Secret Mission Rescues Yemen's Jews

By MIRIAM JORDAN
[UNDER SIEGE: The State Department has resettled about 60 Yemeni Jews in the U.S. since July amid rising violence; more are expected to arrive. Top, the father of Moshe Nahari, who was killed in December, with his daughters outside a court in Yemen following a hearing in the murder case.] AFP/Getty Images

UNDER SIEGE: The State Department has resettled about 60 Yemeni Jews in the U.S. since July amid rising violence; more are expected to arrive. Here, the father of Moshe Nahari, who was killed in December, with his daughters outside a court in Yemen following a hearing in the murder case.

MONSEY, N.Y. -- In his new suburban American home, Shaker Yakub, a Yemeni Jew, folded a large scarf in half, wrapped it around his head and tucked in his spiraling side curls. "This is how I passed for a Muslim," said the 59-year-old father of seven, improvising a turban that hid his black skullcap.

The ploy enabled Mr. Yakub and half a dozen members of his family to slip undetected out of their native town of Raida, Yemen, and travel to the capital 50 miles to the south. There, they met U.S. State Department officials conducting a clandestine operation to bring some of Yemen's last remaining Jews to America to escape rising anti-Semitic violence in his country.

In all, about 60 Yemeni Jews have resettled in the U.S. since July; officials say another 100 could still come. There were an estimated 350 in Yemen before the operation began. Some of the remainder may go to Israel and some will stay behind, most in a government enclave.
Clandestine Resettlement

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Reuven Schwartz

Moshe Nahari, who was murdered in December 2008 (left), and Said Ben Yisrael, whose house was firebombed (second from left), danced at a wedding celebration in Raida, Yemen in 2007.

* More photos and interactive graphics

The secret evacuation of the Yemeni Jews -- considered by historians to be one of the oldest of the Jewish diaspora communities -- is a sign of America's growing concern about this Arabian Peninsula land of 23 million.

The operation followed a year of mounting harassment, and was plotted with Jewish relief groups while Washington was signaling alarm about Yemen. In July, Gen. David Petraeus was dispatched to Yemen to encourage President Ali Abdullah Saleh to be more aggressive against al-Qaeda terrorists in the country. Last month, President Barack Obama wrote in a letter to President Saleh that Yemen's security is vital to the region and the U.S.

Yemen was overshadowed in recent years by bigger trouble spots such as Afghanistan. But it has re-emerged on Washington's radar as a potential source of regional instability and a haven for terrorists.

The impoverished nation is struggling with a Shiite revolt in the north, a secessionist movement in the south, and growing militancy among al-Qaeda sympathizers, raising concern about the government's ability to control its territory. Analysts believe al-Qaeda operatives are making alliances with local tribes that could enable it to establish a stronghold in Yemen, as it did in Afghanistan prior to the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

The State Department took something of a risk in removing the Yemenis to the U.S., as it might be criticized for favoritism at a time when refugees elsewhere are clamoring for haven. The U.S. calculated the operation would serve both a humanitarian and a geopolitical purpose. In addition to rescuing a group threatened because of its religion, Washington was seeking to prevent an international embarrassment for an embattled Arab ally.

President Saleh has been trying to protect the Jews, but his inability to quell the rebellion in the country's north made it less likely he could do so, prompting the U.S. to step in. The alternative -- risking broader attacks on the Jews -- could well have undermined the Obama administration's efforts to rally support for President Saleh in the U.S. and abroad.

"If we had not done anything, we feared there would be bloodshed," says Gregg Rickman, former State Department Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism.

Mr. Yakub says the operation saved his family from intimidation that had made life in Yemen unbearable. Violence toward the country's small remaining Jewish community began to intensify last year, when one of its most prominent members was gunned down outside his house. But the mission also hastens the demise of one of the oldest remaining Jewish communities in the Arab world.

Jews are believed to have reached what is now Yemen more than 2,500 years ago as traders for King Solomon. They survived -- and at times thrived -- over centuries of change, including the spread of Islam across the Arabian Peninsula.

"They were one of the oldest exiled groups out of Israel," says Hayim Tawil, a Yeshiva University professor who is an expert on Yemeni Jewry. "This is the end of the Jewish Diaspora of Yemen. That's it."

Centuries of near total isolation make Yemeni Jews a living link with the ancient world.

Many can recite passages of the Torah by heart and read Hebrew, but can't read their native tongue of Arabic. They live in stone houses, often without running water or electricity. One Yemeni woman showed up at the airport expecting to board her flight with a live chicken.

Through the centuries, the Jews earned a living as merchants, craftsmen and silversmiths known for designing djanbias, traditional daggers that only Muslims are allowed to carry. Jewish musical compositions became part of Yemeni culture, played at Muslim weddings and festivals.

"Yemeni Jews have always been a part of Yemeni society and have lived side by side in peace with their Muslim brothers and sisters," said a spokeswoman for the Embassy of Yemen in Washington.

In 1947, on the eve of the birth of the state of Israel, protests in the port city of Aden resulted in the death of dozens of Jews and the destruction of their homes and shops. In 1949 and 1950 about 49,000 people -- the majority of Yemen's Jewish community -- were airlifted to Israel in "Operation Magic Carpet."

