The Jews of Harlem

The Rise, Decline, and Revival of a Jewish Community

Jeffrey S. Gurock

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781479888511
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Jewish Theology

The complete story of Jewish Harlem and its significance in American Jewish history New York Times columnist David W. Dunlap wrote a decade ago that “on the map of the Jewish Diaspora, Harlem Is Atlantis.... A vibrant hub of industry, artistry and wealth is all but forgotten. It is as if Jewish Harlem sank 70 years ago beneath waves of memory beyond recall.”During World War I, Harlem was the home of the second largest Jewish community in America. But in the 1920s Jewish residents began to scatter to other parts of Manhattan, to the outer boroughs, and to other cities. Now nearly a century later, Jews are returning uptown to a gentrified Harlem. The Jews of Harlem follows Jews into, out of, and back into this renowned metropolitan neighborhood over the course of a century and a half. It analyzes the complex set of forces that brought several generations of central European, East European, and Sephardic Jews to settle there. It explains the dynamics that led Jews to exit this part of Gotham as well as exploring the enduring Jewish presence uptown after it became overwhelmingly black and decidedly poor. And it looks at the beginnings of Jewish return as part of the transformation of New York City in our present era. The Jews of Harlem contributes much to our understanding of Jewish and African American history in the metropolis as it highlights the ever-changing story of America’s largest city. With The Jews of Harlem,the beginning of Dunlap’s hoped-for resurfacing of this neighborhood’s history is underway. Its contemporary story merits telling even as the memories of what Jewish Harlem once was warrants recall.

1

A Jewish Outpost in Harlem, 1870–1880

It was the kind of decision that young Jewish couples would make frequently during the next half century and then again at the turn of the new millennium. In the years immediately after the Civil War, Israel and Emma Stone, who had grown up on the Lower East Side, considered leaving the immigrant hub where their families lived. By 1870, they had determined to reside in Harlem, a remote outpost within the northern reaches of Manhattan Island. Israel’s parents had brought him to America as a one-year-old in 1850. He was born in Scotland as Solomon and Jennetta traveled to the United States from their native Prussia. The family settled in downtown’s Tenth Ward, where Solomon found work as a glazier, a skilled laborer. There within a neighborhood known as Kleindeutschland, they took part in the social and cultural life of the Jewish and gentile newcomers from central Europe. If they behaved like most of their fellow Jewish immigrants, the focus of their leisure time conviviality was a lodge—a verein—where folks could spin tales of what it had been like on the other side, share news about what life continued to be in Germany, and discuss the issues of the day in America, including their quest to advance in this country. Often these gatherings took place in modest beer halls. The flow of libations contributed to the warmth and hyperbole of the storytelling. These societies were also places where young people might congregate, and parents were pleased when their sons and daughters found a suitable marriage partner from a similar background.1

While still a teenager, Israel met and fell in love with Emma, whose family likewise hailed from Prussia. And in 1869, they were blessed with the birth of Celia. She would be one of three daughters. Despite his tender age and whatever his educational achievements may have been, to support his wife and young child, Israel Stone aspired to be an entrepreneur. Such seems to have been a common goal of second-generation Kleindeutschlanders. Meanwhile, as a glazier, with steady work as a skilled artisan, Solomon Stone may well have been in the economic position to help his son get started. We know nothing about Emma’s family’s economic status. Perhaps they were able to assist as well. But where would Israel set up his retail clothing store?2

