Emma Lazarus: Poet of Exiles

You're probably familiar with a poem called "The New Colossus" that includes the line “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…” It's an essential part of the American immigrant narrative that unfolded at Ellis Island in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty.

However, you may be less familiar with the poem's author, Emma Lazarus, a lifelong New Yorker born in 1849. Through the Summer of 2012, the Museum of Jewish Heritage in lower Manhattan is presenting Emma Lazarus: Poet of Exiles--the first major museum exhibit about Lazarus. This is a rare opportunity to learn more about a remarkable woman who broke gender barriers and left an important mark on American history.

Emma Lazarus

Though her Sephardic Jewish family had deep roots in the United States dating back to the colonial era, Lazarus lived through a period of unprecedented immigration. Living in New York, she witnessed the impact of thousands of newcomers beginning their lives in a new world. She captures the profound nature of this chapter of American history in "The New Colossus", her most famous work:

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

--Emma Lazarus, 1883

To learn more about the life and work of Emma Lazarus, visit the Museum of Jewish Heritage in lower Manhattan.

--Posted by Kira Garcia

Goodbye Mr. Ball Goodbye!: A Tribute Song to Hank Greenberg

On April 27, 2011, Mark Kurlansky and Kevin Baker joined Tenement Talks to discuss the life and times of Hank Greenberg, an Jewish-American professional baseball player from the 1930s and 1940s.  Greenberg is best known for his refusal to play baseball on Yom Kippur in 1934.  Audience member, David Bellel from the Lower East Side History Project, brought a special treat for the audience, a song written by Bill Coryn and Harold Smith about Greenberg's ability as a power hitter.  Listen to the song here and follow along with the lyrics!

Goodbye Mr. Ball Goodbye

Written by Bill Coryn & Harold Smith
Performed by Groucho Marx, Bing Crosby & Hank Greenberg

Courtesy of the Philco Radio Show

We’ve heard about those old time dangerous pirates

of Captain Kidd and Silver John the Long

but we prefer those modern dangerous Pirates

as our victims walk the plank we sing this song

Oh, goodbye, Mr Ball, goodbye

You are going to see an awful lot of sky

don’t hang around for Richard to open up that door

when Hankus Pankus hits you where you’ve never been hit before

Oh, goodbye, Mr Ball, goodbye

You had better kiss your relatives good bye

when Hank comes to the plate, Ball,

you’re gonna to be out late so

Oh, goodbye, Mr Ball, goodbye

Oh, goodbye, Mr Ball, goodbye

Say hello there to the sun up in the sky

a plate is mighty handy to eat the lean and fat

but not when Hank the Greenberg serves it up with his big bat

Oh, goodbye, Mr Ball, goodbye

Go fly ‘til the blue has met the dawn up in the sky

when Hank gets home run itch, Ball,

you’re going to drop a stitch
so goodbye Mr ball, goodbye

Oh nothing could be finer

than a partner like Ralph Kiner

in the outfield

and I am confirmin’ that I’ll work for Billy Herman

in the infield

Oh goodbye, Mr Ball, goodbye

you had better kiss your relatives goodbye

Wait a minute, when the count is 2-0 and I let that third one go,

what happens then?

You’re out

Oh Goodbye Mr Hank goodbye

And furthermore,

when I think I've got a hit and it winds up in Slaughter's mitt

How about that?

Too bad

Oh goodbye Mr. Hank Goodbye

Oh, Mr. Greenberg

Goodbye Mr. Hank Goodbye

Lyrics courtesy of hankgreenbergfilm.org

A Conversation with Mark Kurlansky on Hank Greenberg

Mark Kurlansky, the author of Hank Greenberg: The Hero Who Didn't Want to Be One, explores the legendary life of Hank Greenberg, the famous first baseman and power hitter for the Detroit Tigers in the 1930s.

Why does Hank Greenberg remain so important in American Jewish history?
In the 1930s, at a time when there was so much anti-Semitism in America that Jews hesitated to be too conspicuous, here was a Jewish superstar who seemed fearless, who faced relentless anti-Semitism and never backed away.  But in the longer view of history, Hank Greenberg was a man who stood against not only anti-Semitism but racism and bigotry in general, and did so with remarkable grace.  His refusal to ever use prejudice as an excuse and his ability to always keep his dignity stand as an important chapter in the history of the fight against bigotry in America, one that can inspire not only Jews but all victims of hatred and discrimination.

