JEWS AND NEW YORK- 49 VERY INTERESTING FACTS BY LAILA CARON
http://forward.com/articles/209106/of-egg-creams-ed-koch-and–other-facts-you-didnt/
1. The first Jews to set foot in North America arrived in New York as a
group of 23 in 1654.
2. Congregation Shearith Israel, founded in New York in 1654, was the first
synagogue in the colonies. It was the sole purveyor of kosher meat until
1813.
3. By the late 19th century, there were over 5,000 kosher butchers and
1,000 slaughterers in New York.
4. In 1902, the Beef Trust raised the price of kosher meat on the Lower
East Side from 12 to 18 cents per pound. After butchers’ boycotts proved
ineffectual, 20,000 Lower East Side women stole meat from kosher butcher
shops and set it on fire on the streets in protest. The Forward supported
their efforts, running the headline “Bravo, Bravo, Bravo, Jewish women!”
5. On March 25, 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist fire claimed the lives of 146
garment workers, the majority of whom were Jewish immigrants. Reporting on
the tragedy, the Forverts wrote that ‘the disaster is too great, too
dreadful, to be able to express one’s feelings.”
6. When entertainer Al Jolson came to New York City at age 14, he held jobs
in the circus and as a singing waiter. Born to a cantor, Jolson’s career
took off when he began performing in blackface.
7. In 1903, the Lower East Side Chinese and Jewish communities formed an
unlikely partnership when Chinese organizers put on a benefit for Jewish
victims of the Kishinev pogrom, raising $280.
8. In 1930, there were over 80 pickle vendors in the Lower East Side’s
thriving Jewish pickle scene. The briney delights were brought to America
in the mid-19th century by German Jewish immigrants.
9. The egg cream is thought to have been invented by the Jewish owner of a
Brooklyn candy shop. Musician Lou Reed was a famous admirer of the frothy
drink.
10. From the beginning of the 20th century till the close of World War II,
the Lower East Side’s 2nd Avenue was known as the Yiddish Theater District,
or the Jewish Rialto. It extended from 2nd Avenue to Avenue B, and from
14th Street to Houston. Considered Broadway’s competitor, the Jewish Rialto
was home to a variety of productions including burlesque and vaudeville
shows, as well as Shakespearean, Jewish and classic plays, and were all in
Yiddish.
11. The Jewish Rialto’s most popular haunt was the Cafe Royal on Second
Avenue and 12th Street, where one could find performers such as Molly Picon
and Charlie Chaplin sharing blintzes.
12. Pushcarts were all the rage among Jewish vendors on the Lower East Side
from the turn of the century until 1940, when Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia
banned their use. Jewish pushcart operators sold everything from vegetables
to cigars to stockings.
13. At Sammy’s Roumanian Steak House on Chrystie and Delancey, every table
is provided with a bottle of chicken fat as a condiment; resident emcee
Dani Luv entertains diners with renditions of Jewish standards and punchy
Borsht Belt humor.
14. One of the first kosher Chinese restaurants in New York was Moshe
Peking, whose all-Chinese waitstaff wore yarmulkes.
15. The Second Avenue Deli opened in 1954 in the then-fading Yiddish
Theater District. It featured a Yiddish Walk of Fame on the sidewalk
outside its original location on Second Avenue and Tenth Street, and served
up such Jewish specialties as matzo ball soup and corned beef. In 2007, it
closed and reopened in Murray Hill.
16. Famed music club CBGB was opened in 1973 by Jewish founder Hilly
Kristal.
17. Mayor La Guardia, who served for three terms from 1934 to 1945, was
born to a Jewish mother and descended from Rabbi Samuel David Luzzatto, but
practiced as an Episcopalian.
18. The Jacob K. Javits Convention Center was
named in honor of the Jewish U.S. senator, who served from 1957 to 1981.
19. Sig Klein’s Fat Men’s Shop opened in the late 1800s at 52 Third Ave.,
and carried plus-sized clothes for men. Its sign featured the slogan: “If
everyone was fat there would be no war.”
20. Abraham Beame was the first practicing Jew to become mayor of New York.
He held office from 1974 to 1977.
21. The popular and proudly Jewish mayor Ed Koch, who served from 1978 to
1989, was known for the phrase “How’m I doing?” which he would ask
passersby while standing on street corners or riding the subway.
called him the “ultimate New Yorker.”
22. The erection of the Brooklyn Bridge in 1883 and the Williamsburg Bridge
in 1903 catalyzed a Jewish exodus from the Lower East Side to Southside
Williamsburg. Crossing the bridge on foot, the LES’s Jews left in search of
better living conditions.
23. By 1930, more than 40% of New York City’s Jews lived in Brooklyn.
24. Jewish-fronted band The Ramones formed in the Forest Hills neighborhood
of Queens in 1974.
