Vol. 4

No. 27

Restaurants:

Goldstein's

The Jewish Encyclopedia:

Beth Israel Congregation (1852)

Neighborhoods:

Bloomfield

Calendar:

July 9: Arnoud-Jan Bijsterveld

Aug. 2: Aaronel deRoy Gruber

through Aug. 13: Green Book

Community:

"How We Got Here"

Under the Dome of Rodef Shalom

JCBA "Road-Trip"

Mystery portraits

Research Tools:

Newspapers, Cemeteries,

Memorial Plaques, Books,

Population Figures, Newsletters

Restaurants:

Goldstein's

Advertisements announcing the opening of Sam Goldstein’s restaurant at 1002 Fifth Ave. Copy reads, “In answer to a long wanted need in this Community… we have installed exclusive booths for Ladies and Gentlemen,” May 19, 1933.

—from Jewish Criterion

Pittsburgh Jewish Newspaper Project

The past is recreated two ways: through memory and through records. Over time, the balance between them shifts. Initially, memory is paramount. As fewer people remember the past, though, records assume greater importance. 

Our annual collecting initiative is a way to ease the transition between the history of memory and the history of records. Each year, we identify a corner of local Jewish history where documentation is lacking, and we ask you to help us fill the gap by providing your records, your memories, or both.

This year, we’ve been focusing on local Jewish-owned restaurants. If you’ve been following along, you may have noticed a trend. Certain types of records appear again and again. There are a lot of newspapers advertisements. There are occasionally photographs of storefronts. Every now and then, there are menus and matchbooks and memorabilia. Rarely, there are oral histories.

The records that survive determine the stories you can tell. For restaurants, the available records describe exteriors but fail to capture the warmth of life inside—what it felt like to walk past, not what it felt like to come inside.

That’s especially true for Goldstein’s Restaurant.

Advertisement for the new Goldstein’s Restaurant. Announces hiring of executive chef Marcel Martin of Oakmont Country Club, November 15, 1973.

—from Jewish Chronicle

Pittsburgh Jewish Newspaper Project

The brothers Sam, Alfred and Murray Goldstein began their careers as hucksters, delivering fruit by horse and wagon from their home on the Bluff to locations throughout the West End of the city. They established a restaurant at 1002 Fifth Ave. in 1933 and sold it in 1972. It was a classic Jewish restaurant, with a menu founded on a corned beef on rye.

That quick biography completely misses the spirit of Goldstein’s.

In its nearly 40 years on Fifth Avenue, Goldstein’s was an institution—a place known more for its ambiance than its menu. It was popular among local and visiting boxers who trained at the nearby Lyceum, as well as Duquesne University basketball stars. Their signed photographs lined the walls above the booths. Goldstein's was also popular among politicians, such as Mayor Joseph Barr, County Commissioner Thomas J. Foerster, and Judge James F. Clarke. Mayor David L. Lawrence stopped by daily.

Just before it closed, Post-Gazette Critic Geoffrey Tomb wrote an elegy:

“Seated in a faded booth next to a graying photo of the city basketball champs for 1919-20-21, we shared the premises with one of the brothers, a waitress, a grill man and four customers… It was like a scene from an old Warner Brothers movie with the grill man pouring over the early edition of the Post-Gazette while ‘somewhere, a radio played.’

“The sports figures’ photos on the walls, the white china rimmed in green, steaming mugs of coffee from a huge stainless steel urn, neon lights outside and dusty chandeliers inside plus jars of brown mustard all combined for an All-American dining image.

“Microwave ovens and frozen foods are replacing restaurants like Goldstein’s just as sliced mystery meat is replacing honest, sweet-tasting corned beef… But there is a place for Goldstein’s in our lives because it has honest, straightforward character, a depth many newer establishments cannot buy. I can see why it will be missed by so many…”

Do you have records or memories of Goldstein's?