How much of his decision not to play ball on Yom Kippur, 1934, was informed by his religious faith? 
He had no religious faith, was completely secular.  When his team needed him in a tight pennant race, on Rosh Hashanah, he played.  But by Yom Kippur the pennant was secure, and since many Jews had been upset about Rosh Hashanah and it was an embarrassment for his family, he decided not to play.  The following year on Yom Kippur he was in a World Series and his team needed him, and he agreed to play without hesitation.  But a wrist injury the day before prevented him from participating, thereby securing the myth that "Hank Greenberg won't play on the High Holidays."  It never came up again.


Was Hank Greenberg always uncomfortable with the idea of being a hero to American Jews?
Yes, he was very uncomfortable about it.  Jews were constantly trying to honor him at banquets and give him gifts, and he turned both down, saying he just wanted to be a ballplayer.  He never wanted to deny being Jewish but did not believe that it should give him a special standing.


How much did Detroit figure into his experience and his legend?
Had he played in New York his story might have been different.  But he was in Detroit, a city with a small tightly knit Jewish community and a general public with a great deal of anti-Semitic feeling.  In the years he was playing, two of the most notorious anti-Semites in the country, Father Coughlin and Henry Ford, were both spewing hate in Detroit.  


What qualities defined him as an athlete?
Though his swing was unbelievably graceful, he was never considered a natural athlete.  He was large, a bit awkward, and flat-footed.  But he was also extremely powerful and the most hardworking player in the history of professional baseball.  He spent hours before and after games practicing his swing and his fielding moves.  Whenever his performance was lacking he worked on that particular move until he had it down.  And in an age when other players such as Babe Ruth were out carousing, he kept himself in top physical condition year round.


What qualities most defined him as a man?
His humility, without a doubt.


This interview was conducted and published by the Yale University Press. 

Our Neighbor on Broome Street

THIRTEEN / WNET has a web series called City Concealed, in which they visit lesser-known New York landmarks. Their latest video concerns the Kehila Kedosha Janina synagogue here on Broome Street. Since 1927, the temple has been the spiritual home of the Lower East Side's Romaniote Jews, who came from the town of Ioannina (Yanina / Janina) in Greece. Neither Ashkenazi not Sephardic, this group has their own language and cultural traditions, although they worship in much the same way that all Jews do.

My favorite part of the video comes as the congregation members are discussing the foods of their culture, naming them one by one. As they get to fasolia, which someone says means "beans," congregation member Jerry Pardo interjects his own very personal memory of the dish:

"Fasolia's not just beans. Fasolia is your mother in the kitchen, five o'clock in the morning, Friday morning, with a cigarette hanging outta her mouth, and the beans are on the stove. They're simmering, and they're simmering, and they're simmering, and they're simmering, and there's pieces of lamb in it - the one that your father sucks the middle out of it, the marrow."

This dish isn't just some pot of beans - it embodies his mother's labor and love, her devotion to her culture and her family, and the special work she put into the weekly Sabbath meal.



The City Concealed: Kehila Kedosha Janina from Thirteen.org on Vimeo.

The synagogue is open for services and also open Sundays for guided tours of their small museum. Check it out next time you're in the neighborhood.

- Posted by Kate

Baking with Schmaltz

Around the turn of the 20th century, Jewish immigrants began to flood into America by the thousands, coming largely from Eastern Europe and Russia. These Jewish immigrants were faced with the grand question of Americanization: "What traditions from my home country do I preserve, and which do I shed to become more 'American'?" Many new immigrants looked to their dinner tables to begin the assimilation process.

Cookbooks printed at this time reveal "...the choices Jewish women made and, at times, the conflicts that they felt as they negotiated the tension between kosher laws and their upwardly mobiles aspirations... As the 20th century marched on, many Jewish women felt comfortable assimilating through the table...It was possible to do this and still remain Jewish in identity, soul and even according to religious law if desired." (1)

In the pages of early 20th-century cookbooks, you can find the Americanization process written in the recipes. Some of the most literal examples come from cookbooks designed to accompany commercial products, many printed in both English and Yiddish. In the Manoschewitz cookbook pictured below, you can find Passover-friendly recipes for Boston Cream Pie with a matzo meal crust and Mock Oatmeal Cookies, made with schmaltz (chicken fat) instead of butter.