About 2,000 Jews stayed in Yemen. Some trickled out until 1962, when civil war erupted. After that, they were stuck there. "For three decades, there were no telephone calls, no letters, no traveling overseas. The fact there were Jews in Yemen was barely known outside Israel," says Prof. Tawil.

After alienating the West by backing Iraq during the first Gulf War, Yemen sought a rapprochement with Washington. In 1991, it declared freedom of travel for Jews. An effort led by Prof. Tawil and brokered by the U.S. government culminated in the departure of about 1,200 Jews, mainly to Israel, in the early 1990s. Arthur Hughes, American ambassador to Yemen at the time, recalls that those who chose to remain insisted: "This is where we have been for centuries, we are okay; we're not going anywhere."

The few hundred Jews who stayed behind were concentrated in two enclaves: Saada, a remote area in Yemen's northern highlands, and Raida to the south.

In 2004, unrest erupted in Saada. The government says at least 50,000 people have been displaced by fighting between its troops and the Houthis, a Shiite rebel group.
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Animosity against Jews intensified. Notes nailed to the homes of Jews accused them of working for Israel and corrupting Muslim morals. "Jews were specifically targeted by Houthi rebels," says a spokeswoman for the Yemeni embassy in Washington.

In January 2007, Houthi leaders threatened Jewish families in Saada. "We warn you to leave the area immediately... [W]e give you a period of 10 days, or you will regret it," read a letter signed by a Houthi representative cited in a Reuters article.

Virtually the entire Jewish community in the area, about 60 people, fled to the capital. Since then, they have been receiving food stipends and cash assistance from the government while living in state-owned apartments in a guarded enclave, says the Yemeni embassy in Washington.

President Saleh, a Shiite, has been eager to demonstrate goodwill toward the Jews. On the Passover holiday, he invited TV crews to videotape families in the government complex as they feasted on lamb he had ordered.

Raida became the last redoubt of Yemeni Jews, who continued to lead a simple life there alongside Muslims.

Ancient stone homes dot the town. Electricity is erratic; oil lamps are common. Water arrives via truck. Most homes lack a TV or a refrigerator. The cell phone is the only common modern device. Some families receive financial aid from Hasidic Jewish groups in Brooklyn and London, which has enabled them to buy cars.

Typically, the Jewish men are blacksmiths, shoe repairmen or carpenters. They sometimes barter, trading milk and cow dung for grass to feed their livestock. In public, the men stand out for their long side curls, customarily worn by observant Jewish men. Jewish women, who often marry by 16, rarely leave home. When they do, like Muslim women, only their eyes are exposed.

For fun, children play with pebbles and chase family chickens around the house. At Jewish religious schools, they sit at wooden tables to study Torah and Hebrew. They aren't taught subjects like science, or to read and write in Arabic, Yemen's official language.

"I showed them a multiplication table and I don't think they had ever seen one," says Stefan Kirschner, a New York University graduate student who visited Raida in August 2008 and says he sat in a few classes.

In September 2008, militants detonated a car bomb outside the U.S. Embassy in Yemen's capital of Sanaa, killing 16 people. The attack raised fresh concern about Muslim extremism and the government's stability.

Then, on Dec. 11, a lone gunman shot dead Moshe Nahari, a father of nine and well-known figure in Raida's Jewish community. Abdul-Aziz al-Abdi, a retired Air Force pilot, pumped several bullets into Mr. Nahari after the Hebrew teacher dismissed his demands that he convert to Islam. In June, the shooter was sentenced to death.

Israel's offensive against Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip later in December sparked protests in Yemen. Jewish men and children in Raida were heckled, beaten and pelted with rocks. A grenade was hurled at the house of Said Ben Yisrael, who led one of three makeshift synagogues in Raida, and landed in the courtyard of his two-story home.

From the safety of his new home in suburban New York, Mr. Yakub recounted his last months in Yemen. Rocks shattered the windows of his house and car. Except for emergencies and provisions, Jews began to avoid leaving home. When they did, Mr. Yakub and other Jews took to disguising themselves as Muslims.

"This was no way to live," he said, seated at the head of a long table surrounded by his wife and children.

Salem Suleiman, who also arrived recently in New York, bears scars from rocks that hit his head. "They throw stones at us. They curse us. They want to kill us," he said. "I didn't leave my house for two months."

New York had a community of about 2,000 Yemeni Jews. Yair Yaish, who heads the Yemenite Jewish Federation of America, says he was barraged with "desperate calls from the community here saying we have to do something to get our families out."

The U.S. Ambassador to Yemen urged Yemeni ministers to facilitate the departure. After initial reluctance -- the government preferred to give the Jews safe haven in the capital city -- Yemen agreed to issue exit permits and passports.

"It was the embassy's view, and the Department concurred, that because of their vulnerability, we should consider them for resettlement," says a spokeswoman for the State Department's Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration.

Jewish Federations of North America raised $750,000 to help the effort. Orthodox groups also pledged to pitch in. The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society was tasked with their resettlement.

Word reached Jews in Raida that there was an American plan afoot to rescue them.

The first applicants signed up at the U.S. Embassy in January. To avoid attracting attention, families convoyed to Sanaa in taxis at dawn.