Next Week: Heading down the block

All year, the Rauh Jewish Archives is highlighting Jewish restaurants in Western Pennsylvania. If you would like to donate a material from a Jewish restaurant, or just reminisce, contact the archive or call 412-454-6406.

Jewish Encyclopedia of Western Pennsylvania:

Beth Israel Congregation (1852)

Black and white illustration of Vigilant Engine House on Third Ave in downtown Pittsburgh.

—from Corinne Azen Krause Photographs [MSP 113]

Beth Israel Congregation was the second Jewish congregation in Western Pennsylvania. It was established in early 1852, when many of the “Polander” or “Posener” members of Shaare Shamayim Congregation left in a dispute over ownership of the Bes Almon Cemetery. Beth Israel Congregation hired Rev. Emanuel Marcusson as its spiritual leader. By the High Holidays in 1852, Beth Israel had 12 members, a place for worship, and a Torah scroll. Known members include N. Eisendrath, Leopold Jaroslawsky, and L. Tuteur. Sometime in early 1853, Beth Israel rejoined Shaare Shamayim, bringing along Rev. Marcusson as spiritual leader and appointing Jaroslawsky as president. The reunited congregation soon established the Hebrew Burial Association.

Our entry for Beth Israel includes a bibliography of known references to the congregation in Jewish newspapers and in Isaac Leeser’s correspondence.

Neighborhoods:

Bloomfield

Color photograph showing 5020-5024 Penn Ave. in 2019. 

The way Pittsburghers talk about Pittsburgh, each neighborhood has an ethnic identity—complete and distinct. Squirrel Hill is the Jewish neighborhood, the Hill District is the Black neighborhood, Polish Hill is the Polish neighborhood, Bloomfield is the Italian neighborhood. This way of talking about neighborhoods describes a diverse city but also a segregated city, one where different groups of people co-exist but rarely interact with each other.

No neighborhood was ever entirely one ethnicity. Bloomfield today is seen as an “Italian neighborhood.” But a century ago, it had a large Jewish minority.

Map showing Jewish households in the "Bloomfield District," comprising present neighborhoods of Bloomfield, Garfield, and Friendship, 1921. Creating using information from the "Pittsburgh Jewish Community Book," (online).

The Jewish Criterion published a “Pittsburgh Jewish Community Book” in 1921. It was a directory of all the major Jewish organizations.

The early 1920s was a great moment to figure out where Jewish people were living. The local Jewish population was just beginning to expand beyond the city center. There were emerging first-rung suburbs like Squirrel Hill, East End, and Beechview. There were also new working class Jewish neighborhoods, like the North Side, the South Side, Lawrenceville, and Hazelwood.

If you map all the directory listings, you find something unexpected: a hidden Jewish neighborhood. There were about 115 Jewish households in the “Bloomfield district,” covering the present-day neighborhoods of Bloomfield, Garfield, and Friendship.   

Even more surprising is the diversity of these households. 

About 75 were affiliated with Rodef Shalom Congregation. Rodef Shalom had relocated to Fifth Avenue in 1907. At the time, Shadyside was separated from Bloomfield by a ravine. It's known today as "Two Mile Run" or sometimes "The Hollows," but at the time is had the more evocative name "Skunk Hollow." 

Between 1907 and 1909, the city built five bridges over the ravine: at Centre , at South Graham, at Ellsworth, at South Aiken, and at South Negley. A second wave of construction between 1913 and 1915 included new bridges at Baum Boulevard, Herron Avenue, and the first iteration of the Bloomfield Bridge. 

These bridges increased the desirability of Bloomfield—especially its leafy streets between Liberty and Penn avenues, what we now call Friendship. With all these bridges, you could live on a nice, quiet street and then duck into Oakland for some culture or zip along Bigelow Boulevard to get downtown. 

Black and white photograph showing construction of the South Aiken bridge over Two Mile Run in Shadyside, Sept. 23, 1909. 

