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103 Though no one could trace the rumor’s origins, by the afternoon of Wednesday, December 11, 1901, the devastating news had been repeated by thousands of lips. It gathered a force of its own, wending its way through the Hester Street pushcart market, across tenement airshafts, from one stoop to the next, and up into the garment lofts. Sender Jarmulowsky’s bank had run dry! Shoppers stopped haggling, storekeepers shuttered their shops, and tenement housewives threw down their market baskets and formed “an excited mob, in which there were mingled shouts and cries of anger, pleading, grief, and despair.” The crowd converged at the bank’s entrance, on the corner of Orchard and Canal Streets. Though it soon appeared that the venerable Jarmulowsky had ample funds to satisfy all requests—he and his clerks disbursed $35,000 on Wednesday and kept their doors open past the standard closing hours—the lines showed no signs of abating. Rather, they continued to extend for blocks in several directions as “many terror-stricken depositors kept their places in line in front of the doors all night, and were desperate when the institution resumed payments at 10 o’clock [Thursday] morning, and other depositors by the hundreds arrived.”1 A New York Times journalist surveyed the scene that morning, noting the diversity of the crowd. Some passbooks showed accounts as large as $1,000, others as small as $5 or $6. But the depositors’ anxiety united them. The reporter sensed not just the sums of money involved but the many hours of rugged toil that those sums had exacted from the passbooks’ owners and the broader hopes and ambitions they promised. Mary Geltman, of 4 Orchard Street, arrived at six a.m. Thursday to relieve her brother and redeem her $68 C H A P T E R 4 Immigrant Citadels: Tenements, Shops, Stores, and Streets 104 ■ e m e r g i n g m e t r o p o l i s savings: “She blushingly confessed that she was going to be married soon, and wanted to take no chances on getting her bridal outfit.”2 Had the journalist elicited more “confessions,” he might have reported a young husband saving money for ship tickets for his wife and children in Europe, a presser laboring in a garment shop with hopes of buying a sewing machine and starting his own enterprise, a mother in need of cash for the next installment on the family’s prized piano, or perhaps a merchant who hoped to move his family beyond the teeming Lower East Side. These anxious East Siders, holding onto their passbooks like life preservers amid a swirling sea, were a microcosm not only of the neighborhood’s Jews that day but also of the collective strivings of the hundreds of thousands of Jews who made the Lower East Side their first home in America in the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century . For close to fifty years, the East Side was known as the city’s premier Jewish neighborhood, welcoming newcomers and sending the more Americanized on their way. Even as one family bade farewell to an East Side tenement apartment for the enticements of Harlem, Brooklyn, or the Bronx, a new family arrived to claim their apartment, perhaps applying a new layer of wallpaper but encountering similar challenges and nursing the same hopes for mobility as their predecessors. These immigrants sewed, hawked, and haggled to build better lives. Pious synagogue-goers, Yiddish-theater devotees, and Socialist firebrands alike dutifully visited the bank weekly to deposit portions of their own paychecks or the collective earnings of their family’s labor. On normal days, as they waited in line to deposit or withdraw, they perhaps entertained hopes for their future lives in New York. The potential for success was there, firmly rooted in the ethnic enclave. The story of Sender Jarmulowsky, reputed to be a “millionaire ,” showed how a Talmud scholar with ambition could start a bank and forge a career as a philanthropist and benefactor of schools, hospitals, and synagogues. The people in line could surely see the rooftop finials of the Eldridge Street Synagogue, an early product of Jarmulowsky’s largesse. Businessmen also mingled with the crowd: “Several . . . Hebrews of the more intelligent class . . . told everybody that there was no need of uneasiness and cautioned all not to discount their claims.” Another real estate merchant cum philanthropist , Jonas Weil, had an “enormous roll of bills in his pocket...

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