Later they traveled to a hotel for interviews with U.S. officials. To establish a case for refugee status, they had to demonstrate a well-founded fear of persecution. For many of the women, it was the first time speaking with anyone outside the home.

As news spread of their imminent departure, many families reported trouble selling property. Potential buyers offered low prices or refused to bid, thinking they could get the property free after it was deserted.

"All they have is this little house worth $15,000," says Yochi Sabari, a Jew from Raida who lives in New York and has relatives in Yemen. "They can't leave until they sell it."

About three weeks before their travel date, the U.S. embassy contacted the first four families cleared for travel. On July 7, their 17 members traveled to the airport in Sanaa and boarded a Frankfurt-bound flight.

When the Yemenis landed in New York the next day, Jewish organization officials there to greet them spotted several women cloaked in black robes, only their eyes exposed.

"The Jewish women were the ones in burqas," says Gideon Aronoff, president of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. He says he was "initially shocked."

Several families missed the two flights offered to them by the U.S. and, therefore, forfeited their chance to move here. Family members say they are having trouble disposing of assets. An undisclosed number of people have reached Israel, including the family of Mr. Ben Yisrael, whose home was the target of a grenade, and the family of Mr. Nahari, who was slain in December 2008. In the U.S., the Yemeni refugees are being settled in Monsey, a suburban enclave of ultraorthodox Jews, lined with strip malls that sell black coats and wide-rimmed hats worn by Hasidic men.

The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society's network established a Monsey office, where case managers arrange housing and disburse food stamps, cash and other refugee benefits to the Yemeni arrivals. Many of the adults, caseworkers say, aren't yet capable of budgeting, following a schedule or sitting still in a structured classroom to learn English.

On a recent morning, Mr. Suleiman, a 36-year-old father of three, retrieved an alarm clock that he received with his furnished apartment.

"I still don't know how to use this," he said. "The children have been playing with it."

Was Elvis Presley Jewish?

Orthodox Elvis impersonator Dan Hartal a.k.a. "Schmelvis" thinks so.
By Richard Rabkin

*

In 1998, The Wall Street Journal published an article titled, "All Shook Up in the Holy Land" exposing Elvis Presley's unlikely Jewish lineage. Apparently, Elvis' maternal great-great grandmother, Nancy Burdine, was a Jew. Her daughter gave birth to Doll Mansell who gave birth to Gladys Smith who gave birth to Elvis. Although it sounds improbable, according to Jewish law, which confers Jewish lineage by way of the mother, that makes Elvis Presley Jewish.

Furthermore, this fact was something that Elvis was apparently aware of and even sensitive to. For example, there is a famous picture of Elvis performing in Salt Lake City in 1972 wearing a Jewish "chai" symbol, and when Elvis' mother Gladys died in 1959 he made sure to put a Jewish Star of David on her headstone. But even if Elvis may have been technically Jewish, and was even aware of his background, he was not at all observant.

There is another Elvis however who is in fact observant. Dan Hartal is the world's only Orthodox Jewish Elvis impersonator, and goes by the moniker -- Elvis Schmelvis.

Hartal's unusual story begins in an unusual place -- the Montreal Hospital of Hope, a home for the aged where Hartal is employed as the Music Coordinator. When he began his work, he wanted to find a way to combine his love of performing for the elderly Jewish residents with his love for Elvis Presley's music. The result was Elvis songs with a Jewish twist like "Jerusalem Hotel" instead of "Heartbreak Hotel," or "Love me Blender" instead of "Love me Tender."

"After one of my performances," Hartal recalls, "one of the residents said to me, ‘You aren't Elvis, you're Schmelvis.'" And "Schmelvis" was born.

Soon thereafter, Schmelvis paired up with documentary filmmaker Max Wallace for another unusual journey. They wanted to make the pilgrimage to Elvis' home in Graceland and recite Kaddish – the Jewish memorial prayer that is recited on the anniversary of someone's passing – his yahrtzeit. They decided to bring some cameras along and make a film out of their experience.

The result is "Schmelvis: Searching for the King's Jewish Roots," and the film does exactly that. For example, we learn that Elvis grew up in "the Pinch" -- the Jewish quarter of Memphis where his mother worked in the "shmata business," a predominantly Jewish enterprise at the time. As a teenager the future king was the "Shabbos goy" (I.e. Performed tasks otherwise prohibited to Jews on the Sabbath) for his upstairs neighbors at 462 Alabama Ave., Rabbi Alfred and Jeannette Fruchter, who was the Rabbi at the local synagogue. The Presleys regularly came over for Friday night dinner, and Elvis had a penchant for the Rebbetzin's cooking.
If there is one regret that Geller has about his time with Elvis it's that he wasn't able to wrap teffilin with him.

In watching the movie and speaking to Hartal, it is hard not to come to the conclusion that there is something almost spiritual in the love that diehard Elvis fans have for their "king." "Elvis had a special neshama (soul)," says Hartal. "You don't see followers of John Lennon or Jim Morrison behaving the same way that Elvis fans do. There was something special beyond the man. His spirit, his music, his connection."

