Los Angeles: The Breed Street Shul

Los Angeles' Breed Street Shul, in Boyle Heights, has an interesting history here

Located at 247 North Breed Street in the Boyle Heights district on the Los Angeles River’s east bank, the Breed Street Shul served a once thriving Jewish neighborhood in Boyle Heights that has since become predominately a Latino community.

The property on Breed Street was purchased after 1910. In 1915, Beth Hamedrash was built on the back of the property. Construction on the shul itself began in 1920 and it was dedicated in 1923. The large building is constructed of brick and the interior fixtures are polished wood.

The Breed Street Shul served as the focal point of the neighborhood that was the heart and soul of the Los Angeles Jewish community. Even if you have never been to Los Angeles, you might very well have seen the shul. Both the 1927 original and the 1980 remake of “The Jazz Singer” featured the Breed Street Shul.

The Breed Street Shul was, at one time, one of the largest synagogues on the West Coast and home to the largest Orthodox congregation west of Chicago.

After World War II, The Jewish presence in Boyle Heights began to diminish as the area became more of an industrial area. An influx of other cultures resulted in young Jewish men returning from military duty during the war to use their VA loans to move to other areas. This resulted in the shrinkage of the congregation at the shul.

The story covers the 1987 Whittier Narrows earthquake damage, the building's abandonment in 1996, and attempts to renovate it. The Jewish Historical Society of Southern California took over the renovation in 1999 and set up the nonprofit Breed Street Shul Project.

In addition to preserving the historical Jewish site it was also meant to serve the current community as a center. Several Latino organizations and the J. Paul Getty Museum worked with the Jewish Historical Society on the project. Young Latinos from the Imaginando Manana ("Imaging Tomorrow") worked on it, learning the Jewish history and tolerance and respect for other cultures.

Sunday clean up events became popular with the entire community, strengthened community bonds as well as with the area's Jewish heritage.

Involved were JHS President Stephen Sass and Robert Chattel Brent Riemer of Chattel Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Inc., who is quoted as saying, "This building should continue to be a place of congregation." One idea to serve the contemporary community and preserve its heritage is a computer lab with displays depicting the Jewish history of the site.

Read the complete article at the link above.

The Breed Street Shul's website is here.To read more about the history of the Breed Street Shul, read through the National Register of Historic Places nomination (it was registered in 2001) for the site here. There is a wealth of detail about the building, the neighborhood, a bibliography and more for those interested in history and architecture.

For more general comments on Los Angeles' members of the tribe, see Hadassah Magazine's article (June/July 2008) here.

I just received a note from Jan Meisels Allen, who writes that her father, William Samuel Meisels (1907-1998) was the last president of the congregation.

An extensive LA Times story was published on October 18, 1984, when he was still president and he was quoted extensively. Jan also notes that some time ago when the Autry Museum's exhibit on Jews of the West was running, the Jewish Genealogical Society of Los Angeles visited. The exhibit included a video of the shul and her father was in that as well - she was very surprised to see that.

Jan is president of the JGS of the Conejo Valley and Ventura County (JGSCV) and also serves on the board of the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies (IAJGS).

Gendisasters.com: Our Jewish ancestors

Gendisasters.com is subtitled "events that touched our ancestors' lives." It compiles information on historic disasters, events and tragic accidents our ancestors endured. We can learn about their lives and deaths, unfortunately, in some cases.

Database and records are searchable by surname. I tried a quick search for COHEN and obtained numerous references to articles detailing someone with this name as a victim (or related in some other way) to disasters involving a fire, hurricane, tornado, avalanche, train, plane, ship, mine, home accident and others. Locations were across the US, with events from the mid-1850s, 1860s, 1880s, 1900s, 1910s, 1930s, 1940s and into more contemporary times.

A recent post details a September 23, 1892 synagogue panic on Rosh Hashanah. According to the transcription by Tim Taugher, the story appeared on September 24 in the Knoxville, TN The Daily Journal, the Journal and Tribune, and the Baltimore, MD Sun.