The Mock Oatmeal cookies aren’t as bad as they sound, particularly when they are fresh from the oven and made with Russ & Daughters’ schmaltz. For the recipe, head to my blog Four Pounds Flour.

(1) Schenone, Laura. 1,000 Years Over a Hot Stove. W.W. Norton & Company, 2003.

- Posted by Sarah Lohman

From Work Space to Space for Worship

What can a pair of tarnished candle sticks hidden away on a kitchen mantel tell us about a family?

For Harris and Jennie Levine, making a living in America meant using their small tenement apartment at 97 Orchard Street as both home and workspace. Harris, like many other Eastern-European immigrants at the turn of the century, made a living through piecework for the garment industry, eventually employing a handful of other workers in his family’s living room.

During the week Jennie and their children shared the space with Harris and his workers as they pieced together ladies’ dresses. Harris might have been cramped over the sewing machine situated near one of the few windows in the apartment, while up to half a dozen women stitched pieces of fabric alongside him in the living room. In the kitchen a presser, a senior male member of Harris’ staff, ironed the completed pieces next to the same stove Jennie would be using to cook and clean for her family.


On the kitchen mantelpiece are two candlesticks – small objects that tell a larger story of how the Levine family would have maintained their culture and religion in this home/work environment. With the Jewish Shabbat beginning at sunset each Friday evening, Jennie would have a limited amount of time in which to reclaim her home and transform it from a work space to a space of worship. She might have waited impatiently for the workers to leave on Fridays so she could move the dress model out of the center of the room, dust around the sewing machine, and put away the tools of Harris’ trade, like the bobbin, pattern tracer, and scissors.

Though Jennie wouldn’t be able to reclaim the space until Friday afternoons, she might begin her Shabbat shopping on Thursday nights or Friday mornings to gather all the necessary ingredients to prepare a proper meal, as none of this work could be done after sunset.

A New York Daily Tribune reporter visiting the neighborhood market on Fridays stated that “the people are massed so thickly on the pavements that it is only in aggressive fashion that one can make his way through the crowd. As for the middle of the street, there is no middle to be seen.” Homemakers like Jennie poured into the streets to gather last-minute ingredients for this weekly holiday.

For working families, Shabbat rituals helped transform the tenement into a special space for one day, with the aroma of stew and challah filling the apartment instead of freshly steamed dress pieces, and the sounds of song and prayer replacing the hum of the sewing machine. As sundown approached, Jennie would bring out the candlesticks, hidden on the mantel during the week, and place them prominently on a table to signify the beginning of the family’s day of rest. On Shabbat, the Levine family could find comfort in the old traditions, modified for a new home.

All photos by Battman Studios, Courtesy Lower East Side Tenement Museum.

- Posted by Shana Weinberg

Suzanne Wasserman Previews “Sweatshop Cinderella”

On Tuesday, June 8, noted filmmaker and historian Suzanne Wasserman stood in front of a packed crowd at the Museum Shop to tell Anzia Yezierska’s amazing history. An eclectic mix of visitors both young and old sat to watch Sweatshop Cinderella, Wasserman’s documentary about this Polish-born immigrant, a child of the Lower East Side tenements who fought against prejudice and poverty to become a stubbornly honest, gifted writer. Afterward, Wasserman spoke directly to the audience about her film, its subject’s challenging personality, and how she felt personally connected to Yezierska’s prevailing nostalgia.

The film follows the writer from her youth in a sweatshop and her early career to a romance with famous thinker John Dewey, her brief stint in Hollywood where she was courted by Samuel Goldwyn, and finally her return to New York, where she wrote her most famous novel, Bread Givers, a semi-biographical account of life in the tenements.

Wasserman splices together the major events of the Yezierska’s life with the author’s own wisdom, providing a glimpse into the her enduring outlook on life (“Nothing is real to me but the past”) and her rebellious determination to overcome the simple expectations for a young Jewish woman at the time (“All that I could ever be… was in myself”).

Using archival footage culled from Wasserman’s extensive research, the film is a collage of historic photos, silent films, interviews with friends and fellow historians - Alice Kessler Harris, American history professor at Columbia University, and author Vivian Gornick, who proclaims Yezierska a “literary genius” - and even the sole recording of Yezierska, from a reel-to-reel tape housed at Boston University. These clips, of recycled brown paper bag upon which she would write, of the notebook in which she scribbled at ten years old, espouse many of the same profound ideas and frustrations she held all her life and provide an unprecedented look at Yezierska’s humble genius, even as she was misunderstood by readers and critics alike.

