"The Autobiography of a Jewish Immigrant"

Joseph Hurwitz told his entire life story through his career. His 28-page memoir “The Autobiography of a Jewish Immigrant” is an account of making a living—from scraping by in Lithuania, to stability in Butler, Pa.

He wrote it in 1949, in response to a YIVO contest, mentioned in the Yiddish Daily Forward. The prompt was “Why did you, as a Jewish immigrant, leave your home in the Old World and what are your accomplishments in this country?”

Hurwitz makes life-changing decisions in the moment, in response to immediate circumstances. Despite graduating from a highly regarded preparatory school, he is denied entry to a selective teacher’s college in Vilna because he does not have a birth certificate. He assumes his parents never registered him to keep him from conscription into the army. Having lost the opportunity, he instead spends the next four years working alongside a band of revolutionary laborers and agitating for better working conditions for all.

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.

Abraham Goldstein (1857-1938) was the gabbai (sexton) and Hebrew teacher at Tree of Life Congregation for 54 years. He arrived in Pittsburgh from his native Lithuania by way of Chicago around 1880. Upon taking a position with Tree of Life, he lived with his wife Anna and their eight children in rooms at the synagogue supplied by the congregation—first at its Ross Street shul in downtown Pittsburgh and later at its Craft Avenue shul in Oakland. 

In a memorial tribute to Goldstein from 1953, Rabbi Herman Hailperin wrote, “The annual Passover Seder in their apartment above the old Craft Avenue Synagogue was a great event, attended by admiring children and grandchildren.” Used that those gatherings was this Passover haggadah. The title page is marked with a stamp listing Goldstein’s address as 400 Ross Street, the synagogue location. Inscriptions include the birth dates of the Goldsteins’ eight children and the death dates of the three who died in infancy.

—Pittsburgh Platform historical marker ceremony photographs [2008.0102]

Estelle Harris, best known for her role as Estelle Costanza on the television show Seinfeld, died this week at 93. Harris was a New Yorker by birth—and certainly by accent—but she spent several formative years in her youth in Tarentum, Pa., where her aunt and uncle ran the Star Confectionary.

The young Estelle Nussbaum graduated from the Tarentum Religious School (seen above) and Tarentum High School in the mid-1940s. "I was a very curious child, an avid reader and people-studier, but I was also very shy. I felt out of place in Tarentum," she told the Chicago Tribune in 1995. "It was like I had my nose pressed up to the glass looking in. People would punch me in the stomach and call me names like 'dirty Jew,' names I'd never heard before. I remember asking, 'Where am I dirty?' But I overcame. I managed."

“At the beginning of this study we asked our Superintendent and Secretary of this committee to furnish us with a small list of the worst housing conditions that he knows. The members of our committee were agreeably surprised after the first visit because they found conditions better than they expected. The houses were dilapidated, some were constructed in great ignorance, the sanitary conveniences in others were very poor and yet the general appearance was much better than we expected to find. And here is the reason. This happened to be Saturday afternoon, two days before the Passover holidays, just after these houses had been given their annual cleaning in strict conformity with the rabbinical laws. The cause of ‘overcrowding per block’ can only be remedied through legislation…” —from “A Report on Housing Conditions,” published by the United Hebrew Relief Association, 1916.

The preceding account comes from a study of housing conditions in the Hill District published by the United Hebrew Relief Association, a forerunner to JFCS Pittsburgh. It is a rare piece of documentation about a crucial tradition: the thorough spring cleaning of houses before the holiday of Passover begins.

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.

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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