Vol. 4

No. 17

Restaurants:

1603 Centre Ave.

The Jewish Encyclopedia:

B'nai B'rith Hillel Foundation

Research Tool:

Jewish Population

Calendar:

May 21: W. Todd Knowles

June 11: Alex Calzereth

Community:

Under the Dome of Rodef Shalom

JCBA "Road-Trip"

Jewish Daily Forward exhibit

Mystery portraits

Research Tools:

Newspapers, Cemeteries, Memorial Plaques, Books, Newsletters

Restaurants:

1603 Centre Ave.

Advertisement for Gold’s Restaurant at 1603 Centre Ave. in the Hill District. Announces return to the location.

—from Jewish Criterion, March 25, 1921.

Pittsburgh Jewish Newspaper Project

We looked last week at the restaurants at 1600 Centre Ave. in the Hill District in the 1920s. This week, we cross the street to 1603 Centre Ave.

The building at 1603 Centre Ave. in the Hill District was home to three Jewish-owned restaurants in the late 1910s and 1920s. Not much documentation survives for any of these three restaurants, essentially just a few newspaper advertisements. But there is an interesting theme running through these advertisements, revealing something about the Hill District at that time.

Advertisement for Kelson’s Restaurant at 1603 Centre Ave. in the Hill District, A. L. Kelson proprietor.

—Jewish Criterion, March 13, 1925

Pittsburgh Jewish Newspaper Project

Israel A. Gold opened Gold’s Restaurant at 1603 Centre Ave. as early as 1917. During his time in the Hill District, his advertisements sometimes encouraged customers to go out of their way a little farther for a good meal. “It pays you to walk a mile and to come out with a smile for good home cooked meals.”

He was likely speaking to the wholesale merchants on Fifth Avenue, who must have been reluctant to climb a hill for a sandwich when they just walk down the block to Richest’s. Gold later opened a second shop on Penn Avenue to the Strip District and then relocated in 1924 to Forbes Avenue in Oakland.

Sam Abramovitz opened the short-lived Commercial Restaurant at 1603 Centre Ave. in November 1924. Abramovitz had previously been the dining room manager at Canter’s Restaurant’s downtown location at 624 Penn Ave. The name “Commercial Restaurant” was common at the time and suggests that Abramovitz was also trying to get business from Fifth Avenue merchants.

A. L. Kelson opened Kelson’s Restaurant at the location in March 1925. He relocated around September 1926, becoming a fixture on Fifth Avenue.

(Right) Rachel Spatz in front of A. Binstock Jewelers on Centre Avenue in the Hill District, c.1920s; (Left) The Hurricane Club, July 1979. Photographs courtesy Michael Melnick.

Abe Binstock relocated his jewelry business to 1603 Center Ave. in 1926, crossing the street from his previous location at 1600 Center Ave.

Thanks to his descendent Michael Melnick, we have some photographs of the business at that time before World War II. Michael also returned to the address in the 1970s, to document its existence as the famed Hurricane Club.

Next Week: Gold's Restaurant

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

B'nai B'rith Hillel

Black and white photograph showing Hillel-JUC students manning a booth at an unidentified event, c.1980s.

—from Hillel-Jewish University Center photographs [1998.0143].

Hillel-Jewish University Center is an educational, programming, religious, and service center in Oakland, serving Jewish undergraduate students in the area.

A local chapter of the B’nai B’rith-Hillel Foundation was founded in November 1952 with support from the regional B’nai B’rith Women. B’nai B’rith-Hillel initially served students at the University of Pittsburgh, the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University), Duquesne University, and the Pennsylvania College for Women (now Chatham University).

Rabbi Morris Feldman was hired as its the first director, and the YM&WHA provided office space at its building on S. Bellefield Ave. B’nai B’rith-Hillel was reorganized in 1970 with the help of the United Jewish Federation. The new organization included board representatives from both organizations and became known as the Hillel-Jewish University Center or Hillel-JUC. Hillel-JUC had three locations before dedicating a building at 4607 Forbes Ave. in 2001.

Our entry for B'nai B'rith Hillel includes articles, three issues of its newsletter "Pittsburgh Hillel News," and photographs from the 1970s and 1980s.

Research Tool:

Jewish Population Bibliography

Map showing Jewish population of Pittsburgh and its suburbs, 1963.

—from Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh Records [MSS 287]

It’s pretty easy to figure out how many people lived in a certain part of America at a given moment in time. The federal government collects general population data each decade through the census and releases the raw data after 72 years.

Communities have no such mandate.

If you want to know how many Jews were living in Squirrel Hill in the 1960s, or how many Jewish students attended public schools in 1925, or the Jewish population of the Pennsylvania oil region in 1880, you have to rely on studies compiled by various local and national Jewish organizations over the past 170 years. These surveys provide the most easily accessible information about the regional Jewish population—how many Jews lived here at specific moments in time, as well as where they were living throughout the city and the region.

Map showing Jewish population regions for Pittsburgh and its suburbs, 1984.

—from Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh Records [MSS 287]

While many of these surveys exist online, they are scattered across numerous websites. And several useful local resources had never been digitized, making them inaccessible to anyone who was unable to visit the archive in person.

To make these resources more accessible, we’ve added a new bibliography to the Jewish Encyclopedia of Western Pennsylvania. It collects more than 30 surveys of the regional Jewish population, conducted between 1852 and 2017.

The bibliography includes the seven major national surveys conducted by American Jewish Yearbook between 1907 and 1992, all six community studies commissioned by the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh between 1938 and 2017, and data on every Jewish student survey compiled by the Hebrew Institute between 1924 and 1958. The bibliography also includes three early surveys conducted between 1854 and 1908, as well as several population estimates provided by the local community between 1852 and 1864.

