Students in the market square of Białystok on the pilot Helix Project, Summer 2012

Since Yiddishkayt started working to get the Helix Project off the ground, I thought I wouldn’t be surprised by the response of major Jewish philanthropies and that, although there would be the inevitable disappointments associated with starting something new, I’d be prepared for whatever came our way. But I did not expect that our project, which has the backing of today’s leading scholars of Jewish history and culture, would not receive any support whatsoever from Jewish federations, foundations, and philanthropies.

Even though philanthropies’ “giving priorities” are often slow to change, responses to our program have made clear just how tied the Jewish establishment is to a particularly parochial and insular view of Jewish life, so detached from the mainstream and from our history.

Over the past year:

• A major holocaust organization reported that even though their mission is to preserve the memory of European Jews so “that the world does not forget both how they lived and how they died,” our program did not include “enough death.”

• We were told that funding a program that explored Jewish history in Europe would be “improbable” if it did not include a visit to Israel.

• For our focus on the variety of Jewish life in the diaspora and claim that there had undoubtably always been a spectrum of religious belief among Jews — as among any people — we were called (in the Los Angeles Times), “just stupid” and “really sick.”

• Another funding organization responded to our statement that “the past 70 years of Jewish history needs to be placed in a context of a millennium of diaspora Jewish life,” by saying that it is too much to ask for such a major change in the way mainstream Jewish history is presented and to lower expectations about what Jewish educators can accommodate.

• We have received numerous angry emails, demanding to know why we were going to take students “to the land of killers,” often including — without any sense of irony — an urging rather to take students to the place that has “always been central to Jewish life, Israel.”

• After advancing to a second phase of a grant, we were forced to withdraw our application because the organization’s funds for the study of Jewish topics could go “only to Jewish students.”

• Included in a funding rejection was an encouragement to join forces with the (only) other non-profit working in pre-Holocaust European Jewish history — notwithstanding that it has rather different objectives from ours — because, apparently, there just aren’t enough resources to support two. This is the case, even though nearly every major U.S. city has multiple offices in their Jewish Federations, Bureaus of Jewish Education, and individual organizations devoted specifically to the Holocaust.

And the list of unforgettable comments goes on and continues to grow…

Yiddishkayt imagines an approach to Jewish culture that is liberated from this small-minded thinking. In 1937, the great historian, Salo Baron, wrote:

Today’s Jewish establishment, for reasons political, cynical, but more often thoughtless, has become fully devoted to a vision of Jewish history that attempts to unite under a banner of victimhood. Under this banner, it would seem, future generations can be bullied into supporting militarism and chauvinism, scared into religious observance, or guilted into acts of differentiation and group identity at the expense of understanding a common vision of humanity and of a better, more loving world.

Rob Adler-Peckerar
Executive Director — Yiddishkayt

If you want to get involved in community-based funding of our broader view of Jewish culture, check us out on IndieGogo!

Birthday of Bessie Abramowitz Hillman, Labor Leader

Bessie Abramowitz Hillman, a leading labor organizer in Chicago, was born on May 15, 1887. Abramowitz immigrated to the United States in 1905 and found work in the garment industry in Chicago as a button sewer. She quickly became a leader in her workplace, organizing fellow workers to protest cuts in their wages and unsafe working conditions. In 1910 she helped to lead what became a citywide strike of the garment industry.

Basheva Abramowitz was born in a village called Linowo, Grodno Province (today Лінова, Belarus). In 1905 at the age of 18 she immigrated to the US to join an older cousin already here. She found work as a button sewer in Chicago where some distant family lived. She was fired from her first job for organizing a protest against low pay and poor working conditions.

Freshly arrived in Chicago, Abramowitz enrolled in night school at Hull House while working during the day in a garment factory. Hull House was a settlement house, part of a movement of organizations to help new immigrants and poor workers with services like daycare, healthcare, and educational opportunities. The Chicago Hull House was founded by Jane Addams, who later supported the 1910 garment workers strike of which Abramowitz was a leader.

After being blacklisted for her role as a labor agitator, Abramowitz found work at the Hart, Shaffner and Marx factory under an assumed name. But she didn’t stay out of trouble; in 1910 she led a walkout of 16 workers to protest a cut in the piece rate. This walkout gained support and by October most of the 8000 workers at the factory had joined the strike, including Abramowitz’ future husband, Sidney Hillman.