As Harris notes in the film, Yezierska “could write English perfectly well” yet hid this mastery behind a “Yiddish idiom,” for the sake of authenticity and respect for her subjects. This talent, of course, was overlooked – she was labeled an inexplicably successful “Sweatshop Cinderella” by the press and undermined by Hollywood, where her painful, honest characterization of immigrant life was reduced to a simple, raving caricature in 1922’s film adaptation of Hungry Hearts.

Wasserman's biographical film is also deeply personal. She first discovered Yezierska’s work as a grad student in the ‘80s and couldn’t believe the “grittiness of description” that she employed to “bring the Lower East Side to life.” Wasserman immediately felt a connection between her nostalgic memories of childhood in Chicago, represented by home movies scattered throughout the film, and Yezierska’s own yearning for a sense of home in New York, even if it was less than ideal.

In the 1930s, after the Depression hit and people grew disinterested in her stories of hardship, Yezierska was happy to be poor again. When the audience asked Wasserman if Yezierska was a downbeat person, she described her only as “compelling” and “magnetic” even in her troubles.

Appropriately, her film concludes with the great German author W.G. Sebald’s words, “Memory blinds us to life and yet, what would we be without memory… without the faintest trace of the past?” Yezierska gave her life to history, so where would we be without discovering it ourselves?

See the wonderful Sweatshop Cinderella at its next public screening, July 11th at the Yiddish Book Center. And make sure to stop by at another installment of the Tenement Talks series tonight and Thursday.

- Posted by Joe Klarl

Tenement Talks: Sweatshop Cinderella

While women of the 21st century have more choices and more control over their destinies than ever before, some  societal pressures remain. Immigrant women in particular must struggle to assimilate into American society while continuing to respect the traditions of their home countries. Feminist writer Anzia Yezierska was influential in spurring dialogue during the early 20th century about this very issue

Yezierska was born in Poland; her family emigrated at the turn of the 20th century, settling on the Lower East Side. She, her mother, and her siblings worked while Mr. Yezierska, a Talmudic scholar, studied day and night.

Yezierska envisioned a life different than the one traditionally arranged for young Jewish women during that time. While most women married, then stayed home to have and raise children, she attended Teacher’s College at Columbia University and majored in domestic sciences. She felt a passion for writing and published her first story in 1915.

Bread Givers, her most famous novel, was published in 1925. While the work is fictional, there are many parallels to the author's own life. This coming-of-age story follows Sara Smolinsky, who lives with her family on the Lower East Side in a tenement building. Sara struggles with her father’s domination over her family, her assimilation to American culture, and her fight to be an independent woman.

Suzanne Wasserman recognizes Yezierska’s literary influence on American society. In her new documentary, Sweatshop Cinderella, Wasserman explores Yezierska’s life, literary career, and the way her work still resonates today.

Tonight Tenement Talks is excited to present an advanced screening of the film, followed by a discussion with with the director. Join us! RSVPs are requested to events@tenement.org.

- Posted by Alana

Questions for Curatorial: Come and Go

Curatorial Director Dave answers your questions. To submit a question, write in the comments or on our Facebook wall.

In what percentages did immigrants return to their home lands? Are there differences if looked at by time period and ethnicities?

Many immigrants came to America with the ultimate intention of returning to their home countries after earning enough money to buy land or houses. Between 1900 and 1920, 36 percent of immigrants arriving in the United States returned home.

In turn-of-the-century New York, the degree to which Russian Jews became permanent settlers was remarkable. Escaping virulent anti-Semitism and political oppression, many emigrated with no intention of returning. Nevertheless, many more went back than is ordinarily assumed. Between 1880 and 1900, 15 to 20 percent returned to their homes. After 1900, however, return migration dropped off as political upheaval and religious oppression intensified.

In contrast to Russian Jews, the return rate among Italians reached 50 percent in some years -— of every 10 Italians who left for the U.S. between 1880 and World War I, five returned home. Sometimes called “birds of passage,” many of the first Italian immigrants were young men who came to America with the intention of earning enough money to return to Italy, buy land, and raise a family.

According to Nancy Foner, author of From Ellis Island to JFK: New York’s Two Great Waves of Immigration, “Italians called the United States ‘the workshop’; many arrived in March, April, and May and returned in October, November, and December, when layoffs were most numerous… For many Italian men, navigating freely between their villages and America became a way of life.”

