The Jews of Harlem by Jeffrey S. Gurock

Author:Jeffrey S. Gurock
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: REL040000 Religion / Judaism / General
Publisher: NYU Press

Jewish Institutional Migration from Harlem, 1917–1930.

7

The Scattering of the Harlem Jewish Community, 1917–1930

In 1929, N. Davidoff, chairman of Branch No. 2 of the Arbeter Ring—his first name also has been lost to history, but what he had to say about Jewish Harlem remains important—reflected with satisfaction and a degree of pride on his organization’s past and present-day status and location. Expressing no sadness over the decision of the workers’ group to leave what was now their old uptown neighborhood, Davidoff declared, “Branch No. 2 was born in Harlem and we have lived there and grown. When the time came and the majority of the members moved away to the Bronx, it was natural that the branch goes where the greatest numbers of members were. Therefore we can see that although we are growing old, we are keeping up with the times.”

Several years later, an anonymous Yiddish writer put to work during the Great Depression by the Federal Writers’ Project offered a terse understanding of where members of Harlem’s hundreds of landsmanshaften had gone and why they had left the neighborhood. The migration was “not due to economic need. The removal is voluntary and the reason is not gloomy. Jews on the road to bettering themselves and making life more convenient for them moved from Harlem up to the Bronx.”1

Israel Stone did not leave a personal account of his family’s peregrinations. But census and building records tell us that, as of 1915, this one-time clothier who became a real estate operator was living quite well in his large apartment in a seven-story elevator building that boasted of a “highly-decorative brick and stone façade” at 92 Morningside Avenue, across the street from bucolic Morningside Park. There he resided with his wife, his widowed daughter, Martha, who had become a stenographer—a good occupation for a second-generation American Jewish woman—and her son, Herbert, who seemingly helped out in the business as a real estate collector. This middle-class Jewish family continued to employ a gentile servant in their home, another sign of their affluence in their comfortable section of Harlem. Eight years later, when Israel passed away at age seventy-three, the family still lived on Morningside Avenue, although his death certificate now characterized his dwelling as a tenement. But by 1930, Martha had relocated by herself to 69th Street off Central Park West, where she rented an apartment in a classy multifamily house. As of 1925, a recently married Herbert, who earned his living as an importer, had settled with his bride, Florence, in a newly built low-rise apartment building, west of the Grand Concourse. But they did not stay long in this emerging and soon to be renowned Jewish neighborhood in the Bronx. By 1930, in an unusual move for a young Jewish couple of that inter-war era, they had bought a single-family home in Floral Park, a suburb in western Nassau County. At that point, Herbert was the proprietor of a dress trimming shop. In 1931, Herbert and Florence welcomed the arrival of a daughter, Marilyn.

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