Museum In the Making

New Jersey Jewish culture to be showcased

Lois Goldrich, Jewish Standard, 07/22/05

According to Eric Freedman, a Jersey City resident and president of Newark’s Ahavas Sholom synagogue, Jews in New Jersey have “a story to tell.”

And what a story it is.

Consider, for example, the experience of Jewish farmers in New Jersey in the early part of the 20th century. While the agricultural efforts of East European Jewish immigrants to America were generally not successful, the thought of these ventures remains intriguing to historians (and urban Jews).

Or think about the original residents of Roosevelt, founded as Jersey Homesteads and created in central New Jersey as part of a government program to provide relief for garment workers during the Great Depression. Painter Ben Shahn created a fresco mural, in what is now the public school, to commemorate the community. The panels depict the history of the town, from the eastern European origins of its Jewish residents, to their arrival at Ellis Island, to the planning of their cooperative community.

Or, closer to home, take note of Temple Emanuel in Paterson, slated to move, piece by piece, to a synagogue in Franklin Lakes. Built with money donated by Jacob Fabian, Paterson philanthropist and theater-chain owner, this magnificent, intricately detailed structure was designed by a man whose previous experience lay in building the great movie houses of the 1920s.

Jews in New Jersey are represented in every field. Author Philip Roth hails from Newark, as does TV personality Jason Alexander, of Seinfeld fame. The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart, born in Trenton and raised in Lawrenceville, recalls being the only Jewish kid in
his town when he was growing up. And then there’s poet Allen Ginsberg from Paterson.

Still — with the fourth largest Jewish population in the U.S. and numerous Jewish Historical Societies — New Jersey has not, up to now, had one place where the entire cultural heritage of its Jewish residents could be showcased. That will soon be remedied. The Jewish Museum of New Jersey, thanks to Freedman and Ahavas Sholom board member Joe Selzer, now has a space, an executive director, a mission statement, and a plan.

The idea was conceived by Selzer, who was inspired by a visit to the Jewish Museum of Florida in Miami Beach two years ago. Seeing the museum thrive in a restored synagogue, Seizer realized that a similar transformation could take place in Newark.

Freedman agreed, and sold the idea to the board of Ahavas Sholom. Constructed in 1923, the shul is the only Newark synagogue that is still active. Its second floor, however, has remained vacant for years. It used to house a Hebrew school. The museum will be housed in that 1500-
square-foot space.

‘When I first came, I found an older congregation with a struggling minyan’ says Freedman. “Now we’re committed to the next hundred years.”

While the museum will display items of Judaica, says SeIzer, it will also feature both temporary and traveling exhibits. A timeline of Jewish history in New Jersey, to be housed at the museum, is being created by students in the Jewish Studies Program at Kean College. Classes and community outreach programs will also be offered, and it is envisioned that both Hebrew schools and public schools will bring children to visit. In addition, organizers hope the museum will serve as a resource for interfaith groups and other community organizations.

Freedman sees the museum as a “Newark institution” and points to the building’s mission statement, which speaks of fostering “a broader understanding and a mutual and religious backgrounds.”

“I think it can help refine what the synagogue wants to do on its own, pursuing tikkun olam in the neighborhood,” says Freedman, adding, ‘Through pride in our Judaism, we can celebrate everyone’s ethnicity at the same time.”

The museum is asking members of the public to provide both information and materials — whether documents, ritual items, oral histories, or photographs — to help realize its dream of showcasing Jewish culture.

Rabbi David Blumenfeld, the founding executive director of the New York Holocaust Memorial Commission, has lent the project his full support and has already met with the New Jersey Board of Rabbis to ask for its assistance in this effort. BIumenfeld, who has conducted the High Holiday overflow service at Winston Towers in Cliffside Park for decades, lives in New York but was originally from Newark.