—from Pittsburgh City Photographer Collection

University of Pittsburgh Archives & Special Collections 

[715.091421.CP] (online—Historic Pittsburgh)

Bloomfield in the early 1920s was also home to about 20 Jewish families affiliated with B’nai Israel Congregation and Adath Jeshurun Congregation, the two relatively new congregations in East Liberty. Neither had a synagogue in 1921. By 1923, both had beautiful synagogues. It makes sense that Jewish families would settle in an adjacent neighborhood, just a short walk away.

The remaining 20 Jewish families living in Bloomfield in the early 1920s were affiliated with Tree of Life Congregation and Poale Zedeck Congregation.

These synagogues were located at the western edge of Oakland and in the lower Hill District, respectively—far from Bloomfield. But both congregations were considering moves to the east. Tree of Life explicitly considered joining these East End families, while Poale Zedeck did its reckoning more implicitly.

You can easily imagine a time when rivaling factions of remote congregants in Squirrel Hill and East End were actively lobbying congregational leadership to relocate to one neighborhood or the other. Both ultimately chose Squirrel Hill.

Advertisement for upcoming High Holiday services at Aves Achim Congregation for Jewish residents of Bloomfield, Sept. 12, 1924. Services to be held at the Garfield Bank building at 5022 Penn Ave. Contacts include Mr. Weinstein and Max Landy.

—from Jewish Indicator

In the middle of these dynamic years, Bloomfield also became home to a congregation of its own. It was called Aves Achim, or Brotherly Love. It was a small Orthodox synagogue, more accurately described as a shtieble or chevra.

Aves Achim was started by Ruben Shapera. Shapera came from Poland and skipped the Hill District, starting a store in Polish Hill and then moving down to Lawrenceville. By the early 1920s, Shapera was able to afford a house on South Evaline Street in Bloomfield. For unknown reasons, he started a shul.

For years, Aves Achim only met for the High Holidays. But year-by-year it expanded, first to include other holidays and then regular Sabbath services. 

Shapera was the heart of Aves Achim. When he died in 1933, the congregation essentially closed, or at least stopped advertising in the local Jewish papers.

In the decades after World War II, the middle-class Jewish population of Pittsburgh increasingly clustered in two places. There was Highland Park and Stanton Heights to the north, and there was Squirrel Hill, Shadyside, and Point Breeze to the south. Bloomfield retained a few Jewish families in these years, but it never again coalesced into an independent neighborhood community.

July 9:

JGS-Pittsburgh presents:

"Stumbling Stones, Commemoration, and Family History"

with Arnoud-Jan Bijsterveld

Searching for the history of his house, Arnoud-Jan Bijsterveld stumbled upon the dramatic history of a Jewish family and a son who was murdered in Auschwitz. With the help of surviving relatives and by doing archival research, Bijsterveld was able to reconstruct the family’s past, while reconnecting scattered family members at the same time. As a result, they were able to place a stumbling stone, create a documentary film, and write a book.

In this talk, Bijsterveld will sketch the wider context of the changes in the Dutch memory culture of World War II and the Holocaust. This can be characterized as a transformation of remembrance to a more individual approach, doing justice to the agency of the people involved as well as to the nuance and paradoxes that come with every family history. The stumbling stones are a case in point, as these exemplify this transformation.

Recently, the focus has shifted from a single narrative on the Holocaust in the Netherlands to multiple narratives. Research on life and family histories is essential to further this approach. This asks of the (family) historian to strike a balance between personal involvement and professional attitude.

The program is Sunday, July 9 from 1:00-3:00 p.m. ET. This is a virtual program, occurring exclusively online. The program will be recorded, and the recording will be made available to current JGS-Pittsburgh members.

“Stumbling Stones, Commemoration, and Family History” is a collaboration between the Jewish Genealogy Society of Pittsburgh and the Rauh Jewish Archives at the Heinz History Center. Please register online. 