Abramowitz and Sidney Hillman developed a friendship through their union involvement that eventually became a romantic relationship. They kept their relationship secret—so that Abramowitz could continue working—until May Day on 1916 when they announced their engagement by walking arm in arm at the head of the Chicago May Day parade. They were married three days later.

Yortsayt of Szmul Zygielbojm

Let my death be an energetic cry of protest against the indifference of the world which witnesses the extermination of the Jewish people without taking any steps to prevent it. In our day and age, human life is of little value; having failed to achieve success with my life, I hope my death may jolt the indifference of those who, perhaps even in this extreme moment, could save those Jews who are still alive.
—Szmul Zygielbojm (Artur) 12.V.1943

Birthday of Irving Berlin, Lyricist and Composer

Irving Berlin was born Yisroel (Isidore) Baline on May 11, 1888 in a shtetl near Mogilev (today Магілёў, Belarus). He was the youngest of eight children born to Moyshe (a cantor) and Lena Baline. The family settled in New York in 1893 and three years later Moyshe (now Moses) died leaving the family poverty-stricken. In 1902, Israel Baline left home and worked at various singing jobs in the city. In 1906, he wrote his first song, “Marie from Sunny Italy” and changed his name to Irving Berlin. He quickly became recognized as a clever lyricist, despite the fact that he had difficulty writing English and had never learned musical notation.

In the early 1910s, ragtime, a musical creation of Southern and Midwestern African-Americans, was becoming extremely popular. Berlin began to write lyrics for ragtime numbers and eventually wrote his own, including “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” which became a worldwide hit as recorded by Emma Carus in 1911. It became one of the most famous of all ragtime songs, with its sheet music selling over one million copies.

Berlin continued his success throughout the decade, writing popular musicals. While enlisted during the First World War, he wrote a hit military-themed show, Yip, Yip, Yaphank, which featured the hit “Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning” and for which he wrote “God Bless America” (whose melody was partially lifted from a Jewish dialect novelty song). “God Bless America” was later revised and famously performed by Kate Smith in 1938.

Berlin had an immensely successful musical theater career, creating hit shows such as Ziegfeld Follies (1919, 1920, 1927), Annie Get Your Gun (1946), and Call Me Madam (1950). He also wrote the scores for films Top Hat (1935), Follow the Fleet (1936), and Holiday Inn (1942), which featured one of his best known songs — “White Christmas.”

He died in New York on September 22, 1989.

Here’s an early dialect novelty hit by Berlin, “Yiddisha Nightingale,” recorded by Maurice Burkhardt in 1911:

Dedication of the Peretz Shrine, 1925

On May 10, 1925, in commemoration of the 10th yortsayt of the great master of Yiddish letters, Y.L. Peretz, an ornate shrine was unveiled in the Warsaw’s Jewish Cemetery on Okopowa Street. The Oyhel Perets (known in Polish as Mauzoleum Trzech Pisarzy, the mausoleum of the three writers: Peretz, An-sky, and Dinezon) was designed by the great sculptor Avrom Ostrzego and is a majestic monument to Peretz and stunning achievements of Yiddish culture in the Warsaw metropolis.

Birthday of Léon Bakst, Painter & Theater Designer

Léon Bakst was born Lev (or Leyb) Rosenberg on May 10, 1866 to a middle class Jewish family in Grodno (today: Гродно, Belarus). He studied at the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts as a noncredit student and worked as a book illustrator. He was expelled from the Academy after depicting figures in the Pietà as impoverished Jews. At the time of his first exhibition in 1889 he took the surname “Bakst” apparently based on his mother’s maiden name, although its origin is unclear.

At the beginning of the 1890s was actively a part of artistic circles in the city and he exhibited his works with the Society of Watercolourists. From 1893 to 1896 he studied in Paris at the Académie Julian and with Jean-Léon Gérôme. He returned to Russia and was part of a group of artists who founded Mir Iskusstva (World of Art). Along with his friends Serge Diaghilev and Alexandre Benois he founded the journal of the same name. He continued painting and teaching art. During the 1905 Revolution, Bakst was working for a wide range of arts magazines.

Bakst's 1912 set design for Maurice Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé

In 1909 Bakst went to Paris where he began designing stage sets and costumes for Diaghilev’s newly formed ballet company which eventually became the Ballets Russes. He produced scenery and costumes for Cléopâtre (1909), Scheherazade (1910), Carnaval (1910), Narcisse (1911), Le Spectre de la Rose (1911), and Daphnis et Chloé (1912). Through these and other works, Bakst achieved international fame. His bold designs and sumptuous colours combined with minutely refined details clearly influenced the fabrics and fashions of the day.

