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

"Though your blood ain't so blue ...."

My last post described the parody songs and satires (called “stunts”) that were often performed at New Year’s and other occasions by members of Cincinnati’s German Jewish community. “Reading Road Rose” offered a withering portrayal of the just-out-of-the-ghetto girl with upper-class desires. Today, I’m looking at an untitled composition that mocks the come-one come-all ethos they perceived at the early-twentieth-century Wise Center.

Founded in the 1840s, K.K. B’nai Yeshurun under the leadership of American Reform Judaism’s master builder Isaac M. Wise, became the very model of an American Reform congregation. Like its sister congregation K.K. Bene Israel (Rockdale Temple), it was an impressive bastion of 19th-century German Jewish homogeneity (according to historian Steven Mostov’s careful census study).

When Cincinnati’s affluent Jews began moving up out of the city at the turn of the twentieth century, the congregation maintained the magnificent Plum Street Temple downtown but also built a “Wise Center” on the hilltops to serve as religious school and a gathering and worship site, closer to the homes of most congregants.

Despite their association with German Jews, the growth of most early Reform congregations in the early twentieth century depended upon the growing inclusion of upwardly mobile Russian or Eastern European Jews. In Cincinnati, B’nai Yeshurun was perceived as being much more open to the newcomers than Bene Israel. In 1931, B’nai Yeshurun responded to the pressures of the Depression by merging with the Reading Road congregation, a Reform temple with a more traditionalist orientation and a more eastern European constituency. The merged congregation was renamed the Isaac M. Wise Temple.

With its Zionist rabbi (James Heller who served from 1920 to 1952) and its growing numbers of arriviste members, it seems to have become less attractive to Rose Hill Jews, even those like Robert Senior, who worked actively for Russian Jews (he was president for 25 years of the Bureau of Jewish Education which sponsored the city’s Talmud Torahs). One of his stunts held the Wise Center up for ridicule, suggesting again (like “Reading Road Rose”) the danger that inclusion could pose to the class status of his own community.

If you want to get in, there is one place to begin
At the Center – The Wise Center
Though you’re cross-eyed and fat, there’s a welcome on the mat
At the Center - The Wise Center.
If a man breaks your heart, you can get another start
At the Center – The Wise Center

In addition to letting in all losers who might apply, the Wise Center, according to the song, also subjected itself to ridicule by responding to every possible desire by offering a class or forming “a club for any dub.” But the real lurking danger was in the inclusion offered by the capacious center. Although

“The haughty and proud always come in a crowd
To the Center –the Wise Center,”

they were not exactly barring the door to those of lesser status or merit:

Though your blood ain’t so blue, they will make a place for you
At the Center – The Wise Center.
What you’re worth, what you wear, no one really seems to care
At the Center – The Wise Center.

At Losantiville, the German Jewish country club, the song points out, they still “think you are a pill,” and won’t let you in, but the temple it seems had fallen prey to the dross of annual dues:

“At the Center you get in any day – you pay your dues for they
Don’t care a lot – because they’ve got a melting pot.”

The final verse brings up the same fear of German/Russian miscegenation that haunts “Reading Road Rose.” “Perhaps a boy from Clinton Street [the ‘ghetto’ district downtown] should meet / Some swell girl.” Though he wouldn’t have dared invite her to a show, when they meet

"At the Center, she don’t think he’s got a cheek to speak
On occasion it is said they love and wed.”

If the Clinton Street boy doesn’t go in for nuptials, it is suggested, he might yet go into business with her ‘Pa.' In the end, the song suggests, the inclusion of these upstarts as members of the congregation, the family, or the business, was all about money. A weakening community could not stand up to those who held not equivalent worth, but cold hard cash:

"By the Centers its aufait work or play
Should always pay.”