The bibliography includes Jewish population data for Pittsburgh proper, for many individual city neighborhoods, and for dozens of small-town Jewish communities throughout the tri-state region around Pittsburgh. It also includes enrollment figures from local Jewish religious schools and Jewish day schools, as well as estimates of the Jewish population of Pittsburgh Public Schools.

We hope this new bibliography makes it easier to find basic data about Jewish communities and to research Jewish life in Western Pennsylvania. If you know any additional resources not listed here, please contact the archive.

May 21:

JGS-Pittsburgh presents:

"Using FamilySearch for Jewish Research"

with W. Todd Knowles

Billions of family records. Where do you start?

FamilySearch is an international, nonprofit dedicated to helping all people discover their family story. It is one of the largest genealogical websites online and grows larger every day. Learn how to make the most of the FamilySearch collection, with a special focus on locating Jewish ancestors among the records.

The program is Sunday, May 21 from 1:00-3:00 p.m. ET. This is a virutal program, occurring only online. “Using FamilySearch for Jewish Research with W. Todd Knowles” is a collaboration between the Jewish Genealogy Society of Pittsburgh and the Rauh Jewish Archives at the Heinz History Center. Please register online. The program is free for JGS-Pittsburgh members and $5 for the general public. To become a member of the JGS-Pittsburgh and receive a free membership code for this program, please visit its website.

This program will be recorded and made available to current JGS-Pittsburgh members. Those who attend in person are encouraged to stick around after the program for refreshments and a meet-and-greet with JGS members.

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

W. Todd Knowles, AG, is a Deputy Chief Genealogical Officer at FamilySearch, where he has been for almost 25 years. Soon after being introduce to family history at the age of 12, he discovered his Jewish roots. The journey to find these Polish Jews led to the Knowles Collection, six databases containing the records of almost 1.5 million people. His blog about the collection can be found at knowlescollection.blogspot.com.

June 11:

JGS-Pittsburgh presents:

"Mapping Your Family History"

with Alex Calzereth

Create maps with your own data on Google MyMaps.

This presentation will teach you how to create a custom map, import location data associated with family history events or source records and then customize the appearance of that data on the map. Custom maps can be used in many ways, including visually conveying family migration patterns, showing the location of regional cemeteries, or which towns hold certain vital records. Resulting maps can also be imported into Google Earth.

The program is Sunday, June 11 from 1:00-3:00 p.m. ET. This is a virutal program, occurring only online. “Mapping Your Family History with Alex Calzereth” is a collaboration between the Jewish Genealogy Society of Pittsburgh and the Rauh Jewish Archives at the Heinz History Center. Please register online. The program is free for JGS-Pittsburgh members and $5 for the general public. To become a member of the JGS-Pittsburgh and receive a free membership code for this program, please visit its website.

This program will be recorded and made available to current JGS-Pittsburgh members. Those who attend in person are encouraged to stick around after the program for refreshments and a meet-and-greet with JGS members.

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

Alex Calzareth is a genealogist focusing on Southwest Germany, the Czech Republic and Southern Italy who began researching his family roots twenty-five years ago. He is a board member for Reclaim The Records and the Jewish Genealogy Society of Long Island, serving as JGSLI’s webmaster. Alex is also the JewishGen Research Director for Germany. He lives in New York City and works as a CPA.

Community

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 the Jewish Studies Program

PRESSED: Images from the Jewish Daily Forward

Detail from front page of Jewish Daily Forward, including photograph showing President and First Lady Kennedy, 1960.

Founded in 1897 on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, the Jewish Daily Forward became the most widely read Jewish news source anywhere. By the 1920s, this Yiddish-language daily had more readers than the New York Times. With rigorous reporting, incisive editorials and powerful commentary, the Forward chronicled the events that affected immigrants eager to earn their place in American life. This was the paper read by congregants from its neighborhood’s many synagogues, by families squeezing into tenement apartments, by sweatshop workers and pushcart vendors. Its articles were debated on park benches and at local haunts like the Garden Cafeteria and the Royal Café, its discarded pages then used to wrap fish for Friday night Sabbath eve dinners. The Forward’s ideals have been held dear for generations of readers, not just on the Lower East Side but across the country and around the world.

The new exhibit Pressed at Hillman Library on the University of Pittsburgh campus looks into the vast Forward archive to present a selection of metal plates used to print photographs in the paper from the 1920s to the 1960s. These plates are accompanied by prints made just for this exhibition. These prints have rendered the images with greater clarity than they had as dotted, halftone prints in the newspaper. The Forward pages on which some of these images appeared are also displayed. These pages are enlarged and reproduced from microfilm and photographs because printed copies of the newspaper have not been preserved at the Forward or in any other archive, although they occasionally pop up at auction or in private collections. Together these images of strikes and activists, Yiddish theater stars and baseball players, daily life and historic moments, present the depth and breadth of this singular publication, its audience and Jewish life in America and around the world.

Pressed is organized by the Forward in collaboration with the Museum at Eldridge Street, and hosted by the University of Pittsburgh Library System and the Jewish Studies program. It will remain on display through April 2023.

As part of the exhibit, the Rauh Jewish Archives has created a display surveying the history of local Yiddish newspapers in Pittsburgh. The display includes enlarged reproductions of pages and advertisements from The Volksfreund, the Jewish Indicator, and the regional office of the Forward.

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 almost 400 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.

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.