There were four synagogues in the tenement building at 27 Ludlow St., named as Talmud Torah Ohel Itzchok, Padolski/Podolski Society, Sons of Aaron and Beit Achim Anschel. Some 2,000 men, women and children were worshipping, when the fire started in Talmud Torah as the cloth covering the bima (altar) caught fire from a burning candle, causing the ensuing panic. The Rabbi was named as WALIOZINSKI, the assistant SOLOMON and secretary KRAMER.

The article gives the first and family names, type of injury (or death), ages and addresses (in some cases). There are spelling variants - likely a result of OCR (optical character reading) processing - in the articles. Here are only the family names of the victims: FRIEDMAN/FREIDMAN, MILLKER/STILIKER, ALTMAN, BOISUK/BORSUK, COHEN, DACKOWITZ, SMILOWITZ, GREENBURG, BECKER, ROSENTHAL, BEYMA/BOYAM, PORTMANN.

In addition to the named victims, the police captain said an additional 25 individuals were taken to their homes with no report given.

Here is a portion of the transcription. Read the complete story via the link above.

FATAL PANIC
Is a Jewish Synagogue in New York City.
CAUSED BY A FIRE ALARM.
A Rush Results in Packed Stairways and Frightful Confusion.
FOUR WOMEN ARE KILLED
And More Than a Dozen Persons More or Less Seriously Injured.

NEW YORK, September 23. - There are four Jewish synagogues in the tenement house, No. 27 Ludlow street. They were all crowded this morning with devout Hebrews attending the festival services of New Year when some person in one of the places of worship raised the cry of fire. Immediately there was a panic, everybody rushing for the doors. The stairway, which is not very wide, became packed with people. They piled right on top of one another in the stairway. Some person out on the street had enough presence of mind to send out the fire alarm which brought the department to the scene. The firemen succeeded in extricating the people from the blocked stairway and found four dead and about a dozen injured.

Following are the names of injured persons at Governeuer's hospital:
Rebecca Freidman, 40 years, fractured skull.
Tillie Millker, 33 years, skull fractured and will probably die.
Julius Altman, 9 years, thigh injured.
Rachael Boisuk, 47 years, skull fractured.
Ida Cohen, fractured skull, injuries fatal.
Herman Cohen, 15 years, wrist fractured and internal injuries.
Rachel Dackowitz, skull fractured.
Annie Cohen, 58 years, widow, skull fractured, injuries fatal.
Mrs. Annie Smilowitz, several ribs broken. Simon Greenburg, 33 years, skull fractured, injuries fatal.

The alarm was caused by setting fire by a burning candle to the cloth drapery over the altar in the synagogue of Talmud Thorah, which is on the second floor front. There were four congregations, numbering nearly two thousand persons, men, women and children, worshipping. The stairway was narrow, and Mrs. Annie Smilowitz, a very short woman, fell, blocking the passage way and causing the deaths of those right behind. The four synagogues were the Padolski society, Talmud Thorah, Sons of Aaron and Betti Achin Anschef. There was also a Hebrew school in the building. ...

Historical newspapers can be valuable to all researchers. You could learn important family details that might explain a family mystery or a relative that disappeared.

Canada: Moose Jaw's members of the tribe

Jewish life in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan is the Philadelphia's Jewish Exponent's travel story this week by Lauren Kramer. Learn about the town's hot springs, underground tunnels and more.

It's Friday night, and I'm in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, standing outside the House of Israel Synagogue and wishing there were a service I could attend.

As it happens, I'm late -- by nearly 18 years. This synagogue closed its doors in September 1990, leaving only a cement plaque outside as evidence that it was, indeed, a synagogue, serving a Jewish community in this small prairie town since 1926.

Today, it's a dance school, with windows boarded up against the sunlight and weeds growing prolifically around the building. But there was a time when the House of Israel Synagogue was a hub of activity, with regular Shabbat services and social get-togethers.

"Everybody pitched in and was friendly in our Jewish community; it was like a big family," recalls Sam Cohen, who lived in Moose Jaw from 1957 until 1988.

"We had a Hadassah that was very active, and a B'nai Brith that did a lot of work in the gentile community. We kept kosher, and we knew we were Jews, but ultimately the community disintegrated because you brought up the children to leave -- you didn't want them staying, you wanted them in more of a Jewish environment."

