Memoir: Howard Victor Epstein
Jewish Home for the Aged
The Man Behind Bruno Sammartino (pictured)
Calendar: Rosh Chodesh Elul; New Approaches to Endogamy
Community News: Jakob's Torah, 1950 Census, Pittsburgh Jewish Newspaper Project
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Memoir:
"Jews in Small Towns: Legends and Legacies"
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"Jews in Small Towns: Legends and Legacies," by Howard Epstein. |
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The many memoirs in the Rauh Jewish Archives represent a diversity of experiences. We have memoirs from women and from men, memoirs written in different eras, memoirs from people working in different fields and different professions, memoirs expressing different personalities.
Looking at these memoirs, an unexpected pattern emerges.
Everyone who writes a memoir believes they have an experience worth sharing. In looking over the memoirs in the archive, three experiences emerge again and again.
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The first are community leaders, people like William Frank, Annie Jacobs Davis, and Sidney Stark. It makes sense that these people would write memoirs. They lived consequential lives. They may have sensed a gap between their recollection of events and the documentation of those events, and they might have been compelled to expand the historic record.
The second are Holocaust survivors, which we'll be considering in greater depth over the coming months. It is easy to understand how surviving such a experience might inspire someone to write their story, as an act of testimony.
The third type of memoir is less expected. It is memoirs written by people who were raised in small towns. In fact, about a third of the memoirs we’ve reviewed this year include some account of growing up Jewish outside the city.
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In 1990, a social worker named Howard Victor Epstein sent a letter to 90 Jewish newspapers around the United States and Canada, including our local Jewish Chronicle. He wanted to hear from Jewish people who had lived for some amount of time in some small town in North America.
Epstein was raised in the small town of Logan, Oh. His wife also came from a small town. They both felt that the experience had been fundamental in shaping their Jewish identity, and they both felt that these experiences were missing from the record.
“From an extensive review of the literature, both genealogical and sociological, I concluded that many studies of Jewish populations have documented facts and figures,” Epstein later wrote. “What is missing from the research literature are qualitative ethnographic studies of Jews whose lives have been intimately identified with small towns.”
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Howard V. Epstein letter to the editor.
—from Jewish Chronicle, August 23, 1990, Pittsburgh Jewish Newspaper Project
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Howard V. Epstein letter to the editor.
—from Jewish Chronicle, August 1, 1991, Pittsburgh Jewish Newspaper Project
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Epstein ultimately received 175 short autobiographical essays and published a selection of them in his 1997 book “Jews in Small Towns: Legends and Legacies.” The book is arranged by state. Pennsylvania includes essays from Dr. Aaron Caplan of Ellwood City, Margy Kleinerman of Midland, Eugene Miller of McDonald, Irwin Sealfon of Tyrone, and Eileen B. Smith of Titusville, among others.
Why would small town life inspire so many people to write memoirs?
Perhaps it is because small-town Jews confront their distinctiveness twice.
They are distinct within the predominately Christian towns where they lived. They are also distinct within the larger American Jewish experience, which often highlights stories emerging from large Jewish communities in cities or suburbs.
That sense of distinctiveness is what small-town Jews share with community leaders and with Holocaust survivors. All three recognize they lived through a singular experience worth sharing
One big impediment that prevents many people from writing their memoirs is the mistaken sense that they lived a common life. But really there is no such thing a common life.
What is common to you will be novel to someone in a different place or time. The trick is to get enough distance from your own life to be able to see the contours as they would.
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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:
“The Jewish Home for the Aged at Pittsburgh:
An Exposition and Evaluation” [2021.0070]
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Rabbi Samuel M. Stahl was raised in Sharon, Pa. and attended the University of Pittsburgh in the late 1950s and early 1960s, before going on to a rabbinical school and then to a career in the rabbinate in Texas.
During his senior year at Pitt, for a Sociology class taught by Erma Meyerson, Stahl wrote a term paper describing the history of the Jewish Home for the Aged and providing an overview of its activities at that time. The paper provides documentation of the Jewish Home for the Aged’s activities shortly before an expansion of its operations in the mid-1960s.
Rabbi Stahl got an “A” on the paper.
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Rabbi Samuel Stahl, 1989
—from Temple Beth Israel Records
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Jewish Encyclopedia of Western Pennsylvania:
Jewish Home for the Aged
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Weinberg Village, undated.
