Place, Salem Place, Noyes Place, Bartlett Place and many others.
These boundaries could not be set with any rigidity. We constantly found families who lived in nearby streets which otherwise had a gentile population. For example, many Jews established their homes in the area between
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the North End and the younger Jewish neighborhood of the West End.6
A short distance to the south was the South End neigh- borhood, whose early Jewish settlers were of German origin. (Many of them did not favor eastern Jews.) North Enders kept up a lively contact with these "coreligion- ists" as well as those who dwelt in the West End, East Boston and Chelsea.
THE LARGE MAJORITY of the Jews who settled in the North End came from the Russian Empire. White Russia, Ukraine, Lithuania and most of Poland be- longed at this time to Russia; Galicia was under the rule of Austria-Hungary. "Since 1869 there had been in progress a slow, but steady, emigration of Russian Jews. ... This was the beginning of the third wave of Jewish immigration into America, coming on the top of the early Portuguese and the more recent German."7
Within Russian Jewry itself, there were divisions based on locality, Yiddish dialect, Hebrew pronunciation and religious traditions. In America, the ones who belonged to the same group tended to form their own synagogues. 8 Although the groups on both the North End and the West End were mixed, some interviewees observed that the North End had more of a Litvak character, while the West End had more Russishe Jews.
In addition to these groups immigrating from Russia, there were many Hungarians ("We had no use for Hun- garians," says one interviewee) and some Oriental Jews. ("They looked awfully dirty in those clothes," remem- bers another one, "they wore very colorful clothes.") "Outside the main stream of Jewish immigration from Europe were a number of supplementary currents that
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added to American Jewry nearly fifty thousand 'Orien- tal' Jews. Natives of Greece and Turkey, Syria and Morocco, their languages Greek, Arabic and Ladino, they joined in the New World other Jews with whom they had little contact for some five hundred years."9
It is interesting to note that the area in which East European Jews settled tended to be regarded by out- siders as the Jewish section in town, more than the neigh- borhood of the German Jews. A contemporary travel guide refers to the North End as "the ghetto," but not to the South End. In a book published in 1883 we read, "There is no distinctively Hebrew quarter although many live on Salem Street and in that immediate neigh- borhood."10 The German Jews were by then perhaps sufficiently dispersed in the city not to form a "distinc- tively Hebrew quarter." A greater degree of adjustment achieved by them may have caused the German Jews to be less noticeable than the newer arrivals.
Various reasons were given by interviewees when asked why their families had left Russia. In earlier years the danger of being drafted in the Russian army - a prospect of unlimited suffering for a Jew - was one of the rather frequent causes for emigration.11 Beginning with the eighties, the deteriorating conditions of Rus- sian Jewry prompted additional thousands to look west- ward. "Each new Russian ukase which straitened the living space of the Jews increased the number of those eager to migrate."12
Not all, however, left their homes with the purpose of crossing the ocean. Some wanted to settle in Western Europe. Others aspired to reach the land of Israel. The question "Whence comest thou?" was easier to answer than the question "Whither art thou going?" Rabbi
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Zalman Yaakov Friederman, one of the scholarly figures of the North End, was dispatched from Kovno by the famed Rabbi Isaac Elchanan to a rabbinic position in Amsterdam. He did not like it there and decided to come to America. The family of Nachman Solomon Rabino- witz left Russia in order to go to Palestine. The father was an ardent Biluist13 who did not give up his hope to reach the Land of the Fathers even after he had landed in America. Another family, that of intellectual Louis Mil- lionthaler, had lived for many years in England before crossing the ocean.
Many immigrants chose Boston as the city of their settlement because their relatives or landsleit had lived in this city. Frequently, however, their coming to a given city was purely a matter of coincidence. "Arriving at Castle Garden by the Australia, [Abraham Bilafsky and his family] were 'billeted' to Baltimore, but by a mistake in writing were sent to Boston." As Handlin puts it, "Chance was so large an element in the course of migra- tion, it left little room for planning. The place of landing was less often the outcome of an intention held at the outset of the journey than of blind drift along the routes of trade or of a sudden halt due to the accidents of the voyage."14
The "drift along the routes of trade" caused many immigrants to finally settle in Boston, even if they had originally landed elsewhere. Interviewees remember peddlers who came from afar to sell their wares in the Boston area and then simply decided to settle in this city, from which they would be able to reach their cus- tomers with greater ease.
