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Newark was incorporated in 1836, just in time to receive the German Jewish immigrants who pioneered so much of its commerce and industry. Later, Eastern European Jews, escaping from pogroms, discriminatory taxes, and legal restrictions on education and employment, swelled the city’s population. Worship and informational meetings took place in private homes until there were sufficient funds to build a synagogue and bring a rabbi to America. The first Newark congregation, B’nai Jeshurun, was founded shortly before mid-century; only Paterson’s synagogue of the same name preceded it in New Jersey. With new synagogues in a new country, however, came changes. Once governed by rabbis, scripture, and halacha ( Jewish law), immigrants began to adopt new traditions. Many synagogues, for example, initially conducted services in Yiddish, but the spirit of independence engendered by the New World would inspire Jews to shape uniquely American forms of Judaism.
In Newark, many immigrants supported synagogues according to their country of origin. For example, Polish immigrants attended B’nai Abraham, while Russian Jews attended Anshe Russia. There seemed to be a synagogue for every Jewish sensibility, and the history of Jewish Newark is filled with ideological disputes that led to divisions into new congregations. Eventually, there would be as many as fifty synagogues in Newark, providing a range of essential services to their congregants— worship, nursery care for the children of working parents, book lending, family counseling, and translation assistance. The diversity and magnitude of services represented the Jewish belief that aid to others in this life is of primary importance. The Talmud dictates that a good deed or charity—tsedaka—is equal to all other religious tenets combined.
Many of the talents that Jews brought from abroad found ready outlet in the growing industrial and commercial city that was Newark, a city of immigrants. The first Jewish resident was Louis Trier, a tanner. Soon tailors and peddlers were also abundant, moving from street selling to small shops, congregating in an area of Newark which eventually became the Third or Central Ward. Much of early Jewish life centered around Prince Street and Springfield Avenue. By 1948 some 58,000 Jews lived in Newark, accounting for 12 percent of its population. But the Central Ward was only the first of an upwardly mobile progression of Jewish enclaves in Newark. Jews would soon move to Clinton Hill and then to the Weequahic and Forest Hill areas. Not surprisingly, when upward mobility continued to the suburbs, nearby towns such as Belleville, Hillside, and the Oranges were primary choices.
Although earlier immigrant groups tended to feel superior to later arrivals, the charity of well-established Jews tow ard the community as a w hole was a hallmark of Jewish life in Newark. In the second half of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth, many Jewish residents of the Third Ward and the other Jewish sections of Newark needed such charity. Conditions in the wooden tenements and multifamily houses were crow ded and cold in winter, hot in summer. Many apartments had no bathrooms, so public baths around the city were visited once a week. Conditions in Newark’s innumerable factories were usually miserable. In concert with Jewish workers in nearby Paterson, labor unions, many of w hose leaders were Jews, became another force of uplift for impoverished immigrants. Of course, not all Jews entered reputable professions. Abner “Longy” Zwillman of Newark was one of the chief gangsters of the early twentieth century. “I had to get money somehow,” he explained. “I got it—bootlegging.”
For most Jews, however, poverty increased their desire to succeed through education. Temples such as B’nai Jeshurun provided day schools and Hebrew schools when public education was not yet freely available. The Plaut Memorial Hebrew Free School and the Talmud Torah of Newark, both founded in the late nineteenth century, were important sources of Jewish education. Jewish social clubs such as the No Name Club, an early club for businessmen to meet and make connections, as well as the numerous Zionist clubs that appeared in the 1920s, were a key ingredient of Jewish community life. Major Jewish philanthropic societies appeared in Newark, continuing a tradition of providing aid to the needy.
