Jerusalem Report

The number 350 is all the rage among North American Jews these days, as the community observes it 350th anniversary. The first U.S. Jews, as most of us know, were New Yorkers, who arrived in what was then New Amsterdam from Recife, Brazil, in 1654. The main clearinghouse for anniversary events, http://www.celebrate350.org features a musical photomontage called “Celebrate 350: Jewish Life in America 1654-2004.” The site has a lot to offer: a timeline, calendar of events and links to anniversary happenings across (North) America, from the “Hidden Story of Yiddish” (in Los Angeles) to “Are We Really What We Eat? Jewish Foodways in America 1654-2004” (in Washington, D.C.) to “Capturing our Community: Milwaukee Jewish Oral Histories.”

If you can’t pass through a small town in America without looking for the old Jewish cemetery, check out the work of American Jewish Legacy, a national organization whose mandate is “to preserve and document the unique, rich history of traditional Jewish congregations, individuals and communities in the United States from Colonial times to the present.” Its website, http://www.ajlegacy.org lists the group’s projects, which include a state-by-state listing of important Jewish burial sites and a “History of Kosher Foods and Its Advertising.” The American Jewish Historical Society, at http://www.ajhs.org has another overview of U.S. Jewish history, and more links. There’s also a variety of posters on subjects from a knish man with his pushcart on the Lower East Side to Sandy Koufax’s rookie Brooklyn Dodgers jersey from 1955, three years before Da Bums moved west.

Another series of links checks out more specialized areas. The Goldring/Woldenberg Institute of Southern Jewish Life, at http://www.msje.org runs Museums of the Southern Jewish Experience in Natchez, Mississippi, where visitors hopefully outnumber the 25 Jews who still live in the town; and at the Henry S. Jacobs Camp in Utica, Mississippi, which houses the 1868 ark of the now-demolished Vicksburg synagogue. Home on the Range: Jewish Life in Texas http://www.applewest.com chronicles 150 years of Jewish experience in the Lone Star State.

At http://www.jwa.org the Jewish Women’s Archives, there are Internet portraits of 16 trailblazing “women of valor” (Emma Lazarus, Molly Picon, Henrietta Szold, among them), and an exhibit on Jewish women in politics. Teachers might be interested in purchasing (for $55) a lesson plan called “Making our Wilderness Bloom: 350 Years of Extraordinary Jewish Women in America.”

Of course, not everything was golden in the “goldene medineh.” Some not-so-nice Jewish boys, for example, were making a living in organized crime. At http://www.carpenoctem.tv I learned about the conclave at New York’s Franconia Hotel in November 1931, to “unite Jewish gangs across the country,” including Detroit’s Purple Gang and the Moe Dalitz forces in Cleveland. Not quite my idea of Jewish unity.

Howard Blas