I’d love to hear what other people think of this song (or of “Reading Road Rose). I’d especially love to hear your guesses as to what popular tune the Wise Center song may have gone to. The closest I can get is the anachronistic “Pettycoat Junction.” (Although Robert Senior often composed his own music to songs he wrote for special occasions, I don’t think that is the case here).

Source: Uncatalogued Box 1, Senior Family Papers, Ms. Coll. 139, American Jewish Archives.

Reading Road Rose ...

It’s really not that surprising that Cincinnati’s German Jews have dominated all previous histories of the city’s Jewish community.. Members of the much larger population of Cincinnati Jews who come from an Eastern European background have rightfully complained about this bias, but there is no denying the compelling quality of Cincinnati’s mid-19th-century Jewish community and its descendants.

Cincinnati’s German Jews created the first central successful national organizations of American Jewish life. They had a huge impact on the cultural and civic life of Cincinnati. And, through many in-marriages, they all seem to be related to each other. Their family names quickly become familiar -- seeming to offer a coherent narrative of Jewish communal development – They easily seduce the historian who can trace the swath they cut through religious and municipal social reform and then even visit them in the Walnut Hills United Jewish Cemetery where so many rest in close and eternal proximity.

Much of my book, like those of my predecessors, will inevitably follow the character and achievements of this community, but I hope also to offer more than just the standard patronizing/patronized historical narrative about the complex relationship of the German and Eastern European (“Russian”) communities.

As the clever celebratory but racist couplet cited in my last post suggested, Cincinnati’s German Jews could play integral roles in every significant social/political reform movement in Cincinnati, but still not escape the prejudices of their times. It turns out that their propensity for clever skits and songs (referred to as “stunts”) over the holiday season (more later on the question of “Christmas”) can offer insight into the German/Russian relationship as well.

Set, apparently, to the tune of “Second Hand Rose,” one new year’s song (sorry, I don’t know the year, but it seems to have been written by Robert M. Senior during the 1920s), portrayed the fortunes of a girl whose Russian father had struggled in America until WWI-related prosperity enabled the family to move uptown to Reading Road in Cincinnati’s largely Jewish neighborhood of Avondale:

“Now I’ve got Reading Road clothes – Reading Road beaux
That’s why they call me – ‘Reading Road Rose”

Rose apparently attracts so much attention that they’ve had to bring in “a new traffic cop” to Avondale, but she’s still not satisfied, because “slightly north” of where she stands

“Lives a smarty set
And they don’t invite me – don’t invite me –yet.”

But don’t worry, she suggests,

“Don’t for a minute suppose, despite my Reading Road nose,
I’ll always be a Reading Road Rose”

With a (German-Jewish) doctor ready to take care of her troublesome facial extremity, she feels prepared to take on the snootier set, to make her mark not only in Avondale, but among the grand and gracious houses and community occupying the streets known as Rose Hill:

“I’ll bridge or dance or wear my new golfing pants
There isn’t a demand I won’t fulfill –
I’ll be coy – or I’ll be chilly, I’ll be sober or gay,
For where there is a will, I’m sure there’s always a way,
Once the crowd knows about this Reading Road Rose,
She’ll be Rosey – of Rose Hill.”

The large family group that gathered together on Rose Hill to enjoy this song, many of whom had devoted countless hours to improving the lot of Cincinnati’s immigrant Jews, clearly felt miles above the social climbing aspirations of Reading Road Rose, but she was also clearly a threat to them. More on this threat and another song ….. in my next post .

Source: Senior Family Papers, Ms. Coll. 139, uncatalogued Box 1, American Jewish Archives.

Ah, history ....

In my last post, I tried to share something of the remarkable efforts of communal activist Setty Kuhn in addressing the needs of her community, ranging across musical, educational, religious, international, and racial concerns.

But ah, history. As much as I admire Setty, it is impossible to simply ignore the troubling social attitudes and certainties -- inherent in her life and that of her community -- that come too starkly into view from our early 21st-century perspective. We are forced to censure those we would admire, with the all too certain awareness that we too, in all our earnestness and/or cynicism, will be brought up short by those who someday may look back at us.

