A century ago, New York City’s northernmost borough was home to one of the largest concentrations of Jews in the world. That population has dwindled significantly since then, but the Bronx’s Fordham University, a Jesuit institution, has begun a project to collect artifacts of this Jewish community’s history, focusing on the minutiae of everyday life. Julia Gergely reports:
For the last three years, Fordham has been collecting and cataloging items that detail a once-thriving Jewish community in the Bronx: yearbooks full of Jewish last names, bar-mitzvah invitations, phonebooks full of Jewish-owned businesses—all the simple transactions that define an era in history.
During the first half of the 20th century, Jewish life thrived in the Bronx. There were 260 registered synagogues in 1940, and the borough produced some of the biggest Jewish names in show business, fashion, literature and more: the designer Ralph Lauren, the politician Bella Abzug, the novelist E.L. Doctorow, the filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, the Miss America Bess Myerson, the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Robert Lefkowitz.
At the community’s peak in 1930, the Bronx was approximately 49-percent Jewish, according to the borough’s official historian, Lloyd Ultan. South of Tremont Avenue, the number reached 80 percent. Most of the Jewish Bronx was of East European descent; many were first generation Americans whose parents had immigrated and lived on the Lower East Side, but who could now afford to live in less cramped neighborhoods with more trees and wider streets.
The archive at Fordham is one of the only physical collections of everyday material from Jewish residents of the borough, according to Magda Teter, the co-director of the Center for Jewish Studies at the university, who spearheaded the project. . . . “They may not be the most beautiful things, but we are interested in what people actually used and lived with,” Teter said.
Read more on Jewish Telegraphic Agency: https://www.jta.org/2022/11/15/ny/how-a-catholic-university-amassed-a-treasure-trove-of-jewish-artifacts-from-the-bronx