There was always the option of trying his luck in the highly competitive world of commerce downtown. But could he succeed in making his mark? After all, since the end of the 1850s, so many central European immigrants had “made the transition from dry-goods peddler to clothing merchant that they took over most of New York’s dry goods market.” Beyond the hub, as of the mid-1860s, potential customers conceivably could be found primarily among the affluent Jewish immigrants and their children who were leaving “an increasingly poor and rapidly growing Lower East Side for more suitable and commodious housing north of 42nd Street.” There they settled comfortably among the gentiles next door and down the block. A new neighborhood in the East 50s, on and near Lexington Avenue, for example, was becoming home to thousands of three story row houses, many with brownstone fronts, ideal for prosperous business people and their often extended families. The development of previously unimproved land on Lexington Avenue, north of 42nd Street a decade earlier, permitting traffic north- and south-bound, had opened up that thoroughfare for residential construction. And then there were the rich and the famous customers who owned the landmark mansions that made Fifth and Madison Avenues, also north of 42nd Street, fashionable, as these streets remain today. Although many of the Jews who settled in midtown were not especially interested in synagogue life, enough of them were disposed to relocate their congregations from south of 14th Street to this new district. A substantial community had been brought into existence; people who might frequent Stone’s store for their suits, dresses and other dry goods. Israel Stone, however, looked further uptown and focused on the financial potentialities that existed in Harlem, a locality that was situated several miles north towards the very tip of Manhattan. He hoped to find his niche far away from the bustling, crowded, and, perhaps most importantly, highly competitive developing city.3

So disposed, when this “clothier”—as the city directory of the day identified him—set up his first modest emporium on Third Avenue and 127th Street, he wisely situated his business only two blocks north of the neighborhood’s emerging main commercial thoroughfare. At that point in its history, 125th Street was described as Harlem’s “Broadway where we all went to do our shopping” by residents of “a village on the outskirts of the city.” In other words, Stone sought out a clientele among patrons who though legally residing in New York City were essentially in their own “rural retreat” made up of “the aristocratic New Yorkers [with] its chief charm its well-bred seclusion.” And, while the business strip was then still on “a lane, in fact, all the thoroughfares were lanes,” 125th Street, east to west, was destined to become Harlem’s major crosstown and congested commercial center.4

Stone could only hope that the owners of some of the grand estates that in the mid-1850s began “starting up like mushrooms on spots which five years ago were part of the dense and tangled forest” would become enamored of his establishment. These were people who were not inclined to spend the money for carriage travel downtown and/or had the time to take the horse car for the one-and-a-half-hour trip down to City Hall. Besides which, straphanging on these conveyances meant dealing with little less than “a perfect bedlam of wheels.” In 1864, the New York Herald spoke for suffering commuters when it observed, “modern martyrdom may be succulently described as riding in a New York omnibus. The discomforts, inconveniences and annoyances of a trip in one of these vehicles are almost intolerable.” Mid-nineteenth-century Gotham had a long way to go before it could boast of possessing a comprehensive and commendable rapid transit system. Perhaps a more genteel way of getting downtown was the steamboat option that linked 125th Street with Peck Slip near the Battery. But that marine transportation was unreliable even during the summer months that it operated. Essentially Stone aspired to cater to an upscale clientele that lived and worked near him because, as the New York Evening Post put it in 1867, “the upper part of the island is . . . almost useless to persons engaged in daily business of any kind in the city.” His competitive advantage against clothiers downtown was that he was prepared to settle in Harlem for his customers. Israel and Emma Stone packed up Celia and their belongings and off they went uptown. Early on, the family lived just a few steps west of Israel’s store.5

It is too much to assert that Israel and Emma Stone recognized how their decision to move in search of consumers was—in microcosm—so very reminiscent of the larger American Jewish narrative of their time. Still, their story fits a well-trod pattern of group behavior among central European Jewish immigrants and their children. From the 1820s to well beyond the 1870s, the origins of Jewish communities throughout the United States were tied to the arrival of ambitious peddlers who brought their products to clients who resided away from the major cities. These entrepreneurial pioneers often stayed, set up the first dry goods stores in town, and ultimately succeeded in establishing Jewish economic and religious life. Harlem, of course, was not a Midwestern, Southern, or far Western outpost. But effectively its denizens lived apart from the city, remote from its emporia. And people like Israel Stone stepped up to service their consumer needs.6