Setty lived in a broad world that spanned continents and communities, but her intimate world was a very narrow one. This world consisted almost entirely of Cincinnati’s German Jewish elite – and she was related by blood or marriage to many of its most prominent members. She was even the founder of the country club that came to define the parameters of this community. It was a community defined both by its love of Christmas and its shared devotion to communal betterment.

Setty Kuhn particularly was recognized for addressing the needs of those less fortunate. As one Cincinnati columnist observed, although she always lived amidst privilege, she chose to use those privileges in the interests of a better world. In pursuing her special passion – housing reform – she became instrumental in the passage of municipal, state, and national legislation to address the growing decay of America’s inner cities and its impact upon the least fortunate.

But yesterday’s cutting edge reforms can become the cramped and destructive forces of today. “Slum eradication” as a way to improve neighborhoods often meant the replacement of human scaled neighborhoods with soulless housing projects that did little to foster opportunity and bred much of the destructive behavior they were meant to prevent. It would be hard to argue that Cincinnati’s housing projects did much to advance the fortunes of the African American population they were intended to serve. An easier argument would be that they worked well in keeping that community segregated and marginalized, while opening space for more of the kind of downtown industrial expansion desired by the municipality.

Setty Kuhn worked harder and with more effectiveness for the broader community (across class, religious, and racial lines) than I shall ever hope to be able to do. Yet the responsible American Jewish historian in me feels the need to make the obvious point that Setty Kuhn grew up in an indelibly racist society. She could not have avoided reflecting these views even as she addressed issues that most individuals in privileged white Cincinnati would have avoided.

Her letters as a young woman deployed the derogatory language and patronizing racial attitudes of the world she lived in. These certainly faded with time, but it’s clear from some of the papers in her collection that the Yiddish word “schwartzer” as a negative term for black people was sustained even within her cultured German Jewish circle.

Let me share one example which is so shocking, I think, not because we live in a society that has driven out racism. Rather, because most of us who would now identify with the political activism and social consciousness embodied by Setty, could never imagine deploying racist terms in the interest of our own amusement. It’s hard even to imagine just how close we are in time and identification to those able to do so quite easily and with great aplomb.

The following comes from one of the many song and tributes written over the years by friends and family in Setty’s honor. This one comes from the last verse of a poem written to mark the 20th anniversary (in 1913) of the marriage of Setty Swarts to Simon Kuhn. Here it is, make of it what you will:

“So Si he knew he’d met his fate,
And they were married soon,
For is it not most proper that,
A Schwartz should wed a Kuhn?”

source: Setty Kuhn Papers, American Jewish Archives

Settie Swartz Kuhn: Making a Difference ...

I’ve been spending this week with Mrs. Simon Kuhn, a.k.a. Setty Swarts Kuhn, or more familiarly: Aunt Setty. Wow. Regine Ransohoff mentioned her to me as a Jewish woman for whom a Cincinnati housing project is named, and suggested that I might be interested in the many other things that she did. Well yes, and thanks Regine!

From her creation of the Better Housing League in 1916 and past her retirement from the Cincinnati Metropolitan Housing Authority in 1950 at age 82, Kuhn worked hard to earn official designation as “outstanding woman of the half-century” in Cincinnati public housing. As one admirer summarized the situation: “the word housing to me has meant Mrs. Simon Kuhn."

But Setty Kuhn’s influence was felt in realms far beyond housing. I can’t begin to describe the range of her communal work here, so let me just cite the list of organizations that co-sponsored a celebration of her career on the occasion of her 70th birthday. In perusing this list, please remember that these were not just organizations in which Setty Kuhn took an active part. No, in almost every case (besides, perhaps the United Jewish Social Agencies) she was a key (and often sole) founder and sustainer.