—from Jewish Association on Aging Ladies Auxiliary Photographs [MSP 554]
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The Jewish Home for the Aged, also known by its Hebrew name Beth Moshab Z’Kainim, was a residential facility for older Jewish people in Western Pennsylvania. Efforts to create such a facility began in the early 20th century but failed to gain momentum until Rabbi Aaron Mordechai Ashinsky convened an organizational meeting on October 1, 1905 at the Beth Hamedrash Hagodol synagogue in the Hill District. By the end of the year, Rabbi Ashinsky and a team of supporters had purchased the “Jones Castle” and five acres of surrounding land on Breckenridge Avenue in the Hill District for $25,000 and had also launched a major fundraising campaign throughout the tri-state region around Pittsburgh, focusing especially on small towns in the area.
Our entry for the Jewish Home for the Aged includes a copy of its board of directors roster from 1908 through 1950, as well as assorted articles.
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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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Maurice Simon and Bruno Sammartino, June 1970.
—from Maurice Simon Papers [2022.0048]
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The man on the right in this blurry photograph is the legendary wrestler Bruno Sammartino. But this story is about the man on the left.
His name is Maurice Simon, and he has a small collection of material at the Rauh Jewish Archives. It primarily documents his experience as the literal poster child of the Jewish Home for Babies and Children in the mid-1930s. One photograph shows him as a baby, standing in a crib, staring into the camera with his right hand outstretched. The Jewish Home for Babies and Children used that image in financial appeals to the community. His face even adorned its letterhead.
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August 28:
Our Deuteronomies
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(Left) "Background Music," by Jim Haber
(Right) "Roses in December," by Florence Berman Karp
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The 10.27 Healing Partnership is holding its fourth annual Rosh Chodesh Elul program on Sunday, August 28, from 2-4 p.m. at its suite on the top floor of the Jewish Community Center in Squirrel Hill, at 5738 Forbes Ave.
This reflective and meditative event is an opportunity to awaken, prepare, and become grounded as you head into the reflective time of autumn and the High Holidays. It includes meditation practitioners, reiki-infused sound baths, expressive drum circles, speakers who will connect you with Jewish learning, and a communal shofar blowing on the steps of Sixth Presbyterian Church.
As part of the free event, the Rauh Jewish Archives will be presenting "Our Deuteronomies," connecting recent Torah readings to local Jewish memoirs.
Deuteronomy is arguably the first Jewish memoir. As the Jewish people prepared to enter the Promised Land without him, Moses delivered a public review of the legal, moral and narrative framework of the Torah. Deuteronomy is always the backdrop to the weeks leading into the High Holidays, and therefore it has long been a source of guidance for anyone seeking personal improvement. We’ll read through Deuteronomy for lessons for how to craft our own stories, using memoirs from the Rauh Jewish Archives to show how ancient techniques organically manifest in the stories of everyday people.
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August 31:
JGS Pittsburgh Presents: Caitlin Hollander
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In the world of Jewish genealogy, endogamy is often presented in the context of DNA as a hindrance one must work around to find any real matches. Documents containing duplicate surnames often pose stumbling blocks to aspiring genealogists. In her talk "For the Love of Cousins: Endogamy as a Tool for Jewish Genealogy," genealogist Caitlin Hollander explores the other side of endogamy: how our ancestors' familial ties can be used as a genealogical tool to break through brick walls and work around missing records, as well as the religious and historical contexts in which the branches of our family trees became so very tangled.
This is a virtual program. It will be recorded, and the recording will be made available for JGS-Pittsburgh members who are current on their dues.
This program is possible through the support of the William M. Lowenstein Genealogical Research Endowment Fund of the Jewish Community Foundation.
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Caitlin Hollander is a New York-based genealogist specializing in Ashkenazi Jewish genealogy in the United States and Europe, Holocaust records and documentation, as well as forensic genealogy for high-value estates and assisting clients in citizenship reclamation. She holds a bachelor’s degree in anthropology with a minor in history from Florida International University, as well as academic certificates in Jewish studies and Holocaust and genocide studies. With her business partner, Michael Waas, she co-founded Hollander-Waas Jewish Heritage services, a full-service genealogy and family history firm. Hollander-Waas specializes in Jewish genealogy and provides a customized full-service heritage preservation and genealogy service. Her citizenship reclamation work has been featured in Family Tree Magazine, The Times of Israel, and the South Florida Sun Sentinel, among other publications.
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From the Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh:
Jakob's Torah: An International Journey
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In its newest digital exhibit, the Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh tells the story of Jakob's Torah, which made its way from Germany to Shanghai to San Francisco and New York during and after the War before coming to Western Pennsylvania. It is now on display at the Holocaust Center's new exhibition space at the Jennie King Mellon Library on the campus of Chatham University. |
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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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