According to Larry Geller, Elvis' hair stylist and at times spiritual guru, Elvis was quite spiritual in his own way. When he worked for Elvis, Geller was involved with Eastern religions and would often give Elvis books of a spiritual nature. Geller subsequently became an Orthodox Jew. According to Hartal, Gelller, whom he calls Chaim Lev, said that if there is one regret that he has about his time with Elvis it is that he wasn't able to wrap teffilin with him.

As documented in the movie, in the end, the group was successful in giving Elvis the Jewish tribute that they felt was long overdue. Initially they had only 7 of the 10 Jewish males required for a minyan (quorum) to recite the mourner's Kaddish. But fortunately, or miraculously as Hartal asserts, three more Jews came "out of nowhere" and Rabbi Reuven Poupko led the group in prayer.

Since the release of the film, Schmelvis has become a much sought after performer. He also has a new release coming out called "From Memphis to the Holy Land" timed to coincide with Elvis's 30th "yahrtzeit."

When asked what he thinks Elvis' reaction would be to Schmelvis' music, the movie, and the fact that they got a minyan at Graceland to recite the mourner's Kaddish on Elvis' yahrtzeit, Hartal pauses to reflect and answers, "He would probably say ‘Uh...thank you, thank you very much."

Kristallnacht Still Reverberates

In November 1938, a 17-year-old Jew living in Paris named Herschel Grynszpan received news that his family had been deported from their home in Germany to the Polish border where they were stranded and mistreated. Enraged, Hershel went to the German Embassy and shot a diplomat named Ernst vom Rath.

On November 9, vom Rath died and Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels saw the killing as an opportunity to take the persecution of the Jews to a new level. With Hitler’s assent, Goebbels called for actions against Jews to express the anger of the German people. Within hours, Nazi stormtroopers were rampaging through nearly every town and village in Germany and Austria.

At around 2:00 a.m. on November 10, 1938, Nazi propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels received the report of the first death of a Jew in Munich He reportedly responded “not to get so worked up about the death of a Jew. In the next days, thousands more would kick the bucket.”

In less than 48 hours, beginning on November 9, at least 96 Jews were killed, 7,500 businesses were destroyed, and countless Jewish cemeteries and schools were vandalized. A total of 30,000 Jews were rounded up and sent to concentration camps. The broken glass strewn through the streets from the mayhem led the pogrom to be called “Crystal Night” or Kristallnacht.


On August 26, 1912, the Fasanenstrasse Synagogue in Berlin was dedicated in front of representatives of the government, the military and the city. There was a procession of the Torah scrolls and the ceremonial lighting of the eternal light. The Rabbi said that the light of the lamp, like the love of fatherland of the Jewish community, would never be extinguished. On November 10, 1938, 26 years, 2 months, and 15 days after this dedication ceremony, the synagogue was one of more than 1,300 destroyed.

Sigi Hart was preparing for his bar mitzvah in Berlin. On November 10, the synagogue was burned. The person who took care of the synagogue had a little house in the back that was not destroyed in the fire. The week after Kristallnacht he offered to let the Harts use it for the bar mitzvah. “We came Saturday morning to this place,” Sigi recalled. “We had about three or four people standing outside watching if they saw any police or SS or Nazis coming [so] we could escape from the backyard. In one corner were the burned Torah scrolls. I said my bracha. I did what I had to do for my bar mitzvah. This was supposed to be my happiest day. The rabbi was standing there crying. He told me, ‘Remember, never forget.’

Frederick Firnbacher lived in Straubing. The Nazis ransacked the synagogue and took a Torah that belonged to Firnbacher’s family to the police station. Frederick’s great grandfather had hired a sofer to write a Torah in time for his grandfather’s bar mitzvah in 1872. It was also used at the bar mitzvah of Frederick’s father. On Kristallnacht Frederick’s father went to the Gestapo headquarters and told them he had permission to take the Torah to the United States. Amazingly, the Gestapo gave him the scroll. “Just imagine a Jew in 1938 carrying a Torah through the streets of Germany,” said Frederick. “He brought it to the U.S. and I was bar mitzvahed out of it, and my son Michael was bar mitzvahed on the 100th anniversary of when it was written.” The Firnbacher scroll is now in Ohr Kodesh synagogue in Chevy Chase, Maryland.

The doorbell rang at the Vienna home of Leo Glueckselig’s family. Nazis were standing outside and took Leo, his brother and father to the basement of the central police station. Leo said the SS discovered there was a father and son. “A high officer said, ‘Let’s have some fun,’ and told the son to slap his father. He refused. They grabbed the father and said, ‘If he doesn’t beat you up, we’ll kill him.’ So this father starts screaming at his son, calling him names, saying, ‘Don’t be so stubborn. If I tell you do it, hit me.’ Finally the son started to cry and hit his father. Then they called it off.”

Ursula Rosenfeld was just 13-years-old when the Nazis arrested her father. She had eaten dinner with him the night before Kristallnacht not knowing it was the last meal they’d eat together. The next morning, after she returned from school, Ursula learned her father had been taken to Buchenwald. She learned later that when the Jews arrived, their braces and shoelaces were taken away and her father protested, “so they made an example of him and they beat him to death in front of everybody in order to instill terror and obedience. We heard a few days later that he had died of a heart attack, but this was the story the Nazis told all the families of the people they killed….The Nazis offered us my father’s ashes in return for money. Eventually the urn came and we buried it in the Jewish cemetery. But, of course, whether it was his ashes one never knows.”