Nevertheless, many returnees or ritornati chose to re-migrate to the United States.

“You Shall Not Oppress A Stranger”

My family just had its Passover seder, and after almost two years as a museum educator, I’m thinking anew the recitation of the biblical passages that say, “You shall not oppress a stranger, for you know the feelings of the stranger, having yourselves been strangers in the land of Egypt” and “When strangers reside with you in your land, you shall not wrong them . . . You shall love them as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”

My inclination is to understand this broadly—we are all responsible for all the strangers in our midst—rather than narrowly. My childhood Hebrew teachers said that this meant that Jews must look out for one another. This is consistent with how I think of Passover; but in the interests of full disclosure, I should add that a narrower interpretation would leave me doing all the dishes at the end of the ceremony.

My family’s Passover Seder is such a mixed lot of Jews, Christians, Buddhists, and agnostics that I’m sure we’re going to open the door for the prophet Elijah some day and get the Easter bunny instead. Of course Passover is an easy holiday to celebrate with people who have to be told what they’re celebrating. It fulfills a commandment that says, “You shall tell your child on this day” and is based on the instruction book called the Haggadah. The entire ceremony is designed to explain itself. Participants are meant to ask questions: What are we doing here? Why is there a bone and an exploded egg (I’m a bad egg-roaster) and parsley and mushy things on a plate? Where’s the normal bread?

The answers are nice and concrete—and usually edible: We were slaves in a foreign land until God freed us, and so there’s salt water for tears and horseradish for bitterness, and we taste them both. Literally. The gloppy brown stuff (ours is made of apples and pecans) represents the mortar that the slaves used to stick bricks together while building cities for Pharaoh. And it’s spring and this is a festival about hope, so we eat bright springy green sprigs of parsley.

Mostly it’s a festival of freedom. Whose? Well, the Jews who were enslaved in Egypt, but even as a child I found that too limited an interpretation. I grew up during the civil rights movement. When we sang “Go Down, Moses” in second grade, I knew it was about Moses from my Sunday school classes, but I also knew it was about slaves in the United States and what Dr. King was saying on television. At my childhood Seder, we skipped a lot. Dad read, “‘The great Rabbi Hillel had much to say about this,’” adding, “but we don’t. Next page.” Still, at the end, I always felt my heart lift, because we, or the American slaves, or someone were free.

So when I moved to New York City and acquired a mostly Italian, partly Irish, slightly Japanese family, I wanted to do a Seder with them. Even with the help of a lot of friends named Schwartz, this was awkward. People who have been taught by nuns in the 1950s (much of my new family) tend to think of ritual as serious stuff. They were thinking, “This is holy! Shut up and be respectful.” It took a few years to persuade them that you’re supposed to get slightly drunk and argue.

Having people who have never been at a Seder before makes it a better holiday. Someone needs to be truly asking questions. It shouldn’t become rote, as it might be if it’s always your family and everyone already knows what comes next: here’s where we get horseradish on the tablecloth; here’s where Uncle Irving renews his annual argument with Grandpa Abe about something that happened in 1952. And with newcomers, it’s possible to get genuinely unexpected answers to some of the traditional questions. One year a Venetian-American guest listened to us struggle with the traditional end-of-Seder wish, “Next year may we be in Jerusalem,” when most of us present would have preferred to say, “Next year may we be in Venice.” So what do we make of that—we muttered, as we often mutter—and the Venetian lady said, “Doesn’t it mean that people want to be in their true home—a real place or a spiritual home, their personal Jerusalem?” We thought it might.

It is, of course, possible to do Seder as the story of one people’s freedom and triumph, and the Egyptians get what they deserve, so there. But it’s useful to remember that the angels take this point of view in the Bible, and God yells at them. Even though the Egyptians are the complete bad guys of the story, God says, “You can’t rejoice when some of my people are suffering.” So as part of the Seder, we diminish our full glass of wine—a symbol of joy—a drop for each plague, to mourn the suffering of the very people we were fleeing.

