Germans and Russians: From Queen City Pioneers to "Schindler's List"

I’m having fun spending time with Every Friday, the weekly Jewish newspaper in Cincinnati from 1927-1965, that boasted of being the only Jewish paper in Cincinnati devoted “primarily to the local Jewish community” and to serving “all groups – Reform, Orthodox, Zionists, Non-Zionists, and Radicals.” (EF 8/19/32).    Unlike the American Israelite, Every Friday followed the social doings of both the established “German” Jewish community and those who represented the more recent Russian/East European Jewish migration.  One of the things I’m trying to trace is the extent these two groups remained separate communities and which communal spaces brought them together.  

Coming across an obituary (EF 10/21/32) for Mrs. Clara Lerman, and realizing that she would have been Steven Spielberg’s great aunt, I went back to look at earlier material I had found related to Speilberg, including a 1930 notice of his father Arnold's bar mitzvah. That notice listed the address of Arnold’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Sam P. Spielberg, as 3576 Van Antwerp Place.  The Spielbergs belonged to the East European traditional/ Conservative synagogue, Adath Israel, whose rabbi, Louis Feinberg, presided over both Clara’s funeral and Arnold’s bar mitzvah.

As it happened, directly above the notice of Clara’s death, there was an obituary for Samuel S. Hoffheimer. His family and that of his wife Julia Workum Hoffheimer were among Jewish Cincinnati’s economic and social Jewish pioneers.  The first Workums appeared in Cincinnati in 1829. The Hoffheimer liquor business was noted in the Dunn and Bradstreet credit reports as early as 1853. As I connected these death notices to that of Arnold's bar mitzvah, I noticed that Samuel Hoffheimer's home at 3585 Van Antwerp Place was almost directly across the street from Clara’s brother Sam's house. These two Sams, representatives of the old and new migrations, products it often seems of very different worlds, were actually close neighbors in the heart of Avondale.   This is all becomes cooler of course when we remember that Sam S's grandson was the creator of Raiders of the Lost Ark, etc.

 By the 1930s, most of Cincinnati’s Jews had left the “congested districts” of the downtown basin for the hilltop suburbs, with the majority landing in Avondale. By the time of Clara Lerman and Samuel S. Hoffheimer’s deaths, many of Cincinnati’s most established Jewish families were ensconced in large homes in North Avondale. Indeed, there is a lot of evidence pointing to the social segregation of German and Russian Jews in  Depression-era Cincinnati. Still, just as Every Friday hoped to illustrate, the representatives of the old and new migrations were part of one community  and often neighbors, like Samuel Hoffheimer and Sam Spielberg, of Van Antwerp Place, Avondale.

Jews in the C (ity)

Last week, while attending the annual dinner of the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan, a fellow Ann Arborite approached me for reassurance in the face of what she saw as the narrowness of the Jewish community's vision and civic engagement.   

I admire this woman so much for her intense commitment to the broader community that I wanted to encourage her to see the vibrant progressive energy pulsing around us at the ACLU gathering as at least in part an expression of Jewish community as well.  

This wasn't about documenting the place of Jews in creating and building the ACLU or even reviewing the religious affiliations of its staff and supporters (though others are welcome to do so). What I wanted to suggest was that if we look closely at the foundations of our Jewish communal structures, we will see that American Jewish community arose and  thrived in the context of engaged commitment to the broader society, not in self-centered isolation. 

I told her that in recent public talks I've been focusing on how the creation of organized Jewish communities in different cities shows the vital role of Jews and Jewish communities in making our cities cleaner, healthier, more open, and more just. "Have you written this down?" she asked. 

Well, no time like the present.  Yesterday, I came across a 1930 Jewish newspaper article  that speaks to this theme and offers the opportunity to commit some of this to bloggish print.

Eighty-four years ago,  Cincinnati's Mayor Russell Wilson shared Rosh Hashanah greetings with his Jewish constituents via Cincinnati's Jewish radio hour (recorded in the October 10, 1930 edition of Every Friday, a local Jewish weekly). Mayor Wilson offered up some wooden cliches praising the wisdom of ancient Jewish teachings and Jewish contributions to world and American culture.

Nice enough, but then Wilson brought his talk closer to home. "Certainly the City of Cincinnati has been the recipient of many superb contributions of citizenship by Jews," he notes. And then he starts listing a stunning array of local Jewish civic leaders, starting with Murray Seasongood, his mayoral predecessor.

