Frankfurt on the Hudson: The German Jewish Community of Washington Heights, 1933-82, Its Structure and Culture

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments It is both a pleasant and a difficult duty to thank all the persons who helped me in putting together this book. Somany have been helpful in one way or another that it is difficult to remember and list all of them, though it is a pleasure to think back on the helpfulness of so many. This project was carried out under a generous grant from the Leo Baeck Institute, and this volume is published under the auspices of the institute. Special thanks go to Dr. Fred Grubel for his longstanding aid and advice as well as to Dr. Michael Riff, Dr. Marion Kaplan(now at Queens College),and Ms. Diane Spielman for their advice and for supplying materials from the institute archives and library. I have also benefitted from a grant from the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, for which I am most grateful. Dr. Steven Huberman of the Jewish Federation of Los Angeles gave some very valuable advice in the initial stages of this inquiry. Dr. Bruce Phillips of Hebrew Union College gave considerable time and effort in showing me how to prepare the mail survey.Professor Charles Liebman generously lent me material from his early study of Washington Heights. Adolph Oppenheim gave me advice and material both on the Breuer community and on Washington Heights in general. He helped put me in touch with Frank Vardi and Alfred Fuerst of the New York City Planning Commission, who gave me valuable statistical material. Paul Haberman, oneof 15 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS the researchers in the 1965 survey undertaken by the Division of Sociomedical Sciences of the Columbia University School ofPublic Health and Administrative Medicine, gave me access to original computer tapes of the survey and helped me run new crosstabulations . Paul Ritterband and Steven Schwartz made available materials from the New York Jewish Population Study of 1981. Thanks are due to the boards of trustees and the staffs of the Congregation Shaare Hatikvah Ahavath Torah v'Tikwoh Chadoshoh , Congregation Beth Hillel and Beth Israel, and Hebrew Tabernacle Congregation for their generous cooperation in distributing the mail survey. Especial thanks go to Rabbi Shlomo Kahn, Rabbi Robert Lehman, and Rev. Walter Hes. David Marso gave invaluable aid in programming the data from the mail survey. Thanks are also due to the Computer Center of California State University at Northridge for their generosity in making computer time available to me. I received valuable suggestions from Professor Sanford Jacoby of UCLA and Rabbi Dr. Levi Meier, both former residents of Washington Heights. I had very fruitful discussions with Manny Kirchheimer, who made a film entitled We Were So Beloved about the reactions of the German Jews of Washington Heights to the Holocaust. Fruitful information also came from acorrespondence with Dr. Marion Berghahn, author of a book on German Jews in England. After I had completed the first draft of this book, Professor Benny Kraut sent me a copy of his article "Ethnic-Religious Ambiguities in an Immigrant Synagogue: The Case of New Hope Congregation," which appears in Jack Wertheimer's American Synagogue: Transplanted and Transformed (Oxford University Press, 1987). Kraut's study deals with a German Orthodox synagogue congregation in Cincinnati which bears a remarkable resemblance to the community of Washington Heights. It confirms many of the impressions I had of the culture of the Washington Heights community. An expanded version of Kraut's article is German Jewish Orthodoxy in an Immigrant Synagogue: Cincinnati 's New Hope Congregation and the Ambiguities of Ethnic Religion (MarkusWiener, 1988). This manuscript was read in its entirety by Rabbi Shlomo Kahn, Rabbi Robert Lehman, Professor David Ellenson, and Professor Ismar Schorsch. I thank all of them for their effort and the very useful feedback they gave me. I would like to thank Mrs. 16 Acknowledgments Bruno Stern and the Jan Thorbecke Verlag in Sigmaringen, West Germany, for permission to use photographs from Bruno Stern's memoirs So war es. Finally, I would like to thank my family for their support and patience, which made it possible for me to complete this work. My mother and father, Yette and Max Lowenstein, provided me with the home environment that was a model of the culture I have studied here. They gave me valuable advice and counsel. I am happy that my father was able to read and comment on the first draft, though I am tremendously saddened that he did not live to see the book in...