Hanukkah & Jewish Culture

Brick City Past Revealed

Newark's history is as diverse and powerful as the community that continues to call New Jersey's largest city home. The colonial settlement at Four Corners--the Broad and Market intersection--grew into one of the most heavily traveled thoroughfares in the nation. In the nineteenth century, innovations such as the public use of the electric light bulb in Military Park and the discovery of how to make patent leather established Newark as a flourishing industrial hub. Dramatic events including the battle between Nazi sympathizers and city residents in the 1930s, hearings held by the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s and the event that triggered the infamous 1967 riots, defined a raucous twentieth century in Newark. Today, urban farming can be found in the Ironbound, NBA star Shaquille O'Neal has helped fund the city's first high-rise tower in fifty years and revitalization efforts continue. Author Helen Lippman presents hidden history of Newark, New Jersey.

Known as Newark's ""Jewish Frontier,"" Weequahic was home to 35,000 Jewish residents from the 1930s to the 1960s.

Homes built on farm lots, known as Lyons Farms, attracted the city's upwardly mobile Jewish families. Weequahic High School still remains at the heart of the community, drawing generations of alumni for annual reunions and events. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Philip Roth, a Weequahic High School graduate, found inspiration in the community, documenting its intricacies in his work. The high school still houses a mural, The Enlightenment of Man, painted by New Deal painter Michael Lenson. This mural is regarded as one of the most important pieces of public art in the state. Jews of Weequahic captures the life of this vibrant community that has become one of Newark's legendary neighborhoods.

Jewish settlers began arriving in Morris County as far back as the Civil War. These early Jews settled in Morristown, a market town; Dover, a mining town located on the Morris Canal; and the farming towns of Pine Brook and Mount Freedom. When each of these communities had 10 adult males, the minimum number for religious services, they established Hebrew schools, synagogues, and congregational cemeteries and made Morris County their home. Morristown and Dover Jews were prosperous merchants with heavily populated Jewish business districts located on Speedwell Avenue and Blackwell Street. Stories of live chickens hanging in the kosher butcher's window and fish swimming in glass pools reflect this bygone era. Nearby Pine Brook and Mount Freedom Jews, not able to make a living as farmers, opened summer boarding houses and grew thriving full-service kosher hotels that rivaled New York's Catskill resorts.

Initial Jewish settlements in South Jersey emerged in the mid-19th century and offered a safe haven for people to re-create strong families and practice religion freely, without fear of government-sponsored violence. Looking for work, German Jews first migrated from their community in Philadelphia to Trenton, and then spread south to Wildwood. Although Jewish settlers were mainly known as merchants and shop owners, many towns also boast the development of the Jewish farmer. While agriculture would eventually be abandoned in favor of manufacturing, there were many extremely successful and historically significant Jewish farms that flourished in the south. Now, of course, people of the Hebrew faith are productive players in every walk of life. Jewish South Jersey touches on the many contributions made by Jewish people in the southern part of the Garden State.

Images of America: Jews of Paterson is more than just nostalgia--it is the remarkable story of how the city's Jewish population built a community and made it into a special place.

When Jews immigrated to Paterson in the early 20th century, they came as skilled weavers from the Russian Polish textile centers of Lodz and Bialystok. They brought strong notions of social justice and living righteously; ideas that came alive during the 1913 Industrial Workers of the World silk strike. They raised families, became Americans, and reluctantly moved when the economic base collapsed. Despite this, Paterson Jews defend the aging, gritty city as a wonderful place, and they never left it spiritually or emotionally. Former and current residents recall the Hamilton Avenue bagel bakery, Purity Cooperative rye bread, candy stores, delicatessens, the YMHA, bar mitzvah coaches, rabbis, the baby doctor, pediatricians, schoolteachers, and even the synagogue shammes. They remember and honor the past as a bridge between the present and the future.