It’s not a Seder that would satisfy everyone. Elijah’s cup is from an old Metropolitan Opera production of Parsifal. Occasionally an Italian brings a Neapolitan Easter cake, though some years the brisket has to be kosher. I’ve cobbled together a Haggadah that makes the coming from slavery to freedom, from oppression to joy, as universal as possible. So: You shall partake of suffering everywhere, because you suffered. You shall remember the poor. You shall remember to hope. Next year, may all be free. And, “You shall not oppress a stranger, for you know the feelings of the stranger, having yourselves been strangers in the land of Egypt” and “When strangers reside with you in your land, you shall not wrong them. They shall be like the native-born. You shall love them as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”

This year I was thinking of “strangers in our land.” I’ve given tenement tours to: Third graders, children of immigrants, who tell me our tenement apartments look big to them because they share a single room with their brothers and sisters and parents; the woman who asked her English teacher if the ponds in Central Park were for doing the laundry, like where she came from; visitors who say they were engineers or doctors in the old country, but here they drive taxis or work in construction - sometimes mocked for having “funny accents,” they plan to send their children to college; and the immigrant from Trinidad who was at our Seder—a Baptist minister—who wept, saying that he missed his family but realized that the ties of friendship and ritual can create a new family and a new home, even while the people with whom he shares ties of blood are far away.

- Posted by Judy Levin, Tenement Museum educator

Mick Moloney, a Gorgeous Former Synagogue, and Brooklyn Brewery Beer

All of these things came together Tuesday night at a Tenement Talk entitled "If It Wasn't for the Irish and the Jews." Mick Moloney, an ethno-musicologist, specializes in 19th and early 20th century American music. He's particularly interested in the way that cultures intermingle in song. He's done a lot of work to investigate the American music scene in its early days.

His latest CD focuses on an unlikely cross-cultural collaboration between Irish and Jewish Americans at the end of the 19th century. Musicians, songwriters, and performers easily swapped identities based on the direction the music industry was going... George M. Cohan, for instance, the writer of such classics as "Give My Regards to Broadway" and "You're a Grand Old Flag" was the son of Irish immigrants whose family name was Keohane. His parents were in show business on the Vaudeville stage, so perhaps there was specific intent when they changed their name to Cohan, which at a glance seems like Cohen, a common Jewish name. Working with many Jewish songwriters and performers, Cohan likely took advantage of this misconception to gain a foot hold in his industry. As always in show biz, performers would change their names if it helped to insure their success.

Here's a bit of the title song, written and composed by William Jerome (ne Flannery) and Jean Schwartz:

What would this great Yankee nation
Really, really ever do?
If it wasn't for a Levy,
A Mon-a-han or Don-a-hue,
Where would we get our policemen?
Why Uncle Sam would have the blues
Without the Pats and Isadores.
You'd have no big department stores,
If it wasn't for the Irish and the Jews.

McDonald built the subway and his name we'll not forget.
A word of praise is due to Nathan Strauss.
For pasteurizing baby's milk,
the world owes him a debt.
He's a friend to every kiddie in the house.
Without Big Tim Sullivan what would the Bowry do?
Just ask the man that needs a pair of shoes.
There wouldn't be an East Side in the City of New York,
If it wasn't for the Irish and the Jews.

Below are some photos from our event, held at the beautiful Angel Orensanz Foundation Center on Norfolk Street. Many people asked on Tuesday about the building's history. It was formerly the Ansche Chesed Synagogue (constructed 1849). Click here for a link to a pdf history pamphlet.



Full-sized photos can be found directly on our Flickr page.

Thanks to all who joined us for the event!

- Posted by Kate

Questions for Curatorial: German Populations

Curatorial Director Dave answers your questions.

What percentage of Kleindeutschland’s German immigrant population was Jewish during the mid-to-late 19th century?

Kleindeutschland was a collection of ethnic groups as diverse and independent as the German states themselves. Its inhabitants thought of themselves as Bavarians, Prussians, or Saxons, before they thought of themselves as Germans, even after German unification in 1871. Many dialects could be heard in the streets of Kleindeutschland and its residents practiced a variety of regional customs.

In 1860, the Bavarians dominated the city, but by 1880 the Prussians were the largest German nationality in New York. German Jews, while always a minority, made up roughly 20% of New York's German-American population by the 1880s.

Gender Studies in Hasidic Williamsburg

This Thursday Ayala Fader, author of Mitzvah Girls: Bringing Up the Next Generation of Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn, is coming to Tenement Talks. Her book focuses on the Hasidim in Brooklyn, specifically girls’ experiences growing up in this community. It should be a thought-provoking discussion of religious and gender.