The centrality of family life to the Jewish community was reflected in these charities. The Friendly Sisters was organized in 1852 to help families in need, and the Hebrew Benevolent and Orphan Asylum Society began its work shortly after. Philanthropy and community building such as that sponsored by the department store businessman Louis Bamberger, his sister Caroline Bamberger Fuld, and many others in the early decades of the twentieth century dispersed Jewish culture and community life throughout the state. Although anti-Semitism was prominent in the years leading up to World War II, Jewish philanthropists as well as Jews in the arts and sciences contributed to Jewish acceptance. Newark’s “golden age” of the 1920s through the 1940s saw the building of an enlarged Beth Israel Hospital and cultural institutions such as the famed High Street YM-YWHA and the Newark Museum; all these institutions benefited from the generosity of Louis Bamberger. After World War II, the Jewish Family Service Association of Essex County assisted Jewish families in Europe by helping to bring them to the Newark area to start a new life.
The Lewitt family illustrates the immigrant experience of Jews in Newark. In 1885, sixteen-year-old Martha and her eighteen-year-old husband, Julius, left Russia and came to Newark with their newborn son, Max. They stayed briefly with a Jewish family before establishing a butcher shop and a home of their own. Julius and Martha later sponsored other members of their family to come to the United States. Julius’s brother, Ellis, came to Newark and both raised their families there. Julius and Martha had eight children, three sons and five daughters, who lived and worked in Newark, owned several businesses, raised families, and contributed to the solidarity of the Jewish community. The third Newark generation of Lewitts also married and lived in Newark but then joined the exodus to the suburbs.
With the dispersal of Jews to the suburbs, Newark as a great center of Jewish life disappeared. In the most suburban state in the nation, Jewish life now flourishes in a more decentralized way than it did when Newark was its focus. What was once the Jewish Federation of Newark now is found on a highway near Morristown and is known not as the “ Newark Federation” or even the “Essex County Federation,” but simply as “MetroWest.” MetroWest is an interesting term, suggestive of a sentimental need to remain attached to urban origins while recognizing how much Newark’s Jews, like early pioneers, have headed west. While the Whippany-based MetroWest serves Essex, Warren, Morris, Sussex, and parts of Union, Somerset, and Hudson counties, its large facility serves many Jews from other northern New Jersey counties as well as non-Jews. A less cohesive, more heterogeneous Jewish community needs a community center, and MetroWest supplies that need.
B’Nai Jeshurun: One Congregation’s Story
From Newark to Short Hills, from Orthodox to Reform, from worship in a congregant’s home to a succession of locations, Congregation B’nai Jeshrun has seen many changes in its nearly 160-year history. B’nai Jeshurun, meaning “Children of the Upright,” was founded in 1848 as an Orthodox synagogue. Three of the five signers of the incorporation papers were brothers: Abraham, Solomon, and Isaac Newman. Abraham’s grandson, Jacob Newman, a lawyer who practiced in Newark, was the congregation’s president when the temple celebrated its 100th anniversary in 1948. Earlier, in 1881, the congregation became the first in New Jersey to join the Reform movement. A Jew from England, Isaac Cohen, provided the congregation’s first worship space in his home. Initially without a rabbi, the congregation rapidly outgrew Cohen’s home and rented a succession of spaces. Eventually, it erected its own building on Washington Street in 1858. In 1868 it moved to larger quarters on Washington Street and in 1915 to a new building on High Street. .
The High Street synagogue served the congregation from 1915 to 1968. Pews in this synagogue were sold to members as a way to finance the building. But as more congregants moved to the suburbs, B’nai Jeshurun established an alternate, suburban location in the 1950s, using a renovated home on Center Street in South Orange for certain functions. Thus, its transition to the suburbs took place gradually. .
In 1968, the current, modern temple in Short Hills was dedicated. B’nai Jeshurun’s several sites are emblematic of the history of the Jews of Newark and their movement through Newark and eventually out of the city to the surrounding suburbs. Currently serving over 1,200 families, the Short Hills location maintains a sense of the temple’s past in photos and artifacts from prior locations scattered throughout the building. Descendants of the Newman family still belong to the congregation. Wherever it has been situated, from Isaac Cohen’s home in Newark to its current quarters in Short Hills, B’nai Jeshurun has retained the spirit of its original Newark-based founders.