Memoirs: Sparks and Haas
Jake Eisenfeld
Hebrew Free Loan Association
Cookbook of the Month
Community News
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Memoirs:
“The Sparks and Haas Families: A Memoir”
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Time capsule from cornerstone of Tree of Life Congregation synagogue, Craft Avenue. Inscription on lid reads "Manufactured by Morris Haas, August 20th, 1906." |
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The memoirs most commonly found in bookstores are often tales of self-discovery. The author explains how they became the person they became.
Some of the unpublished memoirs in the archive have that quality, too. But many have an different goal, something not found in published works.
They are often written specifically for the descendants of the author. The author is trying to tell future generations how they became who they became.
“The Sparks and Haas Families: A Memoir” is a good example. Sophie Sparks Haas wrote her 66-page memoir in the early 1960s, after relocating to Albuquerque from her native Pittsburgh. It takes the form an annotated family tree. She lists all the members of the various branches of her family, and she provides whatever details she can remember for each family member.
She gives plenty of basic details like birth dates and death dates, Hebrew names, and details about who married whom and with what clergy officiating. She also tells what people did for a living, and what they did for fun, what they looked like, and how they behaved, and even what charities they preferred.
Patterns soon emerge.
The Sparks family gravitates toward the grocery business and related forms of merchandising, while the Haas family is primarily in the sheet metal business.
We meet numerous immigrant women who are both brilliant and functionally illiterate—never taught to read or write but somehow capable of performing complex mathematical functions and business calculations in their minds.
We see fortunes shift. Someone moves to low-lying Sharpsburg and loses everything in the 1936 St. Patrick’s Day Flood. Someone else survives a brutal illness against all medical prognostication and lives a long, meaningful life.
And we get plenty of the stories that families tell and tell again at every gathering. Here’s one: “In Germany, in the city of Posen, Morris Haas was an apprentice in a sheet metal shop. One day, he was preparing the home of the mayor of the city for a new roof — not wanting anyone to know that he was leaving for the United States, in order to escape having to go into the German Army — and he took off the old roof, preparatory to putting on the new roof the next morning. Instead, however, he left on that selfsame morning for the United States. This was in the year 1879, when he was eighteen years of age… In the early 1900s, after becoming an American citizen, Morris Haas went back to Posen to visit his father, and he met the same mayor, who remembered the incident, and the mayor wanted to know why he had not put his roof on.”
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Next week: Surviving
All year, the Rauh Jewish Archives is highlighting memoirs of Jewish life in Western Pennsylvania. If you would like to donate a memoir, or just chat about the stories you've read, contact the archive or call 412-454-6406.
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New Collection:
Jake Eisenfeld Papers and Photographs [MSS 1199]
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Otto and Erna Eisenfeld with sons Kalmen and Sidney in downtown Pittsburgh, undated.
—Jake Eisenfeld Papers and Photographs [MSS 1199]
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Osias “Otto” Eisenfeld and Ester “Erna” (Nager) Eisenfeld immigrated separately to the United States from Rzeszow, Poland sometime after 1918, married in a small ceremony in Carnegie, Pa., and settled in the Hill District. They had three children, all boys: Kalmen “Kelvin,” Sidney and Jake.
The Jake Eisenfeld Papers and Photographs [MSS 1199] documents the family’s journey to the United States and their lives in the Hill District. It includes a journal Otto Eisenfeld kept while serving in the Polish military in 1915 and an autograph book Erna Nager Eisenfeld kept from 1918 to 1928. The immigration process is documented through official government documents such as a weekly travel pass and a passport, Polish Certificates of Morality, a Certificate of Naturalization, and an Affidavit of Support for immigration. Photographs document both large and small family moments.
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Jewish Encyclopedia of Western Pennsylvania:
Hebrew Free Loan Association
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Photograph showing Irene Kaufmann Settlement House Director and Hebrew Free Loan Association officer Sidney Teller (standing, right) overseeing a loan application at a Hebrew Free Loan Association meeting, likely at the settlement house, December 1924.
—Irene Kaufmann Settlement House Photographs [MSP 78]
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The Hebrew Free Loan Association is a Jewish financial institution offering no-interest loans to anyone in need in southwestern Pennsylvania, Jewish or non-Jewish. Always needed within the community, the Hebrew Free Loan Association has been especially active during periods of economic upheaval, such as the wave of Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe at the turn of the 20th century, the 1918 influenza pandemic, the Great Depression, the St. Patrick’s Day Flood of 1936, the arrival of refugees escaping Nazi persecution, the resettlement of Soviet Jews in the Pittsburgh area from the 1970s into the 1990s, and the coronavirus pandemic. By 1950, the Association estimated it had made approximately 20,000 loans totaling more than $2 million.
Our entry for the Hebrew Free Loan Association includes its original charter, annual reports from 1909 through 1939, plus several photographs.
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The Jewish Encyclopedia of Western Pennsylvania brings together numerous online resources into a clearinghouse for conducting research about Jewish history in this region. As we migrate information to this new website, we’ll be announcing new entries and resources in this section of the newsletter. |
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"Beginnings" (1974)
ed. Joyce Berman and Gail Weisberg
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Starting in the mid-1960s, the Y-IKC offered a popular gourmet cooking series and published annual booklets containing recipes from the preceding year.
In 1974, editors Joyce Berman and Gail Weisberg (working with illustrator Ellen Adelshimer) compiled some of these recipes into a cookbook titled “Beginnings.” They chose recipes for “their originality and continued appeal,” as well as their speed and ease. “Today’s hostesses cannot always devote an entire day to a few ‘beginnings,’” they explained in a foreword to the volume.
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Roquefort Strudel
—from "Beginnings"
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Our featured recipe from the cookbook is “Roquefort Strudel,” a cheesy, creamy, surprisingly spicy mashed potato casserole. It calls for phyllo pastry, which is commonplace today but was still a bit of a novelty some 48 years ago. The recipe includes tips for working with the thin dough and recommends visiting the old European Grocery Store downtown to find the product. |
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The 1950 Census is now online.
You can access the census data using the link below. As additional research tools become the coming weeks and months, we'll share them here.
If you would like help using these records, please contact the Archive.
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Pittsburgh Jewish Newspaper Project |
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The home page of the new Pittsburgh Jewish Newspaper Project website, hosted by Carnegie Mellon University Libraries. The redesigned website is launching this month. |
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By now, you're probably expertly zipping around the new Pittsburgh Jewish Newspaper Project platform. But if you still need a little help navigating the features and tools of the website, the Rauh Jewish Archives recently contributed a brief explanatory article to the Jewish Chronicle. It provides some basic tips and techniques for conducting research using the new site.
We plan to provide a live virtual training workshop in the near future to review the website and its functionalities. Until then, we are here to help you troubleshoot problems. You can contact the archive or call 412-454-6406.
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[IMAGE: Marian Schreiber and employees at the Schreiber Trucking Company, c.1943—from Schreiber Family Papers and Photographs, MSS 846.]
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The Rauh Jewish Archives was founded on November 1, 1988 to collect, preserve, and make accessible the documentary history of Jews and Jewish communities of Western Pennsylvania. You can help the RJHPA continue its work by making a donation that will directly support the work being done in Western Pa. |
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