Vol. 4

No. 1

Announcing: Restaurants

Anshe Lubovitz Congregation

Neighborhoods

Calendar: JGS-Pittsburgh Presents: Judy Russell



In the News

Restaurants:

An Introduction

Sign from Klein's Restaurant, c.1940s. Vertical, two-sided neon sign. L-shaped with steel frame and multi-color neon glass lights, which form text and depict a lobster.

—Museum Purchase [93.3.1]

If you’ve ever visited the Heinz History Center, you’ve certainly noticed the towering sign for the old Klein’s Restaurant rising between the third and fourth floors of the building. In thrilling neon, the name KLEIN’S leads down to a giant red lobster above the words “FINE LIQUORS/STEAKS CHOPS.”

Perhaps you remember Klein’s Restaurant and its popular dining room on Fourth Avenue in downtown Pittsburgh. Perhaps you ate their garlic puffs.

Fewer people have seen this early photograph of Klein’s, taken sometime around 1910. In back, in the doorway, are founders Joseph and Hannah Klein. They each came to Pittsburgh from Hungary in the 1880s and worked various jobs until 1900, when they founded their restaurant on lower Fifth Avenue in Uptown. They proudly stand before their storefront alongside cooks, wait staff, and family. Painted on the windows is the name, “Klein’s Kosher Cafe.”

Photograph showing staff of Klein's Kosher Cafe outside their restaurant on lower Fifth Avenue, c1910. Proprietors Hannah and Joseph Klein can be seen in back, in the doorway.

—Klein Family Papers and Photographs [MSS 588] 

So many changes exist between these two images—changes in size and in scale, changes in location, changes in menu offerings, changes in marketing techniques and in business management strategies. Each one of these changes is a path of inquiry, leading to deeper understanding the Jewish experience.

The Klein Family Papers and Photographs [MSS 588] provides even more documentation of the restaurant, as well as some of the people behind it. 

Klein’s is just one of hundreds of local restaurants of interest to local Jewish history. But aside from Klein’s, few of those restaurants are well documented in the Rauh Jewish Archives. We have some advertisements, perhaps a menu or a matchbook cover. But we lack the rich documentation that helps explain the human element: What did these restaurants mean to the people who created them, and what did they mean to the people who frequented them? 

And so for our fourth-annual community collecting initiative, we’re looking at restaurants. After months of research, we’ve developed a list of more than 500 area restaurants that once advertised as being “Jewish.” For our purposes, a restaurant is an establishment where you could purchase prepared food to eat on site. That means we'll mostly be skipping butcher shops, bakeries, and groceries for now, although each deserves deeper investigation at some point.

The term “Jewish restaurant” is sure to summon debate. That’s part of the story. The intricacies of that debate help illuminate the evolution of Jewish identity and Jewish community in this region over the past 150 years. By understanding that evolution, we can better understand our world today.

Each week this year, we’ll tell the story of local Jewish restaurants. We'll survey the surviving documentation of these restaurants, and we’ll try to learn as much as we can about their founders, their kitchens, their menus, and even the specific dishes that made them so beloved. We’ll also study the gaps in the record, to better understand what we don’t know. And we’ll be asking you to help us fill those gaps by contributing menus, matchbooks, photographs, stories—anything that provides insight into these institutions. Together we’ll expand the public record, so that we can tell better stories in the future.

Next week: A forgotten gem on Bartlett Street

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:

Anshe Lubovitz Congregation

Photograph of the former Anshe Lubovitz Congregation synagogue at 108-110 Erin Street in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, as the Enon Baptist Church.

—from Corinne Azen Krause Photographs [MSP 113]

Anshe Lubovitz Congregation was founded in the Hill District in 1907 by Jewish immigrants from the town of Lyubavitsh (also known as Lubavitch). Anshe Lubovitz initially met at a private residence at 68 Arthur Street and later at an address on Wylie Avenue. In 1918, the congregation purchased two buildings at 108 and 110 Erin Street for $5,300. The buildings were apparently demolished and rebuilt as a small synagogue. Anshe Lebovitz Congregation relocated to 3223 Kennett Square in the Oakcliffe section of Oakland in 1944.

Neighborhoods

Map of Pittsburgh divided into 1940 census tracts, showing geographic distribution of Jewish households in 1938. Each dot represents five households. Red circles mark clusters.

—from "The Changing Pattern of the Distribution of the Jewish Population of Pittsburgh From Earliest Settlement to 1963," by Leonard Irvin Kuntz, 1970

If you’ve spent any time exploring Pittsburgh, you may know about its many “Jewish neighborhoods,” past and present. There’s Squirrel Hill, of course. It has had the largest concentration of Jewish people of any section in the city for almost a century. And then there’s the Hill District, which was the central Jewish neighborhood in Pittsburgh until the 1930s. You might even remember the former Jewish communities in the East End and in Oakland, which both had several synagogues, community centers, and other Jewish institutions.

The map above shows the geographic distribution of the Jewish population of Pittsburgh in 1938. Each black dot represents five Jewish households. The red outlines show population clusters. You can see that most of the local Jewish population—almost 90 percent, in fact—lived in those four neighborhoods: Squirrel Hill/Greenfield, Oakland, the Hill District, and the East End.