In the early 20th century, Cincinnati, under the influence of the Boss Cox political machine, was known as one of the most corrupt cities in the nation. In the words of muckraker Lincoln Steffens the city was "all one great graft."* Seasongood, described by Wilson as "the leader in the movement that has regenerated Cincinnati by substituting citizenship for partisanship" engineered the transition to a city manager form of government that soon had others describing the town as one of the "best governed cities in America." [see e.g. The Rotarian, January 1931]

As Wilson continues his list of Jewish civic leaders, the impact of Jewish involvement in Cincinnati's progressive municipal reforms fairly leaps off the page. What does it take to move a city from worst to best?   Part of the answer must be found in the men who served as the heads of the City Planning Commission, the Board of Education, and the Park Board, not to mention others serving on  the Boards of Education and University and as the County Treasurer.

There's a lot more to say about the prominence of these men in local civic affairs (stay tuned). But what interests me right now is how many of them I already know - not from their civic good works -- but from their extensive roles in creating and leading the Cincinnati Jewish community's foundational philanthropic and communal efforts.

For most of them, civic engagement originated in ameliorating the precarious conditions faced by Cincinnati's turn of the century Jewish Eastern European Jewish immigrants. As it turned out, addressing the economic, health, residential, and cultural needs of this vulnerable population required a deep engagement with the challenges of public health, housing, education, parks and recreation. In the case of these gentlemen and of many other men and women that I hope to document, there was a clear connection between the obligation/desire to create better conditions for their own religious brethren (and sistern) and the welfare of the city as a whole. Not just for their part of it.

Buried deep in the DNA of American Jewish philanthropy lies this core piece of wisdom. You can't separate your own group's welfare from that of the community as a whole. Or, to end by going back to Mayor Wilson:  "We must not be prejudiced nor must we create prejudice in others. We all are fellow Cincinnatians, fellow Americans, possessing common ideals. Let us share those ideals to the glory of our city and of our country."

*Zane Miller, Boss Cox's Cincinnati: Urban Politics in the Progressive Era (Chicago, 1968). Miller offers the best account of this era in Cincinnati along with much astute research on the Jewish community's participation in reform efforts.

Cincinnati's American Israelites Blog 2.0

When I look back at the entries of these blog posts from 2007, I love seeing the richness of sources, people, and events they detail, and the freedom I took to expand on some of the small but fascinating items that can make historical research so much fun (but that don't always make it to our published treatises ...).

Unfortunately/Fortunately, I've been taken up with a few too many other responsibilities and such since then to have much time for this work I love.  Due to a welcome sabbatical, I'm excited to be back in the thick of Jewish Cincinnati research.  In addition to advancing my book project, I am also hoping to go back to sharing some of my favorite morsels of Cincinnati Jewish wisdom and experience via the blog format.  What with digital photography and social media, there are a lot more possibilities for going deeper and farther with this material than in 2007.

Beyond social media, the passage of time and the accrual of differing experiences have also changed my relationship to this work in significant ways.  When I first began my Cincinnati research many years ago as a graduate student, I was able to benefit from the insights of people who knew people who knew people stretching back to the beginning of organized Jewish life in Cincinnati.   Jacob Rader Marcus didn't quite overlap with Isaac Mayer Wise in Cincinnati, but it seemed like he did. (He wasn't so far off, Marcus came to Cincinnati in 1911, while Wise died in 1900).  Now, I'm realizing that by having talked to so many Jewish Cincinnatians in their 80s and 90s (and 100s) in the 1980s/90s and early 2000s, I now am one of the holders of precious oral wisdom linking today's Jewish Cincinnati to its past -- a realization that is both surprising and sobering.

Finally, as my own interests and opportunities have changed, so has my relationship to this work.  As a faculty member at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, I mostly focused on congregations as containers for Jewish community and experience.  Having now had the opportunity to work at the Jewish Women's Archive and as director of the Jewish Communal Leadership Program at the University of Michigan, I think of Jewish community much differently than I did back then.

Clearly much of the significance of Cincinnati's American Israelites arises from their creation and stewardship of the first successful national institutions of American Jewish life (the congregation-oriented Union of American Hebrew Congregations and Hebrew Union College).  Today, however, I find the community's leadership in creating local and national frameworks for broader communal work even more stunning.  More on this later.  But it's important to note that immigrant relief work at the turn of the nineteenth century propelled Cincinnati Jews into leadership not only in the creation of national frameworks for Jewish community, but also in a broad array of municipal and civic reform efforts in the city of Cincinnati and beyond.

Looking forward to further adventures ...