Kristallnacht was the beginning of the end for German Jewry, and telegraphed the fate of all Jews who would come under Nazi control. The deportation of German Jews to their deaths began in October 1941. At the end of April 1943, 150 Jewish children who had been living on a farm training to be Zionist pioneers were deported in one of the final transports of German Jews. Most died in concentration camps. Fewer than 10,000 of the 131,800 German Jews targeted for extermination by the Nazis survived. Of the 43,700 Austrian Jews who had failed to escape the Nazis, fewer than 2,000 returned to their homes after the war.

Jewish Immigrants Write in English

Yiddish-speaking Jews put faith in the language of their new country and left an indelible mark on American letters.
By

Reprinted with permission from Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology, published by W.W. Norton & Company.

When Henry James objected to the changes that the myriad Jewish immigrants were making to the English language, he would not yet have been able to read the fiction of Abraham Cahan, Mary Antin, and Anzia Yezierska, immigrants whose primary language was Yiddish but who chose to write in English. Although these three are often thought of as the originators of Jewish American literature, in fact in their time they were transitional figures, lifting one foot out of their native Yiddish‑speaking immigrant culture while, with the other, stepping toward the English‑speaking American culture they aspired to.

Abraham Cahan stood firmly within the Yiddish world as a journalist and editor of the Forverts [the Forward, a Yiddish-language newspaper based in New York]. Yet, having learned English in night school, he began publishing in English within a year of his arrival in America. When he resigned temporarily from the Forverts after helping to found it, Cahan worked as a journalist in English between 1897 and 1902 with the American journalists Hutchins Hapgood and Lincoln Steffens. At this time, he was befriended by the powerful American novelist William Dean Howells, who encouraged him to write his short stories, novellas, and novels in English to reach a mainstream American readership.

The paradox at the center of Cahan’s writings pulled him simultaneously toward both Yiddish and English as he Americanized those who read his Yiddish newspaper and taught Americans about the cultural, social, and psychological forces driving the Jewish immigrants through their painful transformation. In fact, one might speculate that Cahan wrote his ironic American success story The Rise of David Levinsky (1917) in part to counteract the unmitigated optimism of Mary Antin’s 1912 best‑selling autobiography. The Promised Land, in portraying the metamorphosed immigrant girl as the perfect product of an American education, affirmed for its Gentile American readers the absolute goodness of their nation. The third of our immigrant writers in English, Anzia Yezierska, cultivated a high English prose style that was modeled on 19th‑century British poetry; but she was rewarded for using the Yiddish-accented dialect of English that her 1920s Gentile American audience expected of her. It is fascinating that neither Antin nor Yezierska shows any awareness of the Yiddish literary culture that drew other writers of their generation.

Would James have been so scornful of Horace M. Kallen, a student of his brother, William? Because Kallen, a philosopher of ethnicity, arrived in America as a young boy of five from Silesia, in Prussia, where his family probably spoke German rather than Yiddish, it is not surprising that he wrote in English from the start. In fact, Kallen received an American education better than anything that even Antin could have imagined, for he earned a B.A. and a Ph.D. at Harvard and studied abroad at the Sorbonne and at Oxford.

And what would James have said about the American‑born Jewish novelists Sidney Nyburg and Edna Ferber? Both Nyburg and Ferber wrote fiction in English because they were removed geographically and culturally from the Yiddish world of the new immigrants. Nyburg came from a German Jewish family well established in Baltimore for decades, and Ferber, of German and Hungarian Jewish background, was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and grew up in Midwestern towns. Thoroughly Americanized, Nyburg, a corporate lawyer who published five novels, and Ferber, a Pulitzer prizewinning, bestselling novelist and playwright who was counted among the inner circle of the New York literary scene, wrote for the American public, not for a specifically Jewish audience.

Nyburg’s The Chosen People and Ferber’s Fanny Herself, each author’s only work on expressly Jewish themes were published in 1917, the same year as Cahan’s The Rise of David Levinsky. Although probably a coincidence, the confluence of these three English novels about being Jewish in America or about becoming American as a Jew deserves consideration. Why? Because these writers had nothing to do with each other, and, despite their similar themes, these works have no connection—in contrast to the works of the Yiddish poets and other fiction writers of the time. The point is that in English, as of 1917, there is no movement or perceived lineage of Jewish American literature, while in Yiddish, at that very moment, there existed a coherent, divisive, and ever‑evolving culture and literature. During this period, there were, of course, Jewish journals being published in English such as the Menorah, a B’nai B’rith publication edited by the Sephardic American Benjamin Franklin Peixotto and the Menorah Journal, a literary and arts journal edited by the college‑educated sons of Eastern European Jewish immigrants. However, the great writing of this period is mostly in Yiddish.