This virtual program is free for JGS-Pittsburgh members and $5 for the general public. To become a member of the JGS-Pittsburgh and to receive a free membership code for this program, please visit its website.

This program is possible through the support of the William M. Lowenstein Genealogical Research Endowment Fund of the Jewish Community Foundation.

Arnoud-Jan Bijsterveld (1962) was trained as a medieval historian and is professor at Tilburg University, the Netherlands. He studied at the Katholieke Universiteit Nijmegen (1980-1986) and graduated at the University of Amsterdam (1987). In 1993, he received his PhD (cum laude) at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. For research and teaching, he was affiliated with the Université de Liège (1988-1989), Princeton University (1994-1995), the Max-Planck-Institut für Geschichte in Göttingen (1997), the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (1998-1999 and 2006), Venice International University (2011), and the Humboldt Universität Berlin (2018). 

Since 1999, he has held the funded chair for the Regional History and Ethnology of Brabant at Tilburg University. As member of the Department of Sociology and professor in the University College Tilburg, he teaches on nationalism and regionalism in Europe, regional history, medieval history, the philosophy of history and memory, and the representation of traumatic histories (Public and Applied History). Under his supervision, 23 PhD students have completed their PhD so far. At the moment, he supervises three PhDs working on Holocaust and World War II history. Since 2011, he has been involved in the placing of stumbling stones (Stolpersteine) in his hometown Tilburg.

He published widely on the medieval history of the Low Countries and on the interplay between history, cultural heritage, and (regional) identity. Since 2011, he focuses on the history and the memory culture of the Holocaust. In 2012, he was involved in the making of the documentary film Here was Bertram: In search for a lost life. In 2016, he published House of Memories: Uncovering the Past of a Dutch Jewish Family (Hilversum: Verloren), which appeared in Dutch as Ons huis. Op zoek naar een Joodse familie in Tilburg in 2020.

August 2:

A Celebration of Aaronel deRoy Gruber

The Irving and Aaronel deRoy Gruber Foundation recently donated the kinetic outdoor sculpture Alumascape III to the Westmoreland Museum of Ar in Greensburg, Pa.

In celebration of the donation, the foundation’s Executive Director Brittany Reilly will speak about the life and work of artist Aaronel deRoy Gruber at the museum on Wednesday, Aug. 2 at 3 p.m. You can learn more about the sculpture at the museums' website, and you can research Aaronel's life in the Aaronel deRoy Gruber Papers [MSS 335] at the Rauh Jewish Archives.

Alumascape III, photographed by Walt Seng, 1980.

—from The Irving & Aaronel deRoy Gruber Foundation Archives.

through August 13:

The Negro Motorist Green Book

“The Negro Motorist Green Book” was a travel guide listing restaurants, gas stations, department stores, and other businesses that welcomed Black travelers. In an era of Jim Crow laws and “sundown towns,” the Green Book offered critical, life-saving information and sanctuary for Black individuals and families traveling the country. Harlem postman Victor Green started the publication in 1936, based in part on a similar volume published in Yiddish for Jewish travelers. The Green Book continued annually through 1967.

The new exhibit “The Negro Motorist Green Book,” on display in the McGuinn Gallery of the Heinz History Center through Aug. 13, tells the story of this landmark publication and its impact on the nation’s rising Black middle class in the middle 20th century. The exhibit also reveals the world of the Green Book in Pittsburgh with artifacts from hotels, jazz clubs, restaurants, and more than 30 local businesses listed in the Green Book, including the Terrace Hall Hotel, Harlem Casino Dance Hall, and Palace Hotel. The exhibit features images from the Melvin Seidenberg Photographs at the Rauh Jewish Archives and the Charles “Teenie” Harris Archive at the Carnegie Museum of Art.

Community

From the Jewish Genealogy Society of Pittsburgh

"How We Got Here"

Each family is unique. 

Each family has its own traditions, its own spirit, and its own dynamics. 