Here they are: The Better Housing League, the Child Guidance Home, The Cincinnati Chamber Music Society, the Cincinnati Peace League, the Community Gardens, the Foreign Policy Association, The Foster Home, the Geneva Scholarship Fund, the Jewish Convalescent Home, the League of Women Voters, the Losantiville Country Club, the Toscanini foundation, the United Jewish Social Agencies, the University School, and the Woman’s City Club.

A hefty resumé for any community activist, and one that beautifully exemplifies the way that social issues and reform work that often arose in Jewish communal contexts were successfully presented by Jewish activists as matters that required broad communal attention and systematic municipal reform. This will be a major concern in my book, but what struck me most immediately about Setty’s collection of papers were the ways which her friends, family, and colleagues (Jews and non-Jews) found to express their appreciation for her tireless devotion and effectiveness. (And I’m not even going to get into the myriad scores of poems, songs, and parodies written in her honor – those these are genres dear to my own heart).

People loved Setty for what she did:

“There has been continuously one member [of the Cincinnati Metropolitan Housing Authority] that completely exemplifies unselfish and courageous support of an ideal of improving the circumstances of the underprivileged. Whatever the Authority has accomplished has been attributable in the largest measure to your steadfast and devoted concern with basic social betterment.”

And they also loved her, as one letter writer noted, for how she did it:

“More than just starting things and founding organizations and carrying them on, sometimes with great effort, is the spirit and sincerity you put into these matters.”

She was known by so many (including professional colleagues and city officials) as “Aunt Setty,” that one nephew felt constrained to admonish her: “And don’t’ forget, I’m the only legitimate nephew, them others are imposters, just a lot bastards.”

Setty Kuhn’s life was not easy. Her father died when she was three. Her husband went through severe bouts of depression and died at an early age – around the same time that one of her three daughters, who was mentally retarded, also died. In fact, many of the institutions that she founded or supported, a home for mentally retarded children, a convalescent home, an inclusive and modern private school, a country club (to serve her ill husband) were efforts to transform challenges that she’d experienced in her own life into broader possibilities for others facing similar challenges.

Some other time, I’ll write about some of the time-bound social attitudes that can undermine our eager idealization of someone like Aunt Setty, but I can only join her friends, her disciples, her colleagues in treasuring the humanity that informed her activism.

One younger colleague who went on to work in public health for the Cincinnati Community Chest was transformed by her first encounter with Setty who she came to regard as the city’s “Number 1 Woman Citizen”:

“I do not exaggerate in saying that you set a pattern of life which has challenged my admiration ever since. My own contribution to these great causes … to which you have devoted your energy, time and money, has been very limited. But at least I accepted your standard of values, preferred your pattern to any other.”

I was particularly struck by a 1938 note from a woman who had taught in the school founded by Setty, but who had left Cincinnati 26 years earlier. She recalled Setty as … “one of the loveliest spirits that have ever touched my life.”

One remembrance of Setty Kuhn asked: “What made her the extraordinary woman she was?” The answer in part: “the intensity of her convictions, the magnetism and persuasiveness which lent an inner glow to her personality, and led her own mother to say of her: ‘Setty could charm the blue out of heaven.’”

In our green age, would that we all could find numerous opportunities and worthy subjects to recycle such compliments … As so many wrote to her during her lifetime: “It is only too bad that there are not a dozen Mrs. Kuhns in Cincinnati.” Not to mention everywhere else.

Spielberg in Cincinnati

I have often hoped to catch a glimpse of director Steven Spielberg’s Cincinnati roots in the course of my research. Today’s Cincinnati Enquirer does a pretty good job of covering this ground and conveniently indicates what I should be looking for if I want to find Spielberg’s Cincinnati forebears.

I know I’d heard that Spielberg’s family belonged to the Adath Israel congregation (Lexington Road Synagogue / Feinberg’s) in the Avondale neighborhood. The article doesn’t mention this, but does indicate that Steven’s family lived on Lexington Ave and so must have been pretty close to the synagogue. I was a little disappointed to learn that although Steven was born in the Queen City in 1946, his family moved to New Jersey in 1949.