Another American Gentile visited Lower East Side literary cafes around the same time as Henry James. Boston Brahmin journalist Hutchins Hapgood was escorted by Abraham Cahan through the Jewish quarter in 1901. Hapgood, recording his impressions in The Spirit of the Ghetto (1902), describes the cafes on cast Canal Street as places “where excellent coffee and tea are sold, where everything is clean and good, and where the conversation is of the best…[among] the chosen crowd of intellectuals.” And “the somber and earnest qualities of the race, emphasized by the special conditions, receive here expression in the mouths of actors, socialists, musicians, journalists, and poets. Here they get together and talk by the hour, over their coffee and cake, about politics and society, poetry and ethics, literature and life.” Hapgood characterizes four of the poets he met there as “men of great talent,” and writes with admiration about Eliakim Zunser, the wedding bard, or badkhen, famous as a Yiddish folk poet in Russia and New York; of the elite, refined Hebrew‑revivalist poet Menahem Dolitzki; of Morris Rosenfeld, the Yiddish Labor poet famous to Hapgood’s English‑language readers through Leo Weiner’s 1898 translation of his poems into English; and of a young poet, Abraham Liessin, a radical “Jewish bohemian,” contemporary of Yehoash (Yiddish poet Solomon Bloomgarden), who wrote verse essays on ethics and Jewish nationalism. Whereas James saw only the congestion of people and heard their voices as clamor, Hapgood observed the individuals within the crowd and, with the help of Cahan as his interpreter, spoke with and listened to many people, seeking out the scholars, the artists, and especially the writers. With such a positive, curious attitude, Hapgood discerned the immigrant culture as a part of the American whole and one that would enrich the American scene.

Yiddish Theatre in New York

A cultural phenomenon of Jewish America in the early 20th century.
By Gerald Sorin

Reprinted with permission from A Time for Healing: American Jewry Since World War II (Johns Hopkins University Press).

Many of the institutions created by Eastern European Jews became vital elements in the new transitional culture. Outstanding in this respect was the American Yiddish theatre, which also had its origins in the Old World. Performances and skits by Jews were developed in the 1870s as part of a Jewish cultural revival and were centered in the active secular Jewish cafe life of Iasi, Romania, where Avram Goldfadn, the father of Yiddish theatre, held sway.

By the early 1880s many impoverished Yiddish theatre companies were performing in wine cellars scattered throughout the larger cities of Eastern Europe. But actors suffered harassment from both czarist government officials and Jewish Orthodoxy. Numerous theatre peo­ple, including Goldfadn's troupe, immigrated to the United States after 1883, when the Yiddish theatre was banned by Alexander III in the despotic aftermath of the assassination of Alexander II.
Growth & Development in the New World

In effect, Yiddish theatre arrived in New York City in its infancy and was nurtured there at the turn of the century by its greatest audience--the largest, most heterogeneous aggregation of Jews in the world. In the early years in America, the Yiddish theatre overflowed with "corrupt and foolish versions" of the European repertoire as well as "vivid junk and raw talent." It took hold in the public mind only after many trials. But with the emergence of playwrights like Jacob Gordin and actors like Boris and Bessie Thomashevsky and Jacob Adler, larger and larger audiences were attracted.

By 1900 there were three major theatre troupes in New York City and numerous smaller endeavors in other Jewish population centers. From the late 1890s to World War I, the works of Shakespeare, Ibsen, and Strindberg were adapted to the needs of the immigrant culture, and a flamboyant style of acting was developed. One critic observed that, more than anything else, Yiddish theatre, with its overstatement and ritual pageantry, resembled Italian opera without singing.

The theatre came to enjoy an unrivaled position on the Lower East Side; it became a major cultural institution, in which all the problems, hopes, and dreams of immigrant Jews were dramatized. The Yiddish theatre provided a collective experience for the entire community.

It was also a powerful vehicle for fund-raising. Philanthropic, mutual-aid, and labor organizations often sponsored benefit performances. Ticket prices ranged from 25 cents to a dollar, not a small outlay for immigrant laborers, but somehow thousands managed to pay it.

By 1918 the city boasted 20 Yiddish theatres, which, in a single year--before the inroads of movies--attracted two million patrons to over a thousand performances. Hutchins Hapgood, a keen and sensitive observer and devotee of East Side culture, wrote that Jews of every station and persuasion came to the theatre: "The Jews of all the ghetto classes--the sweatshop woman with her baby, the day laborer, the small Hester Street shopkeeper, the Russian Jewish anarchist and socialist, the ghetto Rabbi and scholar, the poet, the journalist. The poor and ignorant are in the great majority, but the learned, the intellectual, and the progressive are also represented."

Although Jewish intellectuals and socialists considered the Yiddishized classics, along with the musical melodramas of Joseph Lateiner and Morris Horowitz, to be shunde (trashy), the practice of adaptation led the way to better drama on the Yiddish stage. Jacob Gordin began in 1890 to reform the Yiddish theatre according to the best traditions of the Russian theatre. He succeeded, to some extent, in educating actors and audiences to appreciate sincerity on the stage. But the playwright was also influenced by theatregoers; in his later plays, Gordin inserted comic and musical intrusions as part of the dramatic action.
Audience Participation

The involvement of the audience was total and fervent. Crying, always part of an evening at the Yiddish theatre, was cathartic for the bone-weary workers who made up most of the house. Laughter at characters with familiar problems was just as prevalent as tears and helped immigrants recognize their own strength and motivation to hold on--even to succeed.

