City of Promises: A History of the Jews of New York, 3-volume box set

2 “Radical Reform”: Union through Charity

45 In the late 1880s, Rebekah Bettelheim Kohut typically started her day at home on Beekman Place, a quaint two-block stretch of four-story brownstones between Forty-Ninth and Fifty-First Streets. Kohut described these houses as “a little world in themselves. High up above the East River, and seemingly cut off from the rest of the city, the residents were very neighborly. All of the houses were of the four-story brownstone type, with high stoops.” Jewelers, writers, doctors, judges, marble dealers, and musicians gathered on the stoops and in the bay-windowed parlors to enjoy the cool evening East River breezes that made bearable the hot city summers.1 But though she began her day in this serene residential outpost, midday often found Kohut walking briskly through the congested streets of downtown Manhattan, stopping at various tenement apartments to deliver aid and comfort to the city’s Jewish immigrant poor. Kohut and members of her congregation’s sisterhood climbed “flight after flight” of the East Side tenements’ “creaking stairs” and experienced firsthand how “spaces were divided and subdivided into tiny cubicles called rooms, without air or daylight.” In the tenements, they paid “friendly visits” intended to assess the state of immigrant families in need.2 What motivated Kohut to leave her sunny, refined, comfortable brownstone for a district of ramshackle tenements? Middle-class New York Jews like Kohut felt an obligation to help immigrant Jews and labored actively to forge the formal charitable channels needed to connect Jews now living in separate neighborhoods and inhabiting very different New York worlds. In 1890, a census study focusing on American Jewish families who had been in the country for at least five years found that they had achieved solid, C H A P T E R 2 “Radical Reform”: Union through Charity 46 ■ e m e r g i n g m e t r o p o l i s middle-class standing. Throughout the nation, Jews had worked their way up from peddler to small businessman, wholesaler, and professional: of the 18,031 men surveyed, 5,977 were retail dealers; 3,041 were accountants, bookkeepers , and clerks; 2,147 were wholesale merchants and dealers; and 1,797 were commercial travelers. Nearly two-thirds of the families surveyed had at least one servant.3 Many New York Jews too had attained middle-class status, but the city likely had a heavier concentration of both the wealthy and the poor than did the American Jewish community as a whole. Just as the majority of the city’s eighty thousand Jews had achieved middle-class status by 1880, hundreds of thousands of newcomers arrived to reinforce the city’s Jewish working class. Central European and, increasingly, eastern European Jews streamed into the city with few material assets. At the same time, New York’s vitality as the nation ’s economic center produced a wealthy elite. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the nation’s wealthiest and most illustrious Jews made their home in New York City, including department-store magnates such as Nathan and Isidor Straus of Macy’s and Lyman and Joseph Bloomingdale and such famed financiers as Joseph Seligman, Solomon Guggenheim, and Jacob Schiff. Communal leaders not only enlarged the agendas of congregations and other associations to include increased charity for newcomers but also created entirely new forms of charitable and communal support. They devised the charitable communal channels to connect brownstone Jews with tenement Jews and to bring Fifth Avenue Jews to East Broadway. At base, charity work underlined a sense of social responsibility toward the newcomers on the part of the more established. But translating charitable impulses into formal networks and institutions took years and sparked heated debates. Fraternal orders and communal defense organizations offered alternative models of communal organization. Nevertheless, the creation of a New York Jewish community owes much to the fostering of charitable networks and institutions, and they served as its core and structure. Established Jewish New Yorkers could look to broader New York charitable trends as well as their own tradition of giving. In nineteenth-century New York, as elsewhere in the country, philanthropic enterprises were organized along confessional lines. Even publicly funded services were often delivered by groups with religious affiliations, and, naturally, the majority of these agencies “Radical Reform” ■ 47 were Protestant. Missionary activity was never far from charitable work, and the Catholic and Jewish poor...