The near freezing weather and packed crowds aren’t enough to deter the thousands who cram into Times Square every December 31st to watch the ball drop from the top of One Times Square. The New Years Eve event often has nearly a billion people watching, but there’s more to the building than the flashy billboards and crystal ball. Adolph Ochs was born to two…
Stand on the East side of the Jackie Onassis Reservoir in Central Park and look across the water. The skyline is dominated by buildings designed by Emery Roth, many of which have been designated New York Historical landmarks. Born to a Jewish family in Hungary in 1871, Roth immigrated alone to the United States when he was 13. He began his architectural training working…
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…
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…
AJHS Board Chairman and CJH Board Treasurer Sidney Lapidus is not only a dedicated and generous philanthropist, but also a great collector of Anglo-American political treatises and essays and lawbooks on slavery, many of which he has donated to his alma mater, Princeton University, and to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, where he has established the Lapidus Center for the Analysis…
I’m Jaime Taylor, the Center for Jewish History’s systems librarian. My job has two components: I administer the catalog software, and I also do strange things with the catalog records themselves. As such, by chance I see records for all sorts of interesting items that I might not otherwise realize the Center holds. Some months ago I read a title, “Trinitite from Trinity Nuclear…