Israel Stone also fit the model of a community builder on a frontier. Given where he and his family lived and worked, Israel and Emma certainly had the option of distancing themselves completely from Jewish life. Perhaps growing up they had both heard from their immigrant parents about people whom they knew who had moved away from their faith and backgrounds when they arrived in this land of freedom. But the young couple was of a traditional religious bent and began attempting very early in their time uptown to cope with their isolation from downtown synagogues and schools. They grasped the ironic reality that the same remoteness from the city that was a boon to their business opportunities simultaneously undermined their connections to their faith. Unquestionably, the Stones shared these sentiments with their neighbors Adolf and Celina Zabinskie. An older couple—in 1870, Adolph was fifty, Celina was forty-four—the Zabinskies were Prussian Jews too who had lived on Grand Street on the Lower East Side where Adolf was a retail dealer of boots and shoes. In the late 1860s, Adolf and Celina relocated themselves, their five children, and their business to Harlem, where two of the older youngsters helped out in the store.7 The elder Zabinskies concurred that their—and even more importantly their youngsters’—religious identification was imperiled. What chance would their next generation have to maintain even a modicum of their faith’s commitments growing up as they were in a remote, outlying area bereft of contact with Jewish educational and spiritual organizations? So in 1869, these two families and a handful of other Harlem Jews, recognizing that “they were too far away to attend the city synagogues, even if they were willing to ride” to services on the Sabbath and holidays which, reportedly, “they were not,” organized Congregation Hand-in-Hand. At the first, the synagogue was “little more than a chevra—a religious association” that conducted “divine services above a printing store on Third Avenue.” In subsequent years, the members—“few [in numbers], the means sparse”—rented space on 116th Street and Second Avenue and then at the Harlem Savings Bank on Third Avenue and 124th Street before settling down—for at least a decade—when they leased space from the Grace Episcopal Church on 116th Street and Third Avenue. It was a proud early moment when the Rev. Henry S. Jacobs of Congregation B’nai Jeshurun, the second-oldest New York synagogue, came uptown to participate in the dedication of the new home. Congregants were even happier when they were able to eventually purchase the building.8

While still at the Harlem Savings Bank, the Stones, Zabinskies, and other community builders, small-time merchants all, were heartened by the arrival in their midst of Solomon and Sarah Carvalho. They were a couple that was known in American and Jewish circles well beyond Harlem. And Solomon knew all about the difficulties of creating religious life on a frontier. What he had to tell his fellow congregants before, after, and during services about how he garnered large-scale public attention had to have fascinated his listeners who had led much more prosaic lives.

In 1853, explorer John Charles Fremont convinced this painter and daguerreotype artist, who hailed from Charleston, South Carolina, to accompany him—and to take photographs—on what turned out to be a quixotic adventure to find a western railroad route to California through the Rocky Mountains. Sadly, the expedition was a total failure. The group of adventurers ended up trapped in the Rockies and a Mormon family saved Carvalho from death through exposure. The unfortunate Jewish traveler recorded all of his misadventures in what became a national best-selling book, Incidents of Travels and Adventures in the Far West. But Carvalho did succeed in making it eventually to California, where he was instrumental in organizing Los Angeles’s first Jewish institution, the Hebrew Benevolent Society of Los Angeles. Reportedly, upon arrival in town and after setting himself up with a photo shop on the second floor of a building owned by Samuel and Joseph Labbatt, he heard from these brothers of the absence of “any organization in the small Jewish community.” In short order, the society was formed to provide religious services, a school, and a variety of mutual aid benefits.9

Possessed of the desire to help out in Harlem too and having sufficient resources to finance a crucial initiative—Solomon had pioneered a new process for hot-water heating—after returning back east, the Carvalhos in 1874 founded a free Jewish religious school in the neighborhood. Indeed, rather than wait for the congregation to inaugurate instruction for the children, they decided to establish a small school in their own home, which served initially some forty-five youngsters. In 1876, the Carvalho school was named the Shangarai Limud Sunday School Society—sometimes called the “Hebrew School Society”—when the congregation’s ladies auxiliary took control of educational activities. The school’s constitution specifically provided that only women could be active members of the educational society. It did, however, grant the all-male congregational school committee advisory status, and more importantly financial control over the society, making the chairman of the school committee an ex-officio member of the women’s board of managers. The women, led by Sarah Carvalho, who served as school superintendent, were to provide a staff of unpaid volunteer instructors, while their husbands controlled the purse strings. It is not known how skilled the instructors were as transmitters of just the very basics of the Jewish heritage. The school met for two hours on Sundays, and after the “weekly recitation of the Ten Commandments in assembly,” Sarah Carvalho led “a discussion of the weekly [Torah] portion.” Still, with the establishment of the school in their own neighborhood, it became possible for religiously committed Harlem parents to avoid facing the dilemma common to many Jewish families—to this day—in settlements or towns remote from the major centers of Jewish education. How were they to provide for the inculcation of even a minimum of Jewish teachings in their youngsters beyond merely through mimetic observation or participation in family religious ritual?10