Ha! a Cincinnati story after all ...

In my last post, I cavalierly announced that I was going to see if I could find Estelle Sternberger, who partnered with Rebekah Kohut in the 1930s to create a Jewish women's encyclopedia, in the Jewish Women in America historical encyclopedia which appeared in 1997. Lo and behold, not only is there an entry on Sternberger, but she was born in Cincinnati! hooray!

Born in 1886, Sternberger attended the University of Cincinnati and the School of Jewish Philanthropy which existed there for a short time. Later, she worked in New York as executive secretary of the National Council of Jewish Women where one of her roles was to gather information about the careers of contemporary Jewish women.

After serving as executive director of World Peaceways and publishing The Supreme Cause: A Practical Book about Peace (1936), she became a radio commentator on politics and culture.

The entry makes no mention of the encylopaedia project, but it is nice to realize that though she never got to create one, she did end up being in one ...

Source: Jessica Berger, "Sternberger, Estelle," in Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, eds., Paula E. Hyman and Deborah Dash Moore (New York, 1997), vol. 2, pp. 1336-7.

an Encyclopaedia of Jewish Women

There have always been American Jewish women who have sought to counter recurring amnesia about the contributions of Jewish women to their religion and society. Rosa Sonneschein's huge effort on this score was the monthly publication The American Jewess which appeared from 1895-1899. The Jewish Women's Archive has worked to ensure that Sonneschein's work is not forgotten by making the full run of that journal available and searchable on-line. The Jewish Women's Archive, itself, of course is only one the latest of public efforts to insist that Jewish women's history not be forgotten. As Sonneschein observed "not what has happened, but what is recorded makes history."

Cincinnati's Every Friday newspaper of May 6, 1932 offers a glimpse of some other women seeking to fight the male-biased trend of history writing by gathering the stories of Jewish women's achievements into bound volumes. The newspaper noted that "Plans for the first comprehensive publication of facts relating to the work of American Jewish womanhood" had been announced by "Jewish Women of America, an organization with headquarters at 103 Park Avenue, New York." The effort was "to take the form of an Encyclopaedia of Jewish Women, with Rebekah Kohut and Estelle M. Sternberg as Editors."

Sternberger, the article notes had resigned as Executive Secretary of the National Council of Jewish women to take up this work. I don't recall hearing of Sternberger before. I do however know something about Rebekah Kohut, and it is in this light that I can feel some satisfaction at learning of this encyclopedia that never, as far as I know, saw the light of day. Kohut, a leading figure in the effort to create new public roles for Jewish women in the late ninteenth and early twentieth centuries, led a rich and estimable life. In fact, I got to write the article about her that appeared in the marvelous encyclopedia that did eventually get written about American Jewish women.

In 1997, 65 years after Kohut and Sternberger set out to capture the collective experience of "Jewish Women of America," Paula E. Hyman and Deborah Dash Moore published American Jewish Women: An Historical Encylopedia. That work (and its sequel Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia, edited by Hyman and Dalia Ofer, now available on CD) has proven to be an incomparable guide to the richness and scope of the story that Kohut and Sternberg wanted to tell in 1932. I'm going to see if I can find Estelle M. Sternberg in it tomorrow morning.

Semitic Beauty

Why can't I resist these beauty contests? In 1932, the Avondale Synagog (Adath Israel) held a Beauty Contest as part of its Synagog Carnival. The winner was Miss Miriam Hyams, a 17-year-old senior at Hughes High School, who was lauded for "upholding the tradition of Semitic feminine beauty." "Semitic feminine beauty"-- I'm going to have to think about that one. I'm currently reading Eric Goldstein's The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity which raises compelling questions about Jewish ambivalence over whether Jewish identity should be thought about as a racial construct (as suggested by "semitic beauty") or as a religious confession. Given that context, it's sort of nice to see the "semitic" pride here. I'm also appreicative of Miriam Hyams' nose in this profile shot featured in Every Friday. It makes me happy that she was the victor ... in a world where "Reading Road Rose" was seeking to ditch her "Reading Road Nose," and Fanny Brice, as shown in the Jewish Women's Archive's movie Making Trouble , was ditching the nose that had already taken her far on Broadway. And, so, although I don't generally admire beauty contest culture, in this case Ive got to give it up both for Miriam and the judges.

Source: Every Friday, April 15, 1932, p. 12.

Capturing the Anguish of Disaster

This is pretty wild. It so happened that in the midst of their 1906 California honeymoon, Cincinnatiians Robert Senior and Fanny Aub Senior found themselves right in the middle of the great San Francisco earthquake.