While many ethnic groups adopt aspects of American culture, the Satmar Hasidim have for the most part resisted assimilation. Scholar Jerome Mintz describes this community, which was established after the Holocaust:

…unlike the immigrants of earlier decades who had sought to eliminate differences between themselves and other Americans and to integrate into American life… Distinctiveness from the American community, rather than acculturation, was the keystone of their social strategy.

Yiddish, rather than English, is the first language of Hasidim. Hasidic men and boys wear the same style of clothing that their Hungarian ancestors wore decades ago – long black kaftans and black hats. In New York, the Satmar Hasidim manage their own schools, satisfying the state educational requirements in English and secular subjects and dedicating the rest of their time to religion. They live in a concentrated area to attend synagogue; access food, health providers, drug stores, barbers, and tailors that accommodate the strict requirements of their religion; and be close to the rebbe, their religious leader. In this structured, homogeneous community, the Hasidim replicate their way of life in each subsequent generation.

As Fader argues, however, Hasidic women interact much more with the secular world then outsiders might imagine:

They are fluent Yiddish speakers but switch to English as they grow older; they are increasingly modest but also fashionable; they read fiction and play games like those of mainstream American children but theirs have Orthodox Jewish messages; and they attend private Hasidic schools that freely adapt from North American public and parochial models.

What do these changes mean for the community?

We’re looking forward to hearing more from Dr. Fader and hope you’ll join us on Thursday. Tenement Talks are held at the Museum Shop, 108 Orchard at Delancey, at 6:30 pm.

- Posted by Penny King

Tenement Talks: Melvin Urofsky on Louis D. Brandeis

On Wednesday night, Melvin Urofsky joined us at the Tenement Museum Shop for an informative talk about Louis D. Brandeis: A Life, his biography on the first Jewish Supreme Court Justice. Urofsky, a tall but kind and approachable academic, opted to speak without the microphone, opened with a joke, and commenced his engaging dialogue.

Although born in the United States, Brandeis, we learned, was the son of immigrants from the Czech Republic. He was a hard-working, self-made man who devoted his life to law, eventually becoming the first lawyer to practice pro bono work.

Although Brandeis was not from the Lower East Side, he came to know it during a crucial time - the Garment Strike of 1910 - when he played a fundamental role in drafting a Supreme Court resolution. Touching on this subject, Urofsky noted that“[Brandeis] set up the protocol” which was instrumental in facilitating peace in the garment industry.

- Posted by Ariel, Tenement Talks Intern

Business Senselessness

Canal Street’s Jarmulowsky Bank building is a stop on the Museum’s new walking tour, Immigrant Soles. Here's a short history.



In 1873 prominent philanthropist and Russian immigrant Sender Jarmulowsky founded a bank on the Lower East Side. Through his astute business sense and community connections the bank grew, and in 1912 Jarmulowsky erected a structure at Orchard and Canal Streets magnificent enough for his successful company.

Unfortunately, Jarmulowsky died less than a month after the building was completed. Even more unfortunately, his bank failed only two years later, leaving thousands of its depositors penniless. Jarmulowsky himself had little to do with the bank's downfall. His seemingly risky business practices - granting loans to clients based on personality rather than financial standing - proved successful.

It was two of Jarmulowsky's sons who caused trouble, making bad real estate investments and mismanaging the institution they had inherited from their father. As World War I raged in Europe, crowds of Lower East Siders rushed to withdraw money for family across the Atlantic. Having squandered the bank’s funds, the Jarmulovskys couldn’t make good on their clients’ deposits.

Two thousand people demonstrated in front of the bank. Five hundred people stormed the house where son Meyer lived, forcing him and his family to flee over the rooftops. Shortly after the State took over the bank in May 1917, the Jarmulowsky sons were indicted for banking fraud and the bank closed. The building, however, still remains.

Over the Rooftops

Below is a 1914 NY Times article chronicling Meyer Jarmulowsky's escape from a mob of angry depositors. A brief summary: crowds gathered around the banker's home on Fort Washington Avenue, demanding their money. Fearing for his safety, Jarmulowsky scampered from his rooftop onto a neighboring apartment house, descended into the building's basement, and dashed across the street into a waiting cab, narrowly avoiding capture by the protestors.

