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>> 73  Polish Jewry, American Jewish Immigrant Philanthropy, and the Crisis of 1929 Rebecca Kobrin It was a particularly cold morning on December 12, 1930, when thousands lined up in front of the Bank of United States on Orchard Street to withdraw their savings. Founded in 1913 by Jacob Marcus, the Bank of United States stood as a celebrated symbol of Jewish economic success . Holding over $268 million in deposits, the Bank of United States embodied the promise of America to four hundred thousand workingclass Jews who entrusted their money, and their organizations’ savings, spanning from large enterprises such as the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union to the smaller Brisker Relief Committee and other landsmanshaft (Jewish immigrant hometown) associations, which all held accounts with this institution. But several bad investments forced the Bank of United States to close its fifty-seven branches. As the fourthlargest deposit bank in New York City, its closure marked a watershed moment in American economic history. While many scholars and popular writers discuss the role this bank’s closing played in the onset of the Great Depression, few have commented on the havoc it wrought for New York’s Jewish community and those Jewish communities that had grown dependent on money from New York.1 Jewish immigrants in 1930s New York, as Sam Levenson has described, had to rethink their commitments and obligations. Despite the pleas they received from relatives and friends still in Europe, they no longer could send money to relatives abroad because they themselves “never made money.”2 This chapter examines the impact the economic turmoil of 1929 had on the philanthropic ties forged between Jews in Poland and the United States during the 1920s. While the flow of money from America 74 > 75 leaders, not struggling foreigners who faced rising anti-immigrant sentiment and anti-Semitism. The stock-market crash of 1929 that ultimately led to numerous bank failures transformed the lives of immigrant Jews in America—who relished defining themselves in the crucible of their foreign charitable efforts—as well as Jews in Poland who were dependent on American aid. To be sure, the cessation of donations took place against a backdrop of an increasingly complicated economic and political situation in Poland, but Polish Jewish communal life was drastically altered on the local level by the practical evaporation of American funds. Individual families could no longer fund their relatives’ businesses in Poland. Landsmanshaft organizations closed their overseas philanthropic groups. Jews in Poland, with their lifeline pulled, were forced to search for new survival strategies, as immigrant Jews in America were forced to rethink what it meant to be an American Jew in a land, to use the words of historian Beth Wenger, filled with “uncertain promises.”11 War, Revolution, and the Polish Jewish Welfare Crisis: The 1920s and the Creation of a Polish-American Jewish Philanthropic Brotherhood Shlomye Etonis’s memoir of his experiences in the city of Minsk during the First World War was typical for thousands of Jews living in cities nestled in the Pale of Settlement, precariously perched on the First World War’s eastern front. As he recalled, “everyone was frightened and anxious.”12 Forced to live in a cellar because of the fierce battles being fought in the street, Etonis described what he found afterward: “When the Red Army finally retreated . . . our town lay in ruins. Here, a broken window pane; there a wall full of holes, . . . dead bodies lying in the street like garbage, lying in their own blood as if it were dirty water.”13 Indeed, the First World War was terrifying for Jews throughout the former Pale of Settlement, as thousands of Jewish civilians lost their lives, businesses, and homes. In Brisk (Russian: Brest-Litovsk; Polish: Brzec nad Bugiem), a city of close to sixty thousand residents before the war (where Jews constituted two-thirds of the population), only eighteen hundred families returned after the war. Eighty percent of these families were unemployed since they no longer could earn their livings from commerce, trade, and tax collection as they had before the war. When 76 > 77 established kehile (democratically elected Jewish municipal council; plural: kehilos) became crippled by political divisions, as a result of its economic limitations and corrupt leadership. In Bialystok, elected officials embezzled communal funds to help pay for a summer vacation in 1920, prompting the local Red Cross to refuse to give the kehile funds for Jewish poor relief.21 In Brisk, the elected religious and secular Jewish leaders were...

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