So where did the other 10 percent live?

Map of Pittsburgh divided into 1940 census tracts, showing geographic distribution of Jewish households in 1938. Each dot represents five households. Red dots mark synagogues.

—from "The Changing Pattern of the Distribution of the Jewish Population of Pittsburgh From Earliest Settlement to 1963," by Leonard Irvin Kuntz, 1970

They lived in every other section of the city. And everywhere they lived, they came together to form Jewish institutions: synagogues, schools, and charities.

This version of the map shows the location of those institutions. Each red dot marks a census tract with at least one synagogue. As you can see, they are spread all across the city, in neighborhoods no one thinks of as “Jewish” today.

These smaller Jewish communities were never well documented and have mostly been forgotten. This year, we’re sharing the results of a two-year effort to revive these communities. Each month, we’ll look at a different neighborhood community, sharing all the documentation we’ve discovered. 

We’ll look at the Jewish communities of Woods Run, Deutschtown, Manchester, Bloomfield, the Strip District, Lawrenceville, Homewood-Brushton, Wilkinsburg, Swissvale, Hazelwood, the South Side, Belzhoover, and the West End.

By telling the story of local Jewish history through its many individual communities, rather than its major population centers, we hope to reveal insights and challenge assumptions about the Jewish history of Pittsburgh.

January 29:

JGS-Pittsburgh Presents: Judy G. Russell

Genealogy by its very nature is collaborative. We need to work together and share information with others, both relatives and non-relatives if we’re to succeed in filling out our family trees. But doing family research doesn’t mean giving up all semblances of personal privacy, nor is it a license to invade the privacy of others-family or not. All researchers need to follow the rules, both legal and ethical, when we share genealogical information. In her talk, "Share and Share Alike: The Rules of Genealogical Privacy," Judy G. Russell will provide legal and ethical guidelines for seeking genealogical information.

The program is Sunday, Jan. 29 from 1-2:30 p.m. ET It's free for JGS-Pittsburgh members and $5 for the general public. Please register online. 

All attendees are encouraged to log on 30 minutes early for a virtual open house. It’s an opportunity to share genealogy stories and make new friends.

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.

Judy G. Russell, The Legal Genealogist®, is a genealogist with a law degree who provides expert guidance through the murky territory where law and family history intersect. An internationally known lecturer and award-winning writer, she holds credentials as a Certified Genealogist® and Certified Genealogical Lecturer℠ from the Board for Certification of Genealogists®.

Her blog is at www.legalgenealogist.com.

In the News

Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle:

Why was the Chronicle created?

The Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle is completing its 60th year in operation. To help celebrate the anniversary, the Rauh Jewish Archives helped prepare some historical materials about the newspaper, including a look at its founding and a timeline of notable moments, milestones, and policy decisions over the years.

NEXT Pittsburgh: "Reopening Fern Hollow Bridge reconnects vital link for Pittsburgh Jewish community"

David Rotenstein considers the importance of the Fern Hollow Bridge to the local eruv, which allows local Jews to carry outdoors on the Sabbath.

NEXT Pittsburgh: "Tammy Hepps came to Pittsburgh to research the Jews of Homestead and found Jeff Goldblum"

"NEXTpittsburgh: What’s the value of a community genealogy? Americans seem to be so very localized in our attitudes and outlooks.

"Hepps: That localization is actually a positive. You can use genealogical methods to restore people’s sense of place in their local history, which is something they might not have nor realize is important. The goal is to reconstitute the identity of the community. Who were these people; what did they do in their social lives? Business lives? Religion, culture, sports, every facet of their community lives provides the bigger picture that explains why people came to have a special feeling about this place..."

Jewish Action: "Keeping Kosher, Becoming American"

Label for "Chow Chow Pickle" featuring the OU symbol, 1927.

—from H.J. Heinz Company Collection [MSS 57]

Jewish Action devotes its entire Winter 2022 issue to the centennial of OU Kosher, the first independent kosher certification system in the United States.

Although not the first company to receive OU certification, the H. J. Heinz Company was the first company in the United States to use the now familiar the OU hechsher (kosher certification symbol) onto its product labels. You can see an example in the small print on this 1927 label for Chow Chow Pickle.

Research Tools

The Pittsburgh Jewish Newspaper Project contains digitized, searchable copies of four local English-language Jewish newspapers: the Jewish Criterion (1895-1962), the American Jewish Outlook (1934-1962), the Jewish Chronicle (1962-2010), and the Y Weekly (1926-1976). It is a valuable tool for researching almost any topic about Jewish history in Western Pennsylvania.

For a primer on using the website, view the video below.

Western Pennsylvania Cemetery Project

The Rauh Jewish Archives launched the Western Pennsylvania Jewish Cemetery Project in 1998. The goal was to create a comprehensive collection of burial records from Jewish cemeteries across the region. Volunteers walked through cemeteries, writing down the names and dates inscribed on gravestones. Over a period of fifteen years, the information was compiled into a database of approximately 50,000 burial records from 78 Jewish cemeteries.

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.