Lillian Butts, 85, was born there in 1921 and lived there until 1943. Her parents were from Russia and Romania, and recalled going to cheder three days a week and hating it.

"My mother, Rose Schwartz, was one of the few Jews who kept a kosher home in Moose Jaw, so when Jewish travelers came to town and required kosher meals, they came to us. My mother would be up at 5 a.m. on Fridays baking challah, and all week, we'd look forward to our traditional Shabbat dinner of chicken soup and
meat."

The natural spring was discovered in 1910 as someone was drilling for oil. It became a popular place. I assume the hot mineral water was really popular in those Saskatchewan winters.

Those visitors also explored the underground connecting passages under the city, used by bootleggers. The city denied the tunnels existed for more than 70 years. In 1985, they couldn't them it anymore when a heavy truck disappeared into a hole when the pavement collapsed.

Today, they are a hot tourist attraction and offer two tours. One focuses on the lives of poor Chinese laborers who in the early 1900s lived in the tunnels; the other is on the bootlegging history (the town became a mob retreat for the mob).

The Jewish Exponent also has an earlier story on the Calgary, Alberta stampede here, which mentions the Fairmount Palliser Hotel's kosher kitchen, the kosher Haifa Deli and kosher Karen's Cafe & Catering. The Jewish community numbers some 9,000 people.

Recently, the community restored a 1913 prairie synagogue, called Little Synagogue on the Prairie, which Tracing the Tribe has noted previously, which also provides the Jewish history of the city; the first Jewish settler arrived in 1898, the 1904 purchase of land for a cemetery, and the eventual schools, synagogues and facilities that made a real community. The JCC houses community institutions, such as the Jewish Historical Society of Southern Alberta.

A recently published book, "A Joyful Harvest: A History of Jews in Southern Alberta," tells the story of the community.

Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean

"Putting the Oy Back into 'Ahoy'" by Haifa University professor Steven Plaut appeared recently in the Jewish Press.

They did not sing "Yo Ho Ho and a Bottle of Manischewitz," nor do they ever seem to appear in any of the Disney films about pirates in the Caribbean. The website piratesinfo.com carries not a single reference to them.

And while September 19 has for a number of years now been designated International Talk Like a Pirate Day (there are even Internet courses available in pirate lingo), none of its initiators seems to have had Ladino (the language spoken by Jewish refugees expelled by the Spanish and Portuguese after the Reconquista) in mind.

Swashbuckling buccaneers who took time to put on tefillin each morning? Better get used to the idea. Long overlooked, the history of Jewish piracy has been garnering increasing interest, with several serious books and articles telling its epic tales.

Many Jewish pirates came from families of refugees who had been expelled by Spain and Portugal. They took to piracy as part of a strategy of revenge on the Iberian powers (though lining their pockets with Spanish doubloons was no doubt also a motive). Many of these pirates mixed traditional Jewish lifestyles with their exploits on the high seas.

Plaut covers Portuguese Jewish refugees in Jamaica in 1511, and the British takeover from the Spanish in 1655 with the help of local Jews and Conversos. In 1720, 20% of Kingston residents were Jewish. Ashkenazi and Sephardic synagogues operated side by side, finally merging in the 20th century. Cemeteries hold Jewish tombstones back to 1672, inscribed in Portuguese, Hebrew and English.

The official website of today's Jewish community of Jamaica is here, with a pirate page here. Plaut says that municipal workers in Kingston recently uncovered a long forgotten pirate graveyard, with tombstones featuring Jewish stars, Hebrew inscriptions and skulls and crossbones. Pirate graves have also been found near Bridgetown, Barbados and in the old Curacao Jewish cemetery.

Jamaican-born Jewish historian Ed Kritzler wrote "Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean" and offers private tours of Jewish pirate coves on the island.

In 1628, Moses Cohen Henriques sailed with Dutch Admiral Piet Hein (Dutch West India Company), a former Spanish galleon slave who hated Spain. They raided Spanish ships off Cuba, and "liberated" gold and silver. Henriques also had an island off Brazil where Jews could practice Judaism openly.

