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.