In 1922, Bakst went to Baltimore to visit his friend and patron, art philanthropist Alice Warder Garrett. She became Bakst’s representative in the United States and organized two exhibitions of the artist’s work in New York and traveling exhibitions throughout the U.S. Bakst also transformed the gymnasium of Garrett’s home into a colorfully Modernist private theatre, the only private theatre designed by Bakst.

Bakst died of a pulmonary ailment in 1924 in Paris.

Birthday of Dovid Edelstadt,  Anarchist & Poet

Dovid Edelstadt was born on May 9, 1866 in Kaluga (today: Калуга, Russia).  He was educated in Russian language and literature and he published his first poem in Russian at the age of 12. After the Kiev pogrom of 1881 he emigrated to the United States as part of an agrarian settlement program. Rather than moving to the countryside, however, he settled in Cincinnati to work in the garment industry.

In 1888 he moved to New York City, where he continued working in sweatshops and became involved in the developing anarchist movement. He participated in the first Jewish anarchist group in New York, The Pioniere der Freiheit (Pioneers of Liberty) – a highly Germanized Yiddish was considered elegant in those days). The Pioneers organized meetings, fundraisers, and rallies, and began to spread anarchist propaganda among Jewish immigrants. Their efforts led to the establishment of anarchist circles in other cities – Baltimore, Boston, Philadelphia, and Providence and established the newspaper, װארהייט (Truth). Edelstadt often traveled to Philadelphia to deliver talks and he also contributed to the London Yiddish anarchist paper אַרבייטער פֿרײַנד (Workers’ Friend).

At 24 years old, Edelstadt was the third chief editor of the פֿרײַע אַרבעטער שטימע (Free Voice of Labor). He wrote frequently in Yiddish, with works such as “אין קאַמף (In Struggle, or To Battle!),” “װאַכט אויף (Awake!),” and “מײַן צװאה (My Last Will and Testament),” that called upon his working-class audience to revolt against the upper classes and seize the means of production. “How long,” Edesltadt wrote in his poem “Awake!” “Will you create sparkling riches for those who rob you of your bread?” His extremely popular lyrics, sung in sweatshops and on picket lines, depict the world’s imperfections and the wondrous life to come after a social revolution.

Listen to the Lin Jaldati sing “אין קאַמף,” written by Edelstadt in 1889:

Edelstadt's Grave in Lakewood, Colorado

With the bad conditions in the sweatshops and the tenements, Edelstadt, a buttonhole-maker by trade, contracted tuberculosis and was forced to quit his post in October 1891. He moved to Denver to receive treatment. He continued to send poems to the paper, but he did not live much longer. Edelstadt died there on October 17, 1892 at the age of 26 and was buried near the Jewish Consumptive Relief Society campus off of Colfax Avenue in Lakewood, Colorado.

In the next few years after his death, cultural groups named after Edelstadt sprang up in Chicago, Boston, and other cities. In Argentina, many years later, Jewish anarchists named their cultural circle in Buenos Aires after him. The Free Voice of Labor eulogized him: “David Edelstadt, a fine idealistic nature, a spiritual petrel whose songs of revolt were beloved by every Yiddish-speaking radical.”

Yortsayt of Berek Joselewicz, Jewish-Polish Military Leader

Dov-Ber (Berek) Joselewicz was born on September 17, 1764 in Kretinga in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth—a small town near the city of Polągi (Palanga). After receiving a traditional Jewish education, he worked as the financial agent to the local landowner, Bishop Ignacy Jakub Massalski. In this capacity, he traveled frequently to Western Europe, conducting various entrepreneurial activities. With the fortune he amassed, Joselewicz settled in the Warsaw suburb of Praga, where he married his wife Rokhl around 1788 and became a supplier to the army.

Joselewicz was the only Jew in Praga who contributed money in support of the uprising against the third and final division of Poland. Hoping the uprising would usher in equal rights for Polish Jews, he joined the local militia and approached the leadership of the uprising with the suggestion that a Jewish fighting unit be formed. Tadeusz Kościuszko took up this proposal and in September 1794 appointed Joselewicz colonel of a Jewish cavalry squad. In October 1794, Joselewicz made a public appeal in Yiddish denouncing Russia and Prussia and calling upon Polish Jews to join this regiment. At Joselewicz’s request, they were allowed to keep their religious customs, including access to kosher food, abstaining from combat on the Sabbath when possible, and growing their beards. Joselewicz’s unit was popularly known as “the Beardlings.” However, the regiment was decimated in a Russian assault on Praga on November 4, 1794.