Patrons ate and drank, exchanged loud remarks, and unabashedly cheered and hissed. Sometimes they openly jeered actors who lit cigarettes or cigars on stage on Friday night, even while the protestors themselves were obviously not observing the Sabbath, either. Occasionally, patrons yelled out advice, particularly at critical points in the many plays about family conflict. One man was so moved by Jacob Adler's performance in the The Jewish King Lear, that he ran down the aisle shouting: "To hell with your stingy daughter, Yankl! She has a stone, not a heart. Spit on her, Yankl, and come home with me. My yidene [Jewish wife] will feed you. Come Yankl, may she choke, that rotten daughter of yours."
Real Life on the Stage

Family life and its problems preoccupied Jewish playwrights. Leon Kobrin's comedy The Next Door Neighbors dealt with the difficulties faced by a couple who did not immigrate together, and Gordin's Mirele Efros (also known as the Jewish Queen Lear), a melodrama about a self-sacrificing mother, "instructed" members of the audience to respect their parents. These plays of Gordin and Kobrin, as well as those of David Pinski, Sholom Aleichem, I.L. Peretz, Sholom Asch, and others were performed innumerable times over several decades and were enormously popular with parents and children.

Popularity was largely a result of the fact that stage characters faced problems similar to those of every immigrant: How to be an American and a Jew? How to protect the family from destabilization, and religious values from disintegration, in a secular, seemingly normless society? How to enjoy the opportunities for material success in America without giving up the spiritual values of Judaism? These were the questions that befuddled people who were still very much part of two worlds, and the Yiddish theatre, like many other transitional East Side Jewish institutions, helped immigrants deal with those questions, in this case by portraying them on stage.
American & Jewish

The Yiddish theatre also encouraged members of the audience to feel connected to both the American and the Jewish worlds. Patrons felt pride in their Jewishness, as Jewish playwrights and actors expressed Jewish vitality. And Jewish playgoers shared the patriotic enthusiasm of the general American public when they cheered Boris Thomashevsky in Der Yidisher Yenki Dudl, or applauded the song "Three Cheers for Yankee Doodle," typical genre pieces.

By combining aspects of Old World culture, American culture, and the transitional culture of the ghetto, and by dealing with many of the immigrant dilemmas of that transitional culture, the Yiddish theatre held up a mirror to its audiences. It helped them gain a better understanding of their role in the historical process of relocation, and it gave them greater insight into the problems of creating new identities in the New World.

All-American Maydl

Molly Picon, star of Yiddish film and theater
By

Reprinted with permission from "Chapters in American Jewish History," published by the American Jewish Historical Society.


"She is tiny--like her people," remarked Louis Nizer in a 1943 tribute to Molly Picon, superstar of Yiddish stage and film. Her small stature notwithstanding, Picon's impact on Yiddish culture worldwide was enormous.

Long before Mary Martin starred in Peter Pan on Broadway or Barbra Streisand played Yentl in Hollywood, Molly Picon used her gamin-like appearance and acrobatic skills to play, in the words of historian Joann Green, "adorable young waif[s], often a motherless boy who, with naïve gumption, a charming display of tears, laughter, somersaults, splits, songs, cartwheels and musical instruments, accompanied by an occasional farm animal and good luck, managed to make it in the adult world."
Actress From a Young Age

Picon's own childhood on the Lower East Side of New York parallels that of the characters she played. Her father left home when Molly's younger sister Helen was born. Her mother Clara moved the girls to Philadelphia, where she supported them and her own mother by working as a seamstress at Kessler's Yiddish theater. At age five, Molly won a $5 first prize at a local theater contest and the appreciative audience spontaneously threw additional money on the stage.


Molly Picon

"Molly Picon" by Ruth Light Braun, 1929.
Image courtesy Hirschl & Adler Galleries


Picon spent her adolescence as a member of a troupe that performed Yiddish cabaret and vaudeville at Philadelphia's Arch St. Theater. In 1919, she met Jacob Kalich, manager of the Boston Grand Opera House and the couple married that same year. Molly wore a dress fashioned by her mother from a theater curtain.

Picon and Kalich's partnership created some of the most memorable shows ever to appear on the Yiddish stage, with Kalich scripting and directing and Picon starring. Their 1920s collaborations included Yankele, Mamele, Circus Girl, and Molly Dolly. During this period, Molly created the character of the much-loved nincompoop, "Schmendrick." Her athleticism, charm, good looks and humor made Picon an All-American maydl [girl], packing in both Yiddish and non-Yiddish speaking audiences. In the 1920s, the Second Avenue Theater in New York--the best known of all Yiddish theaters in America--was renamed the Molly Picon Theater in her honor.
First Films

Picon made her first Yiddish film, Das Judenmadel, in Austria in 1921. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Picon remained committed to filming in Europe despite the rising tide of anti-Semitism there. Her films provide graphic documentation of authentic shtetl [Jewish village] life before the Nazis obliterated it.

In 1937, in Warsaw, she was paid the record sum of $10,000 to star in Joseph Green's Idl Mit'n Fidl. In 1938, at age 40, she played a vivacious 12-year old girl in Mamele--the last Jewish film made in Poland. Surprisingly, D. W. Griffith, director of the monumental, though racist, Birth of a Nation, called Picon "the most interesting actress in America." Griffith tried but failed to raise money to make a Yiddish movie in which Picon would have starred.