The article highlights a 90-minute interview with Spielberg that will be broadcast on TCM (don’t ask me what that stands for …) on Monday night. In the interview, Steven mentions sitting in his grandmother’s house as she taught English to Holocaust survivors and and learning to recognize numbers by studying the tattooed numerals on their arms.

An accompanying article tells how Steven’s dad Arnold grew up on Windham Ave. which he would sled down to Victory Parkway and that, after serving in WWII, he studied electrical engineering at UC. His mom, Leah Posner Spielberg Adler reports that she grew up in a “very educated but very poor” Jewish family, that her father, Philip Posner, sold dry goods, and that she learned to love music by sitting on the back benches when the Cincinnati Opera performed at the zoo. Leah studied for a while at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music and her mother's name was Jennie.

Now that I know their names and a little about them, I’ll be on Spielberg/Posner lookout …. woo hoo! I’ll be adding this to the Kevin Youkilis family watch … the Boston Red Sox current first baseman’s extended family, however, was quite active at the Lexington Ave. Synagogue and in the Cincinnati Jewish community for many years, so I’ve had those bases covered for a while ….

Remembering Jean Rothenberg

Jean W. Rothenberg, who died in May at the age of 98, was one of the many older Jewish women I've had the opportunity to meet in Cincinnati who made me realize that any city that could boast vital sharp women like these had something special going for it. There was a strength to the civic Jewish culture here that these women both made possible and reflected. It was women like Jean (all of them of course completely unique in themselves) who made me want to understand this community and its history at a deeper level.

I'm very pleased that the Jewish Women's Archive was able to post a remembrance of Jean, written by Sue Ransohoff and Jim Kesner, on the "In Memoriam" pages of our website. The remembrance points to Jean's devoted work on behalf of the hearing impaired and to her indomitable and feisty personality.

Jean had a reputation for being tough, but as many anecdotes about her suggest she was more than ready to open herself to everyone that came her way. Jim Kesner remembers how Jean introduced herself at the opera, got him to walk her to her car, and then invited herself to join his movie group. Another friend told me that once her knees went bad, Jean would happily cadge downhill rides from whatever random car might be going by.

Once, as I was anticipating an upcoming sabbatical, I told Jean that I was thinking of following my days of research and writing with evenings spent watching classic films borrowed from the public library. She seconded my plan and, without hesitation, suggested that I bring the movies over to her house so we could watch them together. Would that I had actually followed through on this video sharing plan rather than feeling, in the end, too overwhelmed by work to spend time watching movies.

There are a few observations about Jean that I wanted to be sure to include in the JWA remembrance. The first was about Jean's truly uncanny ability to make the person standing in front of her feel like there was, at that moment, no one on earth that she could possibly find more interesting. She offered her full focus, conveying her sense that there was nothing more she could want than to learn from you. The other observation was the dominant theme that I heard emerging from Jean's memorial service in June which is also present in the "In Memoriam" piece --- Jean did everything she could to live fully and, in the process, she offered others a model of how to live.

Finally and fortuitously, it just so happens that this week I came across the engagement and wedding announcements of Jean's marriage to Dr. Robert (Bob) Rothenberg. It is my great pleasure as a researcher to be able to share excerpts here. On September 27, 1929, Every Friday announced the engagement of Miss Jean Ransohoff Westheimer, who had just returned from a summer abroad with her parents to Dr. Robert Rothenberg, "a Harvard man, 1924" who had taken his medical training at the University of Cincinnati and was completing an internship at the University of Michigan.

