by Rakhmiel Peltz Introduction to the catalog for "Still Home: The Jews of South Philadelphia," an exhibit of photographs by Harvey Finkle at the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia. Exhibit is in place from September 17, 2000 to July 15, 2001. The year 2000 marks 118 years since the first ships docked on the Delaware River to deliver the leading edge of the wave of East European Jewish immigrants to Philadelphia. South Philadelphia became the home to most of these arrivals from the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires. In New York City, the analogous Jewish immigrant neighborhood is the Lower East Side, which became the object of nostalgia trips and loomed high in Jewish communal consciousness from as early as the 1920s.1 Although some Jews started to leave South Philadelphia to settle in new neighborhoods almost as soon as they arrived, the area remained Philadelphia's major Jewish neighborhood well into the 1930s. But its public profile and its key role in the history of Philadelphia Jewry was never as recognized as the image of the Lower East Side. This is beginning to change, and some observers are searching to understand why this is happening, and why now? I am a native New Yorker, who has lived in Philadelphia on and off for many years. I have always been keenly interested in Jewish communal life, yet I too remained unaware of this neighborhood and did not visit Jewish South Philadelphia until sixteen years after moving to the city. Indeed, from that time on, I was smitten by the neighborhood and would return repeatedly, even during the eleven years when I lived in Massachusetts. As I have worked to grasp the magnetism of my attraction to the neighborhood, I have come to accept the relationship as my own coming home --- my symbolic return to all that roots me in life --- to familial generations long gone, to a neighborhood now vanished, to a Jewish identity that comes with the air we breathe. What is so special about this neighborhood? It has remained a living legacy, rather than a solely nostalgic source of memories, because of the people who have stayed. The neighborhood folks who stayed have a special feeling for place, a feeling that is difficult to describe in words. It is linked to physical cues, but is largely a sense of being comfortable, at ease, at home, based on knowing the surroundings and being known by the inhabitants. It takes time to attain this positive feeling for place, and it can only happen when daily life involves contacts among neighbors. Residents receive the message, you belong here, from the physical environment and during repeated interaction with others, including those who are no longer alive. Time and again, neighborhood residents tell me that this is a friendly place, where you know everyone and everyone knows you. They still feel this, years later, even when they interact with fewer neighbors, even when their parents are gone and their children have moved away. When I first walked through Jewish South Philadelphia in 1982, I was shocked to learn that Jews could live in an area that looked so rundown. Boarded windows, abandoned cars, sparsely planted trees did not seem like the markers of a Jewish neighborhood to me.2 It was not until much later that I realized that the signifiers of a warm Jewish home for South Philadelphians were quite different from the ones I had first noticed. I learned about these signs by listening carefully, over long periods of time to the neighborhood residents. "Staying put," which has been celebrated as an all-too-rare-but-treasured ingredient of contemporary life, is not a characteristic of American Jewish life.3 In Philadelphia alone, one can count many Jewish neighborhoods that were spawned by South Philadelphia, but are empty of Jewish residents today. Some may have been as short-lived as fifteen to twenty years. Yet, in the southern reaches of South Philadelphia, near Snyder and Oregon avenues, between Fourth and Eighth streets, three synagogues and the JCCs Stiffel Center are open today after more than seventy years of existence. The lesson to learn here from the children of immigrants who have kept the immigrant neighborhood alive is that their special feeling for place, their staying put, has enabled future generations to receive the traditions of the immigrants and to become acquainted with the strong ethnic identity emanating from the residents' life experience. In order to identify with a place, one must stay for a while and convey to the next generation a legacy of being and becoming. The ability to intimately intertwine self, group and place does not seem to be dependent on the quality of the place. The landscape can be the polluted vista of urban industry in Pittsburgh, or the drab two-story row-house blocks of South Philadelphia. There are those of us who refuse to give in to the social forces that insist on moving forward in such a way that "we must let loose of the story that has grounded us."4 The Jews of contemporary South Philadelphia decided years ago, unlike their siblings who moved away, to remain close to their immigrant parents and grandparents. They were different from the urban and suburban pioneers who yearned for new vistas. The South Philadelphia diehards appreciated the warm, familiar neighborhood and treasured the immigrant story. It was a wintry morning at the Stiffel Center and twenty-nine elderly adult children of Jewish immigrants were holding a discussion in Yiddish on the topic, "Parents and Children -- To Be a Child in an Immigrant Household." I asked them to recount what they remember most about their parents when they were growing up, and what enduring lessons they learned from their parents. The response came quickly, largely about their parents' lives, about who the parents were. We also heard about moral values the parents conveyed, chiefly by example. For one participant, the parental motto was first and foremost "tse zayn a mentsh" (to be a kind person) and, second, to be a religious Jew. For Beyle, her father was a model of achievement, even though the areas in which he excelled were far from her interests. A tinsmith by trade, he made the Jewish stars that used to adorn the elegant large synagogue in the neighborhood. He sang with outstanding cantors and held leadership roles in his farein (hometown association), the Jewish Orphan's Home, and a senior citizen's club. Esther, another voice, recalled what she termed, "warm memories," ones that have to do with flexibility, with being slow in bringing anger to relationships, and being lenient in Jewish religious proclivities. The immigrant parents remained towering figures in the eyes of their American-born sons and daughters. When I sat down with one pair of neighborhood residents in their kitchen, I learned that these parents of grown adult children were living in the wife's parents' house. What an experience -- to raise your child in the same rooms in which you grew up. Another neighbor, Tsine, had lived in her house for fifty years, down the street from her family's house of almost seventy years, the building in which she grew up, where her parents lived and which her younger sister still occupied. The lessons Tsine ascribed most to her mother's influence were the moral ones, dealing with how to treat people and make life decisions. She was proud that she never hurts anyone intentionally. "But you know what my mother used to say," she told me, "tsen mul a kish, in eyn mul a patsh, iz nokh nit glaykh (ten kisses do not make up for one slap)." Further, she continued: "In di mame ot ekhet gezukt, befor de vort farlozt dayn moyl bisti de balebus, en nu(kh) dem iz yener der balebus (And my mother also said, before the word leaves your mouth, you are in charge, and after that, it's out of your control, the other person is responsible)." In recent years, Tsine has been spending a lot of time reviewing life together with her neighborhood friends, whom she meets regularly at the synagogue and the senior center. The memories she conjures up are most vivid when they are physically reinforced, as on the occasions when she prepares her mother's recipes for her son-in-law. The constant cues of the street on which she grew up have provided a rich stage for her memories. By telling stories and quoting proverbs, Tsine brings to life her past and her long gone family. When I listened to narratives involving her mother and husband, it seemed that she was not addressing me, but them. The South Philadelphia memories are special because they are conjured up where they first formed, surrounded by living links to the immigrant generation. During the twentieth century, very little was written about the history of the Jewish community in South Philadelphia. Nor did it engage the imaginations of photographers, film makers, and other documentarians. In the past few years, however, several varied works have appeared.5 In addition, an exhibition has been mounted that celebrates the contemporary residents in photographic images and interview excerpts.6 The Jewish community in Philadelphia seems to have evolved a mature distance from the neighborhood's history; accordingly, a new appreciation of the neighborhood has been generated. When I first began my research work with South Philadelphia residents in the 1980s, almost no one from outside the neighborhood took part in activities at the local Jewish institutions. Things began to change in the late 1990s. Contacts started to increase. The women who collected recipes from the Stiffel Center members to compile a cookbook, the young Jewish Federation leaders who played pool with men at the Stiffel Center, the girl from Chestnut Hill, who with her family and guests, celebrated her becoming a Bat Mitzvah at Congregation Shivtei Yeshuron Ezras Israel, the synagogue, still active, where her immigrant great grandfather had been a member for many years and where her father had celebrated his Bar Mitzvah, all of these people did not come to South Philadelphia to commemorate the past, but, rather, to experience a special present. Immigrant neighborhoods have not served solely as the focus for nostalgia trips. Immigrant neighborhoods provide contemporary citizens with a living place, an area containing institutions that are open and that function, encompassing a variety of individuals who possess rich memories that are actively invoked in the present. South Philadelphia is such a bridge between past and future. As we walk on this path, let us keep our eyes and ears open to the images and voices of our living history. 1 Beth Wenger, "Memory as Identity: The Invention of the Lower East Side," American Jewish History 85 (1997): 3-27. Return 2 Rakhmiel Peltz, From Immigrant to Ethnic Culture: American Yiddish in South Philadelphia ( Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), 3-4. Return 3 Scott R. Sanders, Staying Put: Making a Home in an Industrial Landscape (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993). Return 4 Laurie Graham, Singing The City: The Bonds of Home in an Industrial Landscape (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998), 163. Return 5 See, e.g., Harry D. Boonin, The Jewish Quarter of Philadelphia, A History and Guide, 1881-1930 (Philadelphia, 1999), a history of the Northern area until 1930; Allen Meyers, The Jewish Community of South Philadelphia (Charleston, S.C.: Arcadia Publishing, 1998), a collection of historic, photographic images; Sandy Wizov, A Corner Affair (no publication place, 1999), a nostalgic album of photographs and memorabilia; JCCs Stiffel Senior Center, Memories & Meichels (Philadelphia, 1999), a cookbook containing recently collected recipes and reminiscences; Murray Dubin, South Philadelphia: Mummers, Memories and the Melrose Diner (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996), a panoramic presentation of all ethnic groups in the neighborhood; and Peltz, From Immigrant to Ethnic Culture, an ethnography of the contemporary community. Return 6 Harvey Finkle, Still Home: The Jews of South Philadelphia, National Museum of American Jewish History, September 2000 - July 2001, Philadelphia, PA. Return |