Despite all these differences, every Jewish family in Western Pennsylvania has at least one thing in common: They all have a story about how they got here.

Perhaps your family sailed in steerage across the Atlanti in the 19th century.

Or perhaps your family drove the Pennsylvania Turnpike in a station wagon in the 1960s to work for the universities and hospitals during Renaissance.

Or perhaps your arrival into one of the many Jewish communities of Western Pennsylvania involves marriage, or conversion, or a surprising DNA discovery.

Each of these stories is special, and each contributes to the larger story of our community. To collect and honor these origin stories, the Jewish Genealogy Society of Pittsburgh is launching a new initiative called “How We Got Here.” To participate, just write a short account explaining how you or your ancestors came to settle in Western Pennsylvania. All stories are welcome.

Stories will be eligible for inclusion in the JGS-Pittsburgh’s monthly newsletter Z’chor and also for preservation in the Rauh Jewish Archives. For more information about this initiative, or to contribute, contact Eric Lidji.

From NEXT Pittsburgh

"What's Under the Dome at Rodef Shalom?"

NEXT Pittsburgh's Boaz Frankel visits with archivist Martha Berg to discover the secrets of Rodef Shalom Congregation's historic Fifth Avenue synagogue.

From the Jewish Cemetery & Burial Association

"Road Trip: The Jewish Cemeteries of Western Pennsylvania"

The Jewish Cemetery and Burial Association of Greater Pittsburgh has released a new documentary showcasing Jewish cemeteries in Western Pennsylvania.

“Road Trip: The Jewish Cemeteries of Western Pennsylvania” is a one-hour tour of the many cemetery properties overseen by the JCBA, as well as an overview of the organization’s ongoing work to care for these sacred burial grounds. The video is a wonderful opportunity to celebrate these special Jewish cultural sites in our region. The video includes many historic photographs and documents from the collections of the Rauh Jewish Archives. 

From Rodef Shalom Congregation

A mystery in primary colors

The Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle reports on an effort by Rodef Shalom Congregation to identify two people from a pair of mid-19th century portraits in the congregation's holdings. Do you recognize these two people?

Research Tools

The Pittsburgh Jewish Newspaper Project contains digitized, searchable copies of four local English-language Jewish newspapers between 1895 and 2010. It is a valuable tool for researching almost any topic about Jewish history in Western Pennsylvania. For a primer on using the website, watch our video.

Western Pennsylvania Jewish Cemetery Project

The Rauh Jewish Archives launched the Western Pennsylvania Jewish Cemetery Project in 1998 to preserve burial records from Jewish cemeteries across the region. Over a period of fifteen years, the information was compiled into a searchable, online database containing approximately 50,000 burial records from 78 Jewish cemeteries throughout the region.

Western Pennsylvania Yahrzeit Plaques Project

The Rauh Jewish Archives launched the Western Pennsylvania Yahrzeit Plaques Project in 2020. The goal was to create a comprehensive collection of burial records from memorial boards at synagogues across the region. Volunteers are currently transcribing these boards and records are being added monthly to our online database. The database currently contains more than 2,000 listings.

Rauh Jewish Archives Bibliography

University of Pittsburgh librarian and Rauh Jewish Archives volunteer Laurie Cohen created this comprehensive bibliography of the Rauh Jewish Archives library holdings from 1988 through 2018. It lists nearly 350 volumes arranged by type and then by subject. This a great tool to use early in your research process, as you’re surveying available resources on a given subject.

Jewish Population Estimates

Looking to figure out how many Jews lived in a certain part of Western Pennsylvania at a certain moment in time? This bibliography includes more than 30 estimates of the Jewish population of Pittsburgh and small-towns throughout the region, conducted between 1852 and 2017.

Rauh Jewish Archives Newsletter

The Rauh Jewish Archives has been publishing a weekly newsletter since 2020. The newsletter contains a variety of articles about local Jewish history, including much original research not found anywhere else. You can find and read every issue—more than 150!— in our new index.