Jewish Bialystok and Its Diaspora

Chapter 2.

chapter  Rebuilding Homeland in Promised Lands W ith little fear or hesitation, David Sohn, a young man of twenty, approached the podium of the small dark auditorium at  East Broadway on New York City’s Lower East Side. Clearing his throat, he began speaking to the sweaty crowd of hundreds who had assembled on July , , to hear about Bialystok’s fate during the Great War. Sohn, with his ink-dark hair and aquiline features, cut an impressive figure. His “fiery” eloquence , as Joseph Lipnick, head of the Bialystoker Bikur Holim society recalled, “deeply moved” everyone in the audience in a manner that no other speaker ever had.1 Few were prepared for Sohn’s vivid description of the horrors befalling their former home: the renowned Jewish hospital lay in ruins; the great synagogue along the main boulevard was now a heap of rubble; wealthy Jewish philanthropists found themselves begging on street corners; Jewish orphans lay starving in the streets; and the lines for the kosher soup kitchen stretched for blocks. All present at the meeting, Sohn thundered, “must do everything in our power to help our compatriots (landslayt) in their time of need.”2 Despite their initial shock and despondency, the crowd went wild. Within a few short weeks, the squabbles that had cropped up in America between Jewish émigrés from Bialystok since the late nineteenth century were forgotten; ideological differences that had earlier divided the dozens of Bialystoker organizations were ignored. Leaders, who had previously refused to sit in the same room, not only met with one another but even decided to merge their organizations. In less than a month, they formed the Bialystok Center with David Sohn at its helm and with a mission to coordinate relief efforts to rebuild Bialystok. David Sohn maintained the mantle of leadership in this new organization for almost fifty years, during which time he nurtured 70 JEWISH BIALYSTOK AND ITS DIASPORA and sustained a new type of dispersed Jewish community and earned himself the title “Mr. Bialystok.”3 Sohn reached out to those who cultivated similar organizations in Buenos Aires, Palestine, and Melbourne, exerting tireless effort to raise millions of dollars to support Jewish life in Bialystok and its legacy abroad. To be sure, Jews from Bialystok were far from exceptional: dozens of other immigrants formed a wide range of civic, labor, religious, and cultural organizations to preserve their deeply ingrained cultural patterns in the early twentieth century. East European Jews exhibited a particular penchant for forming organizations that tied them to an idea of the Old World as they helped them adapt to the dramatically new political, economic, and social environments they encountered in their new homes.4 By , there were more than three thousand East European Jewish immigrant associations in NewYork City, and in Buenos Aires David Sohn in , after his first trip to Poland on behalf of the Bialystoker Center. Courtesy of Steve Kavee, William Kavee, and Rona K. Moyer. 71 REBUILDING HOMELAND IN PROMISED LANDS an estimated  percent of the adult Jewish community belonged to such a society.5 Scholars of Jewish migration have long commented upon the dense network of landsmanshaftn, Jewish immigrant mutual aid societies that helped struggling migrant Jews; far fewer have discussed the ways in which these organizations thrust East European Jews living in the United States, South America, Africa, Australia, and Europe into a transnational sphere in which they debated, conferred, and reimagined what it meant to be a Jew from Eastern Europe. Often casting these organizations as “an American phenomenon” or viewing them primarily within the framework of associational life, scholars have yet to analyze these organizations in a comparative framework or assess the ways in which they tied their members to Jews in other parts of the world.6 As Jewish immigrants from Bialystok strategically employed the term Bialystoker both in reference to a concrete place and as an abstract discursive term, they clearly demonstrated that Jews from different parts of Eastern Europe did not see themselves as belonging to one monolithic ethnic or religious group, as scholars often paint them, but rather saw Old World regional distinctions as still defining who they were.7 Through a cross-cultural comparison of the functions and rhetoric of the organizations founded by Bialystok’s Jews in New York, Buenos Aires, Tel Aviv, and Melbourne—the only four cities where these immigrant Jews founded Bialystoker “centers” dedicated to recreating and...