Rabbi Joshua Finkelstein, president of the North Jersey Board of Rabbis and religious leader of Temple Emanuel of North Jersey, is particularly sensitive to the rich history of the Jewish community and excited about the museum project. As his congregation prepares to leave Paterson, he is working to make a shidduch between museum organizers and a congregant with a large archive of Paterson literature and photographs. In addition, he says, his cantor, Jeffrey Weber, did his senior thesis on the choruses of Paterson and can provide information that will be valuable to the museum.

“So much of our efforts as a community have been to record our destruction,” he says. ‘This museum will record our pride, growth, and positive achievements for the next generation.”
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A black taxicab driver stopped for a traffic violation was beaten by police, and word of the incident spread throughout a city already boiling in racial tension and strained relations between police and the black community.

Rumors grew that the man had died, and the anger built to a fever pitch.

Then it erupted.

When the rioting, looting, arson and deadly violence were finally quelled five days later, 26 people, including a city police officer and firefighter, were dead. Another 1,500 were injured and about 1,600 had been arrested. An estimated $10 million worth of property was destroyed. Some 3,000 National Guard troops and State Police had to be called in to the city, and the riots sealed Newark's place in the pantheon of violent uprisings in America's cities during that unsettling era 40 years ago.

In a panel discussion yesterday at a Jewish temple, civic and city leaders recalled the harrowing Newark riots and the disintegrating relationship between the city's black and Jewish communities in the years before the nightmare.

Morris Spielberg was president of the merchants association along Springfield Avenue, the spine of largely Jewish-owned businesses that became the epicenter of the disturbance.

His furniture store was the first business targeted by the rioters when a trash can was thrown through the front window. Spielberg escaped the violence by being rolled up in a rug by his black employees and slipped out of the store and onto the back seat of a car.

"There was quite a bit of tension," Spielberg recalled of the days leading up to the riots.

Jews owned many of the stores and much of the rental housing in a city whose black population grew while Jews and other whites were fleeing to the suburbs.

Junius Williams, who was then a young black activist with the Students for a Democratic Society, said the city's housing vacancy rate was just 1 percent, a shortage that was exacerbated by a proposal to tear down more than 100 acres of a predominantly black neighborhood to build a medical school that would become the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey.

"What do you need 150 acres for a medical school for?" Williams asked. "That would have been the largest medical school in the world."

Kenneth Gibson, the man who would become a four-term mayor of Newark three years after the riots, said the proposed displacement of so many black residents for the medical school was an affront that helped seal the rift between the black and white communities that led to the riots.

"That was viewed by many leaders of the black community as an attempt to decimate black political strength," Gibson said.

In the aftermath of the riots, the medical school was built on a much smaller campus, with some 60 acres of land set aside for housing, Williams said.

Williams, Spielberg, Gibson and Samuel Convissor, a fourth panelist, all placed blame for the uprising squarely on the shoulders of then-Mayor Hugh J. Addonizio and what they perceived as his utter indifference to the worsening economic and social disparity between blacks and whites in the city.

"There was no effort, none whatsoever, to recognize the growing separation between the black and white communities in the city of Newark during the early years of the Addonizio administration," said Convissor, a former aide to the mayor who resigned in protest.

"It was just a continual deterioration of community life and community spirit," Convissor said.

Though the tone of the panel discussion at Congregation Ahavas Sholom, the last surviving synagogue in the city, was sedate and analytical, there were some lighter moments.

Gibson elicited laughter from the audience of about 125 by recalling how, during his first term in office, he averted a second city riot by Puerto Ricans at Branch Brook Park by leading them in a two-mile procession from a festival at the park to a protest rally at City Hall.

"So I marched 2,000 Puerto Ricans out of Branch Brook Park, down Park Avenue, down Bloomfield Avenue, down Broad Street to City Hall, and by that time they were all tired," the former mayor said.

After yesterday's session, which was sponsored by the Jewish Museum of New Jersey, Gibson noted that while Newark has improved dramatically since the days of the 1967 riots, the city has never quite overcome the disturbing legacy of those five hellish days in July.

"Once you get that kind of bad image, an image like that never really goes away," the former mayor said.