Despite the local prominence of both Jean's and Bob's parents [Dr. and Mrs. Samuel Rothenberg], the wedding appears to have been a simple affair, ornamented with a "musical programme by the Heermann Trio ... supplemented by vocal solos by Mr. Dan Beddoe." It took place on a "Thursday evening, October 3rd [1929], at the home of the bride's parents [Mr. and Mrs. Leo Westheimer], only members of the family attending the quiet ceremony." Unlike many Every Friday wedding announcements, this one carried no mention of what the bride wore. We do learn that both of Cincinnati's leading Reform rabbis participated in the ceremony with "Dr. James G. Heller officiat[ing] and Dr. David Philipson pronounc[ing] the blessing."

I'm grateful that I got to know Jean ... an American Israelite to remember.

The Ladies' Auxiliary

I spent much of last week with the Ladies’ Auxiliary of the Cincinnati Talmud Torah – or at least with their minute books from the 1920s through the 1940s. I love these ladies. For decades, they accepted sole responsibility for paying off the heavy mortgage of the Talmud Torah buildings that housed intensive Jewish education for the children of Eastern European Jewish immigrants to Cincinnati.

They acted not out of any sense of noblesse oblige, but out of their commitment to provide Jewish education to their children and grandchildren. They would meet monthly to report on their collections and to plan fund-raising picnics. They also brought in cakes, pillows, and crocheted bedspreads that were raffled off for the benefit of the Talmud Torah. Any remaining cakes were purchased during their “refreshment hour,” with the proceeds also going to the building fund. Funds accrued this way grew slowly in good times and bad, but as they reminded themselves “As slowly as it may seem, we are doing a great deal if it is the best that can be done” (September 17, 1940).

Something of the spirit of their meetings is captured in one notation about their Golden Book, where notable donations were recorded: “Mrs Hirschman our president told the ladies that if they bring in 25 new members their names will be entered in the Golden book with a gold star next to their name. We hope that all our members will always have golden stars both in this world and in the next for their good work” (February 8, 1928).

In addition to whatever gold stars they accrued, between 1916 and 1923 the ladies raised the notable sum of $16,500 to pay off the 1916 downtown Talmud Torah building. With Cincinnati’s moving population, however, they were quickly confronted with a new $55,000 mortgage for the building that was erected in the hilltop suburb of Avondale in 1927. The ladies raised $10,000 against this debt by mid-1929. And, despite the intervention of the Great Depression and World War II, resulting in a loss of membership and in much scarcity, the ladies went gamely on beating back the mortgage, even as regular mortgage payments of $1000, and then $500, were reduced to $250 increments.

As World War II wound down, the mortgage balance had been reduced to less then $9000, at which time the male Talmud Torah committee informed the ladies that they had decided to “lend a helping hand” to polish off the debt. An invitation to a “Mortgage-Burning Dinner” to be held on June 17, 1945 arrived from the Talmud Torah Association and the Ladies’ Auxiliary of the Talmud Torah. The inside of the invitation, however, listed only the names of the “Mortgage Fund Committee” consisting entirely of men.

Cincinnati’s Talmud Torah is remembered with pride for its provision of well-trained professional (mostly male) teachers and the impressive intensive Jewish education it afforded to thousands of school children. Few who remember the existence of the Talmud Torah today would associate its success with women’s work. Yet like so many other institutions central to the Jewish communal life of most American cities, Cincinnati’s Talmud Torah would not have existed without the women who paid its bills. They did much more than serve refreshments – though they did that too.

Source: Cincinnati Ohio, Cincinnati Talmud Torah, Small Collections #2010, American Jewish Archives

Louise Reichert at 100

I went to visit my friend Louise Reichert today. She celebrated her 100th birthday back in September and, happily, remains as sharp and vital as ever. Louise was the wife of Victor Reichert, who began as a rabbi at Rockdale Temple in 1926. I asked Louise to show me the book that the congregation prepared for her birthday and enjoyed seeing so many remembrances of Louise and Victor. But I was completely bummed to see that the piece that I had sent in from Boston wasn’t included in the book! I had wanted to share my sense of Louise’s place in history with her and with others who love and value her. … I’m going to bring it over to her tomorrow. Meanwhile, here it is:

K.K. Bene Israel is a very old congregation, the oldest – as we’ve all heard many times-- west of the Alleghenies. Yet, sometimes, it can be hard to grasp the reach and the meaning of that history. Often we measure the history of a congregation in the pictures of its buildings and its rabbis – in this case synagogues on Broadway, Mound, and Rockdale and illustrious figures like Max Lilienthal, David Philipson, and Victor Reichert. But the true history of a congregation is in those that give it communal life. By that standard, Rockdale possesses a historical treasure who should remind us that, in the end, Plum Street Temple (opened in 1866), is really just a building.

K. K. Bene Israel dedicated its own magnificent temple in the middle of September in 1906, giving (presumably) little thought to the baby girl born into the congregation’s Feibel family during that same week. Yet for all the apparent grandness and solidity of the neoclassical Rockdale Temple on Rockdale Avenue and the many full years of rich congregational life there, Louise Reichert has outlasted that edifice “for the ages” by more than 30 years!

On the occasion of that 1906 dedication, the congregation recalled the recent deaths of the last surviving widow of one of the original founders of the congregation and of Cantor Morris Goldstein whose skilled musicianship and cultured presence had embodied the aspirations to higher culture implicit in Bene Israel’s Reform Judaism. They realized that, having lost these important symbolic ties to the past, it was up to the congregation to continue to honor their community’s rich historical legacy as they moved into the exciting future that the new building represented.

In this sense, Louise offers a unique bridge to the past. She connects us to that downtown congregation that built Rockdale Temple in order to pioneer a new center of Jewish life in Cincinnati on the hilltop suburb of Avondale. She embodies the activism and rich communal life that characterized the congregation on Rockdale Ave. And she stands with her community now as it envisions a new kind of center on the grounds of the Rockdale Temple on Ridge Road.

A community is fortunate if it can be enriched by its past. In this sense Rockdale Temple is truly blessed by the presence of Louise Reichert. And not just because she has lived a long time. And not just because of the many years of energy, devoted service ,and deeds of loving kindness she brought to the community as the wife of its rabbi, Victor Reichert. The pleasure of Louise’s company, her vibrant spirit, keenness of insight, constant curiosity, and devotion to Rockdale are known to all who spend any time with her.

At 100 years old, she can speak with verve of personalities and movements that few others remember. She reminds us that a past world which often seems far away and present only in the pages of books and old newspapers is not so far from our own. She challenges the complacency of those who would look back on pre-World War II Rockdale Judaism with condescension. At 100 years, she stands not only for the past but also for the potential vitality of Rockdale’s future. May we all take advantage of the good fortune we have to be able to learn from her example.

Jewish feminist interpretation, circa 1929!

Here’s one I didn’t expect. In 1929, as part of a series of activities for Cincinnati’s Young Women’s Hebrew Association, Belle Wohl, the wife of the young rabbi of Reading Road Temple led a discussion series focused on “Feminist interpretations of the Bible.”

British Jewess Grace Aguilar had written the popular and valorizing Women of Israel in the 1830s and U.S. woman’s rights activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton had published the controversial Woman’s Bible in the 1890s which highlighted Old Testament denigrations of women. But I wasn’t aware that there was much of a Jewish tradition of feminist biblical reading before the late 20th century. (The Women of Reform Judaism organization is preparing to publish the latest of this genre, The Torah: A Women’s Commentary by the end of 2007).