Rabbi-pirate Samuel Pallache, a leader of the Fez, Morocco community, was the son of the leading rabbi of Cordoba, Spain, and recruited Conversos for his crew.

Jewish pirates worked for the Ottoman Turks. Born in Turkey, Sinan, known as "The Great Jew," worked from Algiers; his flag bore a six-pointed star. He defeated a mercenary Genoa navy (hired by Spain), conquered Tripoli (Libya) and became an Ottoman naval commander. He's buried in an Albanian Jewish cemetery.

Read about Yaakov Koriel who commanded several ships before repenting and deciding to study Kabalah with Rabbi Isaac Luria in Safed, where he is buried; and David Abrabanel (aka Capt. Davis), who after his family's massacre, joined British pirates with his ship, The Jerusalem. There's a Chilean maritim museum with pirate letters written in Hebrew.

The rabbi of Curacao scolding his community's own pirates when they attacked a Jewish-owned ship. Did that sermon make it into the historical newspaper archive of Curacao?

Josephus writes about Jewish pirates off Roman-era Israel, and Plaut adds that Haifa was once known as Little Malta because of its pirates.

Why were so many Jews in this profession? Jews specialized in map-making during the 15th-16th centuries, such as Zacuto and Cresque who provided maps to explorers; others served as ship navigators and translators.

On the Lighter Side of Pirating a la Mad Magazine, Plaut names a Jewish humor site which lists halachic challenges for pirates, such as how long do you wait, after capturing a ship, to put up a mezuzah in the captain's cabin? Or, if your parrot's on your shoulder, is that carrying?

What costumes do Jewish pirates wear at Purim, Plaut asks. Do they dress up as accountants?

It's time, he says, to put the oy back into "ahoy."

Do read the complete article here. Enjoy!

New York: From here to eternity, Nov. 16

"From Here to Eternity: Jewish Cemetery Research, Preservation and Restoration" is the focus of the Jewish Genealogy Society of New York's Lucille Gudis Memorial Fund All Day Seminar on November 16.

The format includes four sessions with major experts.

Session 1:
The JewishGen Online Worldwide Burial Registry (JOWBR)
- Joyce Field, JewishGen VP, Data Acquisition

Session 2:
How to Catalog Jewish Cemeteries for JOWBR
- Ada Green, chair, JGSNY Cemetery Project

Session 3:
Do Stones Speak? - Interpreting Jewish Monuments; Visiting Jewish Cemeteries
- Rabbi Abraham Laber, founder, Jewishdata.com

Session 4:
Panel on Cemetery Preservation and Restoration
- Chaim Bruder, Heritage Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Cemeteries
- Steve Lasky, founder, Museum of Family History
- Norman Weinberg, executive coordinator, Poland Jewish Cemeteries Restoration Project

Cost: $30 (JGSNY members); $36 (others). Advance registration required by November 10; there will be no onsite registration. Click here for the registration form and other details.

Israel: Judeo-Spanish material culture series

Bar Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel, is holding a series of six meetings on the material culture of Judeo-Spanish speakers at the Salti Center for Ladino Studies.

"Possessions Tell a Judeo-Spanish Past" is the topic of the first meeting on Nov. 19.

Topics will include Balkan Judeo-Spanish dress, home and synagogue textiles, Ottoman Empire Jewish homes and their contents, religious artifacts, Sephardic synagogue art, anthropological research on Sephardic Jews and Judeo-Spanish musicology.

The series will take place in 2008, on November 19, December 3, 17 and 31; in 2009: on January 14 and 21.

The website is here; unfortunately, it is only in Hebrew, thereby excluding thousands of interested readers around the world. The Salti Center's email is ladinocn@mail.biu.ac.il. Readers who feel that it would be good to have an English version of the site might wish to send an email with that suggestion.

There will also be a series on Ladino song during April, May and June 2009 at the Salti Center, with musicologist Dr. Shoshan Weich-Shahak and singer Orit Pearlman.

Jewish DNA: AARP magazine article

There's an interesting Jewish DNA article online at the AARP magazine site. Turns out that author Richard Rubin - despite his ostensible Eastern European roots - is actually one of our IberianAshkenaz types.