What conditions were responsible for the fact that the North End became the neighborhood of Eastern Euro-
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The North End is still a neighborhood of first generation Americans - only the nationality has changed.
O
Ladies on a shopping tour more than six decades ago.
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pean Jews? The son of a real estate dealer and builder of the time says: "Perhaps cheaper housing. It was an old colonial neighborhood. By my time, the original families had long moved away. Before the Jews came, it was an Irish neighborhood."
According to another interviewee, "It was close to the waterfront. The South Ferry that connected the city with the Harbor landed at Fleet Street in the North End."
Whatever their reason for choosing this area, in the early seventies a few Jewish families arrived in the North" End. An interviewee, who came in 1881, was asked:
Q. When you came to the North End did the area al- ready have a large Jewish population?
A. There must have been forty or fifty families.
Q. Did you hear anything in your childhood as to how much earlier the Jews moved in to the North End?
A. They said that eight to ten years earlier it was all Irish. This was in 1881. So I guess fifty families must have settled there in the 1870's.
The first ones seem to have moved there from the South End. "I started telling you about Henry Wyzan- sky. He was one of eight or nine brothers. One of his brothers had a butcher store in the South End when Henry came. In 1869 or 1870 he bought (or perhaps hired first) a house on 5 Stillman Street and opened downstairs a butcher store of his own. Many of the new- comers came to his house when they arrived. Many im- migrants lived with him for a considerable period of time. They paid him three dollars a week for room and board. Most of them were not relatives."
For almost three decades these early settlers and a comparatively small number of others who followed them lived scattered among the Irish inhabitants of the
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North End. The crowded, all-Jewish North End, so well known to Boston Jews around and after the turn of the century, had not yet emerged. In 1873 a congregation was founded by one of the early arrivals in the area.15 The founder's daughter remembers however that even after a few years of the existence of this congregation she was sometimes sent to neighbors' homes to call someone to the minyan. A North End girl who was married in 1887 had difficulty finding an apartment on Salem Street "be- cause she was Jewish." Another former resident, who came as late as 1897, writes : "As I recall the North End of those days, it was still a good residential section of the city. Although the neighborhood was predominantly Irish, with a scattering of Jewish families, there were also a number of old homes occupied by descendants of the original owners, who themselves were pretty well along in years .... The change in the neighborhood was marked even before my graduation from the Hancock School in 1904 and by the time I had graduated from high school, the Irish had all but disappeared from the North End and were rapidly being replaced by a large Jewish population."16
The change in the picture of the North End between the 1870's and the 1900's can best be illustrated by com- paring two statements made by interviewees. One relates that his mother, who went to school after 1870, could find only Irish playmates at school. The other, a physi- cian, tells me that in the early 1900's he was once sent out from his medical school to supervise a birth at a North End home. On the way he saw a trio of boys consisting of a Jewish, an Irish and a Negro boy. They were argu- ing in a loud voice - in Yiddish.
Thus, the character of the North End Jewish com-
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munity during the first period of its history was very different from what it was to become after the turn of the century. The earlier community was small in num- bers, struggling to maintain its institutions. It was not yet a "Jewish neighborhood"; they were still a minority. It leaned in many ways on the older German community in other parts of the city. Its members were "a friendly lot," "a very homogeneous group." They "were as happy as they could be in those days." Their initial pov- erty was soon overcome. They Americanized fast. Un- like the later immigrants, they remained in the North End for a long time. When the large influx began, these early inhabitants became in many ways the guides of the new arrivals. In view of this role and in view of the fact that they were the first to confront the enormous prob- lems of the Jewish immigrant in an area hitherto devoid of Jews, they perhaps deserve the appellation "pioneers" (using this word in a considerably extended sense) which their descendants today affectionately apply to them. The presence of such a smaller, better Americanized community, settled in an area before the beginning of large scale immigration, may have important implica- tions for the sociological processes in the later immi- grant group, such as the speed and the mode of its ac- culturation. We shall touch on these implications in a later section after we have described North End Jewish life in detail according to its major institutional areas.
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