I have been thinking about how the kind of immediate and personal narrative that Fanny sent to her “dear ones,” as soon as she was out of the ring of seismic destruction would never be replicated today. Who, having undergone such a trauma would write such a detailed and emotive letter today? Anyone wanting to assure their family of their safety and to share the details of their experience would use the telephone rather than the written word (the closest equivalent might be blog accounts written for public, not private, consumption).

Fanny and Robert Senior telegraphed their safety as soon as it was possible, but to share their experience with those they loved, they had no choice but to write a long letter – each of them did so as soon as they could.

I don’t know enough about the history of the quake to know if there is anything unusual about Fanny’s moving and anguished account, assuring her family that the “newspaper accounts” of the disaster “are not one bit exaggerated.” I am, however, pretty sure that no one trying to tell the story of that horrific moment has used Fanny’s and Robert’s letters to help convey the story of those traumatic days, preserved but buried as they are in uncatalogued papers of a Cincinnati Jewish family active in communal affairs. What chance has there been for someone interested in San Francisco to come across these words? I hope there will be more of a chance in the future.

I’ve thought a lot about what is in this letter, but hard as it is for me to shut up, I am just going to present an abridged version of what Fanny wrote without adding my own comments. Her powerful anguished voice deserves to be heard on its own and speaks for itself … I’ve shortened it only because it was 8 pages long ….


Fanny Aub to “My Dear Ones” Salt Lake City, 1906 [American Jewish Archives, Senior Family Papers, Uncatalogued Box 1]

My dear ones,

Thank God! for many a time these last terrible days I thought I should never address you again. It has truly been one long dreadful nightmare which we shall never be able to efface from our memories as long as we live. …. Yes we have more than we can realize to be grateful for, for we escaped uninjured, and are far away from the city of misery. …. With fire, famine, draught [sic] and pestilence, can you conceive of such agony? Newspaper reports are not one bit exaggerated. The horror of it all could never be conveyed to anyone who has not experienced this most awful catastrophe of the age.
I never could describe the first sensation of the earthquake which woke us out of our sleep. It was a jar that sent us three feet into the air, oh: Heaven I’m feeling it all the time and shall wake up many a night with a recurrence of those worst seconds I have ever lived through. Darkness, lightning thunder building, falling, the hotel [?] shaking, pounding, God it was terrible. When it stopped everyone dashed for the streets to find waiting a different sight than we had left the night before. People came down with practically nothing on screaming etc. Well what is the use it only excites me more to talk of it. I’m trying so hard to crowd it all from my mind.
After some hours had passed Bob [her husband]insisted upon our going up to dress so as quickly as possible I tumbled into my clothes, my grey suit skirt, tan coat and hat, all I have left to my name at present. We ran down then, just in time to get another shock much milder than the first of course but still a warning that the gases had not subsided. Then and there I decided never to return to those rooms, the lower part of the hotel had been entirely demolished, that is the plaster had been broken off the walls …. I would not permit Bob to return, and so we did not save many things we might have carried although clothes trunks etc were out of the question. You could not have had them hauled away for any money. I really do not reproach myself though for nobody on earth could tell what the next moment would bring, and our few jewels were not worth the risk to my notion of thinking. So you see all I have left is a little underware [sic] one change for both Bob and myself which a bell-boy brought down to us later in the morning in one of our dress suit cases.
We stayed in the park all day with Rheinstroms, Rothschilds and .. what a day! … the dead lying covered in a heap and the fire in the distance I never want to see such sights again. By four oclock I could stand it no longer and made Bob get a carriage to take us out to Mayfields.”
[She was unable to let her family know they were safe because] “there was no communication anywhere in or out of the city as wiring was an impossibility. Well we started for the ferry with Fred Mayfield one of Bob’s Cousins who had come over looking for his wife, poor fellow, Heaven knows if will ever find her, she was visiting … in the city [ a friend] whose house was burned by the time he got there. It was a longer walk he told us than we had ever taken in our lives so I knew I could not carry more than my coat, it was burning hot. “
[After] a six mile walk up and down almost perpendicular hills …. discouraged all the way down by police who turned us back + people who told us we never could get across , [they reached the train station]… all we could get was 2 uppers for Salt Lake but we clutched them. I can assure you we decided to stand rather than remain in that country another second….
Much love to you all. Do send this such as it is to Clara + Edgar I never could write about it all again.”

Fondly , Fan