25. Allen Ginsberg moved to New York to attend Columbia in 1943. He was
purportedly related to seminal Zionist thinker Ahad Ha’am.
26. Poet and kabbalist Lionel Ziprin entertained visitors including
Thelonius Monk, Charlie Parker, and Bob Dylan in his Lower East Side living
room, expounding for hours on Jewish esoterica and history.
27. The bagel originated in Poland, and arrived in New York City in the
1880s in the hands of Eastern European Jewish immigrants.
28. Three hundred all-Jewish New York bagel craftsmen formed a trade union
in the early 1900s, the Bagel Bakers Local 338, which established standards
for bagel production and conducted meetings in Yiddish.
29. In December 1951, New York City was hit with what The New York Times
termed the “bagel famine,” when a dispute between the members of the Bagel
trade union and the Bagel Bakers association led to the closing of 32 out
of 34 of the city’s bagel bakeries.
30. As a result of the bagel outage, the sale of lox dropped nearly 50%.
Murray Nathan, who helped resolve an earlier lox strike in 1948, was
brought in to mediate the situation. The outage lasted until February.
31. Coney Island Bagels and Bialys, the oldest kosher bagel shop in New
York, was set to close in 2011 until two Muslim businessmen, Peerzada Shah
and Zafaryab Ali, bought the store and promised to keep it kosher. Ali had
previously worked at the shop for 10 years.
32. Lou Reed was born in Brooklyn, and in 1989 released an album whose
title, “New York,” paid tribute to the city.
33. In a reinterpretation of Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven,” Lou Reed asked
the four questions at the Downtown Seder at the Museum of Jewish Heritage
in 2004.
34. Musician Lenny Kaye was born in the Washington Heights neighborhood of
Manhattan in 1946. He met Patti Smith while working at Village Oldies on
Bleecker Street and went on to become a member of the Patti Smith Group.
35. Starting in the 1970s, hundreds of thousands of Jews left the Soviet
Union for New York, many settling in Brighton Beach, which came to be known
as “Little Odessa.”
36. Established in 1927, Kehila Kedosha Janina at 280 Broome St. is the
last remaining Greek Jewish synagogue in the Western Hemisphere.
37. Streit’s Matzo Company, the last remaining neighborhood matzo factory,
stands at 148-150 Rivington St.
38. The oldest Orthodox Jewish Russian congregation in the United States,
Beth Hamedrash Hagadol, is still active at 60 Norfolk St.
39. On the corner of Essex and Rutgers, down the street from the original
Forverts building on Seward Park, the Garden Cafeteria served as a
gathering place for Jewish actors, artists and playwrights such as Sholem
Aleichem and Isaac Bashevis Singer from 1941 to 1983. It became Wing Shing,
a Chinese restaurant, in 1985, and now houses Reena Spaulings Fine Art.
40. Seward Park on the Lower East Side was created in 1900. New immigrants
worked in the park’s artisan market, and on special occasions such as
elections, thousands gathered in the park to watch the Forverts’s flashing
news sign in Yiddish.
41. Jewish gangs rose to prominence during the Prohibition; at a conference
in New York in 1931, Jewish gangsters agreed to partner with Italian
Americans, and together remained the most dominant groups in organized
crime until several decades after WWII.
42. After an appeal from a New York judge, Nathan Perlman, Jewish gangster
Meyer Lansky and members of Murder Inc. broke up Nazi rallies around the
city for over a year, with the one stipulation that there be no killing.
43. Lines of a sonnet by Sephardic poet Emma Lazarus, who was born in New
York City in 1847, are inscribed on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty.
44. The house that stands at 770 Eastern Parkway in the Crown Heights
neighborhood of Brooklyn is the center and spiritual home of the
Chabad-Lubavitch movement. Formerly inhabited by Chabad’s late leader
Menachem Mendel Schneerson, Lubavitchers have built replicas of the
building all over the world to serve as movement outposts.
45. The first Reform congregation in New York City, Temple Emanu-El, was
founded in 1845 by 33 mostly German Jews, and moved to its present location
in 1929. Members have included Joan Rivers and Michael Bloomberg.
46. As large numbers of German Jews fleeing Nazi persecution made their
homes in Washington Heights in the mid-1930s, the area was dubbed
“Frankfurt on the Hudson.” [Also called by the German Jewish emigres
themselves, ‘The Fourth Reich.’]
47. Sweet ‘n’ Low was invented in 1957 in Brooklyn by Benjamin Eisenstaedt.
48. Bronx-born Milton Glaser designed the “I[Image removed by sender. Black
heart (cards)]NY” logo in 1977.
49. Eight hasidic dynasties are headquartered in the Borough Park
neighborhood of Brooklyn.
50. Outside of Israel, New York City is home to the largest population of
Jews in the world.
51. As of 2011, 1 in 6 households in New York were Jewish.
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