I’d love to know what Mrs. Wohl had to say. A February 22, 1929 Every Friday report noted only that she "gave a feministic interpretation of women of the Bible." (emphasis added)

Other YWHA activities for the winter of 1929, as reported in Every Friday for January 25, 1929, included dancing classes at the Temple, a bowling team which met downtown at Central Bowling Alleys, and weekly rehearsals for a minstrel show scheduled for March. More on that, or some similar event, anon …

The Jewish Day School: Let Us Think Twice

In July 1951, Rabbi Victor Reichert of Cincinnati’s Rockdale Temple published a sharp rejection of Jewish day schools which were emerging in greater numbers in the post-war years. “The Jewish All-Day School, like Jonah’s gourd, has come up in the night of despair,” he wrote. Reichert attributed their growth to “fears of the total assimilation of Judaism in America,” but confidently predicted that the Jewish school movement, like Jonah’s gourd would “wither in the broad daylight of renewed faith in freedom and the democratic process”

The establishment Jewish position has shifted from that of Reichert’s day. In fact, Jewish day schools which, as he pointed out, began as an outgrowth of Orthodox Jewish life, have now been embraced by the Reform and Conservative movements.

Prevailing opinions may have changed, but Reichert’s strong words should challenge us to consider the cost of “continuity” when it leads to a willingness to withdraw from the broader community as reflected in choices about place of residence, communal life, or education.

"Liberal Judaism gladly accepts the invitation and the challenge of American democracy. We do not conceive of our heritage as a hot-house flower that needs to be rigorously protected from the wholesome give and take of free association and the adventure in shared living provided by our great American system of free public schools.

The All-Day School seeks survival by voluntary withdrawal and segregation from the American public school – the best workshop we have to forge the tools for a more ideal America. It is my contention that any project, however nobly motivated, that subtracts any American child from the wholesome give and take of the public day school, in some measure dwarfs the child’s outlook by depriving him of the vigorous experience and exciting adventure in democratic group living. Where better than in our American public schools is democracy carrying on its fateful battle against narrow prejudices, bigotry and all forms of intellectual and social caste and stratification."

Reichert shared many of today’s concerns about Jewish continuity, but he maintained hope that American Jews should be able to find a strong Jewish identity without sacrificing full engagement in American life:

"In our natural anxiety as liberal religious leaders over the failures, shortcomings and limitation of our homes, temples and synagogues, our Sabbath and Sunday schools and week-day classes thus far, to become really effective instruments for transmitting a robust and self-reliant acceptance of our Jewish heritage, let us think twice about the Jewish All-Day School a euphemism for Jewish parochialism! Are we leaping form the frying pan into the fire?”

Reichert believed public schools were key to the American ability to nurture distinctiveness and to the whole project of democratic equality:

“I want an America where children will respect and appreciate the religious and cultural difference into which they were born apart, because they have shared in the basic human enterprises they have lived together. …. I want America to continue to be the land where the pilgrims and peddlers of one generation can become the patrons of art and the professors of science of the next – where the common man will always have the opportunity to show how uncommon he can become – an America that will spell opportunity for character, integrity, consecration, ability. I want an Am erica where the word ‘minority’ will be nonsense because the barriers based upon the accident of birth will be transformed into bridges – bridges built by Americans who have achieved self-reliance but who have learned to share their spiritual and material possession with others for the larger, universal good.

The Public School is the best instrument we possess for the achievement of such a democracy. If we really believe in democracy, let us think twice before we rob any American child of the robust challenge of this adventure.”

excerpted from Victor Reichert, "The Jewish Day School: Its Fallacy and Dangers," American Israelite, July 19, 1951

Summer Cuties

Let's start with a little summer fun from just 56 years ago when the Cincinnati Jewish community attacked the perennial problem of keeping young Jews interested and engaged by sponsoring a "Summer Cutie Contest" open, it would seem to high school and college students.

"Miss Judy Sunshein, of Alpha Sigma Tau, won the Jewish Community Center's second annual Summer Cutie Contest at the Center pool Thursday, June 19. Miss Sunshein received the trophy at a dance at Le Centerville Gardens, following the contest."
American Israelite, July 19, 1952

The winner had the best possible name for such a summer contest. Jewish beauty contests would have been very appealing in the early 1950s, following up on Bess Myerson's crowning as Miss America in 1945.