It's not surprising to either Judy Simon or me as co-admins of the IberianAshkenazi Project at FamilyTreeDNA.com. Every week, more and more people join the group, and Judy has been able to connect some 30% of ostensible Eastern European Ashkenazim with Hispanic, Converso and other Sephardic families today. The more people who test, the more information is gathered, enlarging FamilyTreeDNA's database potential genetic matches

Here's the part from Rubin's story that really made me happy:

The more obvious discoveries will reveal themselves first. For instance, in comparing myself with my matches, it quickly became apparent that I am of Jewish descent—something I had suspected at least since my bar mitzvah. I also wasn’t too surprised to learn that my matches’ ancestors were mostly, like
mine, from eastern Europe.

But eastern Europe is a big place; while I had believed that my maternal line originated in Lithuania, I found close matches in western Poland, Romania, the Czech Republic, and eastern Ukraine.

Even more dispersed is the family on my father’s side: while my earliest known ancestor in that line came from Belarus, I found close matches in such distant locales as Germany, Latvia, Hungary, and Bosnia. Oh, and also Puerto Rico, where the family of a man I’m supposedly related to has been living for more than 300 years.

Now that was a head scratcher. At first I thought it must be a mistake. But we are, indeed, a match. There is a 96.56 percent chance we share a common ancestor within the past 24 generations. That’s about 600 years ago—or some 85 years before all Jews were expelled from Spain. Which means there’s a good chance I’m not only eastern European but Spanish.

Welcome to the club, Richard!

I can hope that he will now be encouraged to read up on Sephardic history and learn about the exodus after the 1391 pogroms that resulted in the murder or forced conversion to Catholicism of thousands of Spanish Jews and, along the way, decimated or completely destroyed Jewish communities across Spain.

Click here to read the complete AARP article. For more information on the IberianAshkenaz group, click here. To join, or for more information, email Judy.

Tagged: Fives and Tens

The newest meme is out, and I was tagged by both the Genealogy Insider's Diane Haddad here and The Chart Chick's Janet Hovorka here.

10 years ago I:

1. was living in Southern Nevada.
2. chaired the Jewish Genealogical Society of Southern Nevada-East, based at Midbar Kodesh.
3. was slogging through - in Cyrillic - the seven microfilm rolls of 19th century rabbinical records for Mogilev, Belarus at the Clark Street FHL in Las Vegas.
4. was getting over bronchitis.
5. was the mother of a Brown University junior.

5 things on today's "to-do" list:

1. Catch up on blogging.
2. What to make for dinner.
3. Work on a story for a major publication.
4. Decide if we're doing a Persian barbecue for the Sukkot holiday.
5. Find my mini-digital recorder for my husband.

5 snacks I enjoy:

1. Reese's Peanut Butter Cups - frozen.
2. M&Ms - peanut.
3. Chocolate anything.
4. Toasted onion bagels - Tal's Bagels are the best in Israel!
5. Tiny tomatoes (grape or tear-drop), by the handful.

5 Places I have lived:

1. Four of the five New York City boroughs
2. Teheran
3. Miami
4. Los Angeles
5. Southern Nevada

5 Jobs I have had:

1. Day Camp organizer, American Women's Club, Teheran, Iran
2. Country library organizer, major international company
3. Freelance writer/journalist
4. Genealogy columnist
5. Assistant editor

Some colleagues have added two more categories.

5 places to visit again:

1. Barcelona, Spain
2. Vancouver, BC, Canada
3. Zurich, Switzerland
4. Santa Fe, New Mexico
5. Seattle, Washington

5 places I want to visit for the first time:

1. Mogilev, Belarus
2. Melbourne/Sydney, Australia
3. Skalat/Suchastaw, Ukraine (was Galicia, Austro-Hungary)
4. Prague, Czech Republic
5. St. Petersburg, Russia

This meme is being passed on to these genea-bloggers:

1. Renee Zamora, Renee's Genealogy Blog
2. Craig Manson, Geneablogie
3. Kathryn M. Doyle, CA Gen Society Blog
4. Terry Thornton, Hill Country of Monroe County
5. Steve Danko, Steve's Genealogy Blog