"Dov-Ber, Military Hero of the Polish Armed Forces" (Click to Englarge)

Joselewicz moved to Galicia, settling in Lwów in 1795. His suggestion that a Jewish volunteer troop be organized within the framework of the Austrian army was rejected by Vienna in October 1796. However, General Jan Henryk Dąbrowski took Joselewicz on as an officer. After seeing battle in Italy and Germany and achieving the rank of cavalry captain, Joselewicz petitioned to be discharged after the Peace of Lunéville on February 9, 1801. His sense of hopelessness about achieving Polish independence through the Polish legions, as well as the discrimination he had suffered as a Jew, played a decisive role in his decision.

With the founding of the Duchy of Warsaw, he returned to Poland, where, initially as an officer and later as commander of a cavalry squadron, he took part in many battles. On May 8, 1809, he was killed at the Battle of Kock amidst clashes with the Hungarian Hussars. In 1909, a monument was erected there in his honor.

Here’s Sidor Belarsky singing the song “מלחמה (War),” based on the poem by Avrom Reyzen about the deprivation and misery that follow after a father and husband heads off to war:

Los Angeles Jewish People’s Fraternal Order — International Workers’ Order, Jewish Section

The International Workers’ Order came into being as the left wing faction of the Arbeter Ring|Workmen’s Circle during a contentious political rift in 1922. This rift gave rise to an official break and the IWO was established in 1930, promoting leftist, progressive values and operating as a fraternal mutual aid organization and insurance provider. The Jewish Section of the IWO —  there were 13 other sections, including Italian, Ukrainian, Greek, Portuguese, Spanish, English, and other language branches — was the largest and, in Los Angeles, was one of the most important Jewish organizations in the first half of the 20th century.

After the Second World War, the rise of McCarthyism with its intense focus on Hollywood leftism together with the virulently antisemitic campaign of California State Senator Jack Tenney, made IWO a clear target. It also became the prime scapegoat for anti-communists and anti-progressives and for members of the L.A. Jewish community establishment, which sought to publicly distance themselves from leftism.

While the IWO-Jewish Section was one of the most popular Jewish organizations in the city and had more children enrolled in its school network than any other single Jewish organization, a campaign began in 1949 to expel it from the official Jewish Community. Members of the Jewish Community Council claimed that community support should not go to any “international” organization. Although the IWO-Jewish Section had become the Jewish People’s Fraternal Order (JPFO-IWO) in 1944, this was not enough. L.A. Jewish Community Council members challenged the JPFO as political movement and argued that its leftism was a violation of of the Community’s apolitical stance. When the JPFO argued that Zionist organizations were also overtly political, opponents claimed that its domestic politics were the problem and that support for the fledgling State of Israel was not to be considered a “political” cause. Partly to distinguish their particular liberal-left bent from the more radical JPFO, the Workmen’s Circle along with the American Jewish Congress argued vociferously for the JPFO’s expulsion.

The L.A. developments followed the pattern of the nationwide McCarthyite witchhunt. IWO was placed on the U.S. Attorney General’s list of “subversive” organizations (Dec. 5, 1947) and the New York State Insurance Department of moved on December 14, 1950 to liquidate the Order on grounds that its significant cash reserves — far beyond what commercial insurers were required to maintain — would, in the event of war with the Soviet Union, be turned over to the enemy.

After a four year heated struggle, during which the IWO was added to the state’s list of “subversive” organizations, the Jewish Community Council (which became the Jewish Federation of Los Angeles in 1959) expelled the JPFO from the Jewish community, freezing the JPFO’s assets and actively worked towards its dissolution. The Community Council also began a process of halting support fot the Jewish Community Centers on the Eastside — at the Soto-Michigan JCC and the City Terrace Cultural Center where JPFO members met. Within a few years, not only was the JPFO destroyed, but so too were the Eastside’s two most important Jewish cultural institutions.

Do you have memories of the International Workers Order or the JPFO? Please add them below. (Note that there can sometimes be a delay before your comment posts to the page!)
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Images of Boyle Heights and City Terrace

Read more about the history of Yiddish culture on LA’s Eastside.
FOR MORE TRACES OF YIDDISH IN THE CITY OF ANGELS…