American Jewish Places: A Tourist's Guide
AMERICAN JEWISH PLACES* This travelogue is adapted from American Jewish Landmarks (Volume I) by Bernard Postal and Lionel Koppman,published by Fleet Publishing Corporation. Copyright © Bernard...
...1 there is a sign that reads, "Blotner Radar Ballistics Site...
...kedusha, holiness...
...mishpat, justice...
...At Colby College in Waterville you can see a Jewish contribution to ice hockey...
...The antiquity and quality of both essential detail and ornament deserve lengthy description...
...In Binghamton the Margolis Holocaust Collection houses books and documents pertaining to the death of the Six Million...
...A plaque dedicates the library to "the Judeo-Christian commitment to self-sacrifice for peace on earth____" At the Washington Memorial Chapel in Valley Forge one of many interesting items is a battle flag used by George Washington with thirteen Stars of David...
...West Hartford has two Holocaust memorials, one in the Emanuel Synagogue at 160 Mohegan Drive, the other in the building of the United Synagogues of Greater Hartford, 840 Main Street...
...Longfellow visited Newport and composed one of his finest poems, "The Jewish Cemetery at Newport:" How strange it seems...
...Also at Woodlawn in the same plot as Mark Twain's is the grave of Ossip Gabril-owitsch, Jewish pianist and composer who married Mark Twain's daughter, Clara...
...Some of the landmarks are rich experiences for the eyes and mind, while others are plaques or even street signs, evocative only if you know the human stories behind the signposts and markers...
...In 1962 Samuel Blotner, a dealer in government surplus property, acquired a discarded Nike-Ajax missile site...
...The Navy honored him by commissioning a destroyer escort USS Bronstein...
...Harold Alfond donated the Harold Alfond Hockey Rink, and a plaque in Colby's science building notes that the initial gift of $120,000 came from Mr...
...Maryland The Henry Diamond Ordnance Library in Gai-thersburg is named for one of America's foremost scientists and inventors...
...The two names seem to have been considered interchangeable...
...Several other Jews are in the museum's hall of fame, including Walter Miller, the greatest jockey of the early twentieth century...
...A town on an island in the Niagara River, Grand Island has in its city hall a slab of Ohio sandstone...
...Benjamin Kaufman, Sgt...
...When the government offered $5,000 instead of the $30,000 Blotner had in mind, he suggested another kind of deal...
...This stone is the only relic of Noah's attempt to establish a temporary Jewish homeland in America as a waystation before Palestine...
...The Research Center for Kabbalah, 22 Lane Drive, Englewood, is a spiritual center for alienated Jewish youth and those attracted by Eastern religions...
...The Eleutherian Mills Historical Foundation, Greenville, also contains valuable Jewish documents and letters...
...It is a Chassidic village of 1300 designed to recreate a European shtetl, although its homes are modern Cape Cod single families and modern garden apartments, each equipped with two stoves and two kitchen sinks...
...The latter is a ten by eight foot monument to the Six Million in the form of six interlocking Stars of David...
...New York At the Jewish Community Center, 340 Whitehall Road, Albany, a Holocaust memorial consists of one sculpture on the theme of the Burning Bush and one impressionistic sculpture by Nathan Rapoport, who is also the sculptor of a memorial to the Six Million in Philadelphia, a memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in Warsaw, and the B