A couple of doors down from the Forward Building (and notably two stories taller) stands Jarmulowsky’s Bank. Sender Jarmulowsky immigrated to America from Russia, and by 1873 he had set up his bank on the Lower East Side. In addition to the Jarmulowsky Bank Building, he was also instrumental in the construction of the Eldridge Street Synagogue and subsequently served as its first president….
In the heart of the Lower East Side stands a ten story building. Completed in 1912, the Beaux Arts building was the first skyscraper on the Lower East Side and the home to The Jewish Daily Forward. The Forward was founded in 1897 by Abraham Cahan, a Belarusian-born Jew who came to America to escape charges of revolutionary sympathies and actions. At one point…
Dear Mr. Editor, I have been in the country only two months, and I find myself in such terrible circumstances that I need your advice. So begin many of the letters submitted to the Bintel Brief. In 1897, Abraham Cahan founded the Jewish Daily Forward, a Yiddish newspaper based on the Lower East Side of New York City. Included in the newspaper was a…
The other day while procrastinating and scrolling through my Facebook feed, I came across two friends raising money for charities for their birthdays and three fellow students promoting the non-profits they’re interning at. In the day and age of social media campaigns, hashtags, and endless GoFundMe’s, giving has become a lot more personal. Jewish giving in America finds its roots in the landsmannschaften and…
October 24 -25, the Center for Jewish History will host the Conservation Center for Art & Historic Artifacts (CCAHA) annual conference. This year is titled, Now! And Then? Preserving Modern and Contemporary Collections in Libraries and Archives. From CCAHA, “this two-day conference will explore ways to anticipate, plan for, and address preservation concerns in modern and contemporary collections.” As part of the conference, two…
(The following was written by Lea Shvarts, our summer intern, on what she gained from her time working and studying at the Center for Jewish History.) I loved being a development intern at a historical institution such as the Center as I was exposed to such a huge and extensive archive every time I came to work. An enormous wealth of knowledge is at…
Happy New Year from the Center for Jewish History. We’ve dug into our partners’ vast collections to find a wonderful selection of vintage Rosh Hashanah greeting cards to celebrate the Jewish New Year of 5773, which begins at sundown on Sunday, September 16, 2012. The colorful cards date from the late 19th and early 20th centuries and offer nostalgic greetings in English, Hebrew and…
Hartford Hartford is home to the first and largest Jewish community in the state of Connecticut. The earliest mention of a Jew in the state was David the Jew, of Hartford, who was fined 20 shillings for illegal trading in 1659. Afterwards, there were scattered references to the small Jewish community in Connecticut. For example, in 1670 Hartford was visited by Assur Levy, one…
In July 2018, the Center for Jewish History received a rare collection of Jewish bonds and financial paper in support of settlement in the land of Israel and later the State of Israel. The donor collector was donated by financier John Herzog, Chairman Emeritus of Herzog, Heine, Geduld, Inc., a firm founded by his father in 1926 and about which John wrote A Billion…
The first reference to a Jew in Connecticut was to “David the Jew.” In 1659, he was fined 20 shillings by the city of Hartford. His crime: going into houses when the household heads were absent and trading with the children. In the decades that followed, there were several scattered references to Jews in Connecticut. These first Jews were mostly Portuguese and Spanish, and…