Click to enlarge



Family Drama

Sender Jarmulowsky's descendants (at least those that made it into the NY Times' extensive archive on the family) were as prone to scandal as their ancestor was widly successful. Not only were sons Albert and Meyer indicted for fraud after forcing their father's bank to close, but a third son was sent to Bellevue's psych ward. And then there was a grandson who was jailed for stealing $1,625 from a jewelery store manager, and (perhaps the strangest of all) a granddaughter, Bertha Clark, whose elopement to a linen salesman in 1911 dragged her family into a messy lawsuit. When the couple was kept apart for 17 days by Clark's furious parents, the groom demanded $100,000 in retributions.

Triangle Factory Fire

Museum Shop Manager Katherine Broadway guest-blogs about some of her favorite Shop books.

On March 25, 1911 the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, located in the Brown Building at the corner of Washington and Greene Streets (still standing at the edge of NYU’s campus), caught fire when an employee tossed a cigarette into a bin of scrap fabric. Within 15 minutes, 146 garment workers were killed, most of them women. This was the worst workplace disaster in New York until September 11, 2001.

The Tenement Museum’s Piecing It Together Tour introduces visitors to two families tied to the garment industry on the Lower East Side. The Triangle fire affected garment workers on the Lower East Side by galvanizing support among the general public for the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union (ILGWU). The tragedy eventually led to regulations for worker and fire safety that are still in place today.

The Museum Shop has many books on the Triangle fire. My favorites are Triangle: The Fire That Changed America by David Von Drehle and Triangle: A Novel by Katharine Weber. Von Drehle’s Triangle gives not only a detailed account of the fire and its aftermath but also provides a history of the many waves of immigration to New York, which adds perspective and depth to the tragic story. Weber’s novel connects a contemporary woman researching the fire with an aging survivor of the tragedy, linking the past with the present in a way that shows how women’s labor remains a troubled issue, and ways in which it has changed.

We are proud to invite you to listen to David Von Drehle discuss the history of the Triangle Fire on the 98th anniversary of the fire. He will be speaking in the Museum Shop at 6:30 p.m. TONIGHT. Please join us!

Further Reading:

The Triangle Fire, by Leon Stein
The Triangle Fire, The Protocols of Peace, and Industrial Democracy in Progressive Era New York, by Richard Greenwald
Dreamland, by Kevin Baker

Delicious Lower East Side Landmark

Tastes have changed over the years, but Russ & Daughters' Niki Russ Federman and Joshua Russ Tupper, both fourth-generation owners of this Houston Street appetizing shop, stock some of the same things Polish immigrant Joel Russ sold in 1907, when the store was a pushcart on the corner of Orchard Street. Customers still line up for pickled lox, strings of Polish mushrooms (they now go for $200 a lb), and belly lox - salt-cured salmon that Russ & Daughters staff are quick to point out is the only cured fish that can properly be called lox (if it's smoked, it's not lox).


Mr. Russ opened the brick-and-mortar store seven years after he emigrated from southern Poland. In 1933 he added "& Daughters" to the shop's name and began to turn over the business to his three children. Niki's father worked as a lawyer before becoming the third-generation to join the family business, and Niki and Josh were both employed in other professional fields before becoming the fourth-generation.


Strong family ties brought Joel Russ's grandchildren and great-grandchildren back to the Lower East Side, and it's no surprise that they're passionate about food and community. For a more comprehensive history, see this great timeline.



In the old days they sold products like kapchunkas, whole unprocessed fish hung up to dry. This had to be done just right or the fish would spoil. Russ & Daughters no longer sells kapchunkas but the sign remains. Second-generation Russ Anne Russ Federman remembers a few other items no longer available at the store: "oval cans of tomato herring (they were delicious), butterfish, shad, shemykas, tarankas." Do you remember eating any of these?

Dried Polish mushrooms are used in dishes like barley and mushroom soup. They're so rich and flavorful that just a few can season a whole pot.

Facts and Findings - Freebird Bookstore

Freebird Books, a used bookshop in Red Hook, Brooklyn, has added a couple of novels and memoirs about immigrant life on the Lower East Side (and the eventual exodus of Jewish settlers to wealthier uptown Manhattan and the suburbs) to their collection. The store's owners took a tour of the Tenement Museum last week, which they describe, along with the books, in their blog.

Tenement Talks - Who Will Write Our History?

A few weeks ago Samuel Kassow shared the remarkable history of the Oyneg Shabes, who secretly recorded Jewish life in the Warsaw Ghetto from 1940 to 1943, with our Tenement Talks audience.

His talk will appear on Book TV this Saturday and Sunday, February 21 and 22. Check your local listings and see the Book TV website for more details.