Family clubs
JGS Presents: Jess Weible
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All year, we've been looking at the history of Jewish clubs in Western Pennsylvania. We've profiled youth clubs and adult clubs, athletic clubs and dramatic clubs, clubs that lasted a few years and clubs that lasted decades.
We'll end the year looking at a special type of club. They were sometimes called “family clubs,” “family circles,” “cousins clubs” or even “family cousins clubs.” They were organized like any other club. They had members, dues, officers, meetings, minutes, newsletters, and programs. What made these clubs special was their membership: everyone was related to everyone else.
In 1978, the anthropologist William Mitchell published “Mishpokhe: A Study of New York City Jewish Family Clubs,” the first scholarly look at Jewish family clubs. At the time, he was unable to find anything similar among any other ethnic group in North America, and he concluded that these clubs were unique to Ashkenazi Jews living in the United States. He was also unable to find any direct Old World precedent for these clubs. (He did, however, draw a thematic connection to landsmanshaftn and other Jewish mutual aid societies.)
Mitchell focused specifically on the Jewish kinship clubs of New York City, but he found similar clubs in other American cities with a sizable population of Eastern European Jews. He even explicitly listed Pittsburgh as a notable hub.
When the local anthropologist Myrna Silverman conducted her study of multigenerational Jewish families here in Pittsburgh in the mid-1970s, she found that half the families she interviewed were members of least one of these clubs, and sometimes more than one. In recent years, Rauh Jewish Archives volunteer Sam Hirsch compiled a database of local kinship clubs. The database currently includes 109 clubs. It lists the surnames associated with each club, a date range of known activities, meeting places, newspaper citations, and references to any known archival collections for each club.
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In the past five years, the Rauh Jewish Archives has received several collections with documentation of local Jewish family clubs, a sign of a larger trend underway. Over the next two months, we'll look at six of these clubs.
All this year, the Rauh Jewish Archives is highlighting stories of Jewish club life in Western Pennsylvania. If you would like to donate records of a local Jewish club, or just chat about clubs, contact the archive or call 412-454-6406.
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Nov. 14: JGS Pittsburgh Presents: Jess Weible |
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On assignment for a small-town newspaper in rural Pennsylvania, rookie reporter Jessica Weible meets Joan Swigart, a creative fireball and “pioneer in print.” As the two women forge a relationship based on their passion for storytelling, Joan reveals a mystery that she had discovered years ago, but had never solved—a pile of dead letters found in an abandoned general store, just before it was torn down. Joan gives Jessica the letters, each stamped and dated over a hundred years ago, and encourages Jessica to investigate the untold stories of the people and places contained in each one.
What begins as yet another assignment for the reporter, a young millennial who relies happily on email and texting as the primary means of communication, develops into a heartfelt mission to tell the story of the people and places in the letters. Weible's book, “Dead Letters: Delivering Unopened Mail from a Pennsylvania Ghost Town," describes the unexpected twists and turns that her journey takes through the quiet lumber towns of Pennsylvania, the early American settlements in Massachusetts, the bustling crowds at Ellis Island, the violent strikes at the Passaic textile mills, and beyond. Among the letters is one in Yiddish, revealing a web of local Jewish stories. Attendees in person will get a chance to see the actual letters.
This is a hybrid program. Attendees can participate either online or in-person at the Heinz History Center. In-person attendance will be limited to the first 20 people who register. Social distancing and masking will be required. Depending on public health conditions at the time of the program, the program may revert to all-virtual format, with updated instructions sent to all registrants.
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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Jess Weible is a freelance writer and reporter. Her writing has been featured in the Huffington Post and various local news outlets. Her column featuring writers of the Pennsylvania Wilds appears every month in the Brookville Mirror. Jess’s poetry has been published in the Apeiron Review and the Tobeco Journal. Her fiction appears in the Bridge Literary Arts Journal. She is also a founding editor for The Watershed Journal, an inclusive, regional literary magazine for the western Pennsylvania wilds. Jess leads two writing groups, the Writer’s Block Party and the Rebecca M. Arthur’s Young Writers. She lives with her husband and two boys in Brookville, Pennsylvania.
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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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Plan a Visit
Senator John Heinz History Center
1212 Smallman Street
Pittsburgh, Pa. 15222
412-454-6000
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A proud affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution, the Senator John Heinz History Center is the largest history museum in Pennsylvania and presents American history with a Western Pennsylvania connection.
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