But how truly committed were most early uptown Jews? They clearly wanted a synagogue and a school, but signs of ambivalence towards sustained identification were also apparent. Indeed, to the Carvalhos’ and their colleagues’ frustration, while many of their Jewish neighbors were pleased to have a school for their youngsters—and a free institution at that—parental interest in the actual goings on in the classroom often wavered. Israel Stone and Adolf Zabinskie’s brother, George, were among some two score men listed as “founders and subscribers” to the institution as of 1877. They were part of a committed core of strongly involved Jews in early Harlem. Yet many more showed only episodic interest in religious life and were often oblivious to ancestral traditions. The so-called “apathy of the parents and guardians of the 200 children who have been receiving gratuitous instruction” came to a head early in 1880 when “not a single parent or guardian attended the annual meeting for the election of officers.” Chagrined beyond the angry words that they spoke to a reporter from the American Hebrew, a newly established Anglo-Jewish newspaper in New York, “the few ladies and gentlemen who have devoted their energies” to Shangarai Limud threatened to walk away from their efforts, “to disband and the school to be dismissed” if parents did not show greater enthusiasm for Jewish education. Chastised by this public critique, a respectable number of area residents attended a second gathering a week later and to the pleasure of the newspaper reportedly “the Harlem brethren have awakened from their lethargy and have determined to support and maintain their school.”11

This diversity of Jewish interest, knowledge, and commitment was also readily apparent when the Harlem Young Men’s Hebrew Association was established in 1879. Five years earlier, the city’s first Jewish “Y” was opened on 21st Street off Sixth Avenue with the expressed mission to “promote a better feeling and higher culture among young men and to unite them in a liberal organization which shall tend to their moral, intellectual and social improvement.” The problem that the organization sought to ameliorate was, frankly, the bad behavior of Americanized children of central European immigrants. Too many youngsters, it was perceived and said publicly, were caught up in a mid-nineteenth-century version of the contemporary twenty-first-century “club scene” where they “dabbl[ed] . . . in silly fashions, drink, and gamble, swear and make bets.” The Y offered instead a liquor-free and almost smokeless environment with a welter of cultural and recreational activities of which the community could be proud. And four years into its existence, the association was popular enough that it moved to larger quarters on 42nd Street and Sixth Avenue, where it could boast of a reading room, gymnasium, bowling alley, club, and classrooms. Evidently, young Harlem Jews’ pastime pursuits likewise troubled their parents’ generation. And again given their remoteness from Jewish life in the city, uptown leaders determined to emulate the midtown Y’s mission and program.12

Ever the institutional joiner, Solomon Carvalho was the first secretary of the new Y and early on may have influenced it to hold a social benefit ball in 1880 to support the Sunday School initiative. Generally speaking, those who supported the shul and school also backed the cultural association, but many of those who frequented the Y did not attend services. Truth be told, the leaders of Hand-in-Hand were troubled by the attitude of those who “think that all Judaism requires is to join the YMHA and attend its entertainments.” However, people like Solomon Carvalho and others who were religiously inclined had to have been red-faced a year later, when the Jewish Messenger, another New York weekly, upbraided the Y for showing an unconscionable lack of concern for Jewish tradition by scheduling a boat ride up the Hudson River on the fast day of Tisha B’av. Apparently, those who cared about Judaism at the Jewish Y were not doing due diligence about its activities. The fundamentally secular Jewish organization was reminded that it was a Hebrew (the word was emphasized in the original) association and directed to consult a Jewish calendar before arranging for an entertainment on a day of Jewish national mourning.13

In some quarters within American Jewry of the era, there would have been no inconsistency in a Jewish association—even a religious one—hosting an outing on the day that commemorates the destruction of the Holy Te...