Picon showed her versatility by playing a wide variety of roles in radio, television, film, and theater. The 60-six year old Picon was still somersaulting on Broadway in 1964--this time with sheep and goats--in Milk and Honey, a musical about Israel. Her best-known Hollywood film roles included the Italian mother in Come Blow Your Horn (1963), for which she received an Oscar nomination, and Yente, the matchmaker in Fiddler on the Roof (1971).
Humanitarian Work

Picon devoted herself to patriotic and humanitarian work. During World War II, she visited refugee camps in Canada and toured army bases across the U.S. to entertain the troops. Her appearances were especially meaningful to Jewish soldiers. A letter from a soldier found in her papers at the American Jewish Historical Society reads in part, "Above all the shows we've had, you were the tops, above all the movie stars and everyone else who have performed before us, we have chosen you as the best of them all. . . . And also we would like you to know, that you have been selected the number one pin-up of our Squadron."

When World War II ended, Picon and Kalich were the first entertainers to visit the Displaced Persons camps so that, in Picon's own words, the survivors "might feel like [men and] women again." According to Green, "In one camp audience a three-year-old heard his first sounds of laughter." Picon continued her active support of Jewish refugees by working for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration and selling Israel bonds.

Picon's performances blended Yiddish culture with American show business, a combination that appealed to audiences beyond the immigrant generation. Even as the second generation Americanized, Picon provided them with a bridge to Yiddish culture. One non-Yiddish-speaking fan wrote, "I have never before been so moved by a thespian performance.... I'm sure I missed a lot [of the Yiddish]. I feel, however, that what I did understand was reward enough."

Molly performed in one-woman shows until just a few years before her death in 1992. She was sometimes called the "Helen Hays of Jewish theater." After watching her perform, however, Ms. Hays is reported to have said, "I would be proud to be called the Molly Picon of the American theater."

Chocolate Egg Cream

U-bet Syrup & Seltzer Combo Makes a Comeback
By Leah Koenig

Lou Reed--who is best known as the vocalist, guitarist and songwriter for The Velvet Underground--has another love besides rock music: the frothy beverage known as egg cream. In his song of the same name, the “Walk on the Wild Side” singer wrote this about his Brooklyn upbringing in the 1950s:

The only good thing I have to say about P.S. 92
Was the egg cream served at Becky’s, it was a fearsome brew
For 50 cents you got a shot, choco bubbles up your nose
That made it easier to deal with knife fights
And kids pissing in the street
No Eggs, No Cream?

The chocolate egg cream of Reed's youth boasts several rivaling--and often contradictory--creation stories, all of which take place in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The most popular version claims Louis Auster, a Jewish immigrant who owned a candy store in New York’s Lower East Side, as the egg cream’s inventor. According to legend, the Yiddish actor Boris Thomashefsky compared Auster’s refreshing drink to the “chocolat et crème” he drank on a trip to Paris. While Auster’s recipe contained neither cream nor eggs, “et crème” sounded enough like “egg cream” that the name stuck.

While the exact original recipe is unknown, most devotees agree that the basic egg cream combines seltzer water (not the barely-bubbled stuff that comes in plastic bottles, but real seltzer from a soda fountain or a pressurized cylinder dispenser) with a splash of milk and Fox’s U-Bet chocolate syrup. Created by Herman Fox in the 1890s, Fox’s U-Bet uses cocoa and cane sugar instead of corn syrup and artificial flavorings, and has remained the egg cream’s closest syrup companion for more than 100 years.

Throughout the early 20th century--both in the Lower East Side and also in Brooklyn and the Bronx, as Jews climbed their way out of the tenement--egg cream reigned as New York City’s iconic “Jewish drink.” That said, there is nothing inherently Jewish about an egg cream, except that it was created and consumed by Jews.

Professor Jennifer Berg, who directs the Graduate Program in Food Studies at New York University, said, “[Lower East Side Jews] ate foods that were inexpensive and easy to acquire--but they did not yet have symbolic value. The egg cream replicated the thick, American chocolate malted they could not afford, so at the time, drinking egg creams probably made them feel more American, not Jewish.” It is only in retrospect and through a lens of cultural nostalgia, then, that the egg cream took on any Jewish significance.

Today, the egg cream is enjoying something of a modest renaissance, as its original drinkers wax nostalgic, and younger generations grab onto their cultural heritage. But while the drink is still served at Junior’s Cheesecake and other establishments across New York, the best way to ensure that your egg cream won’t leave you feeling flat is to make it at home.
Chocolate Egg Cream

Reprinted with permission from Cooking Jewish: 532 Recipes from the Rabinowitz Family (Workman Publishing). By Judy Bart Kancigor

2 tablespoons cold whole milk
about 1 cup seltzer (ideally from a seltzer dispenser)
2 generous tablespoons Fox’s U-Bet Chocolate Syrup

1. Pour the milk into a 12-oz glass.
2. Spritz with seltzer almost to the top.
3. Add the syrup, wait a moment for it to fall to the bottom, and then stir with a long spoon. If you get at least an inch of foam, you did it right.