The Great Jewish “Fence” of the 19th-Century New York Underworld

For a quarter-century, New York City’s most successful dealer in stolen goods was a German-Jewish immigrant named Fredericka “Marm” Mandelbaum. Allan Levine tells her story:

Mandelbaum portrayed herself as the owner of a modest dry goods and haberdashery store on Clinton Street in the Lower East Side; a widow after her husband, Wolf, died in 1875, the mother of four children, and a respected member of Congregation Temple Rodeph Sholom, then located near her store and home. (The store was on the ground floor and the family’s luxurious apartment was on the second and third floors.)

Yet in reality, for more than two decades Marm Mandelbaum was the premier “receiver of stolen goods” in New York City. Known throughout the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, she operated an extensive criminal enterprise, supported by a small army of thieves, burglars, pickpockets, shoplifters, and “second-story” climbers who worshipped her. But she was protected or ignored by New York City police officers and detectives, who were willfully blind to her illegal activities, or were paid off by her.

Mandelbaum’s rise to infamy in the New York crime world was a matter of circumstance. In 1850, the twenty-five-year-old Fredericka (Weisner) Mandelbaum joined her husband, Wolf Mandelbaum, who had journeyed to New York sometime earlier. They were among the 3 million German-speaking immigrants escaping economic hardship and restrictive government regulation who arrived in the United States in the period from 1820 to 1880, of whom an estimated 150,000 were Jewish. Many German Jews and non-Jews ended up in New York City, where, like Fredericka and Wolf, they settled in the crowded tenement houses of Kleindeutschland (Little Germany), the East Side neighborhood.

Read more at Tablet

More about: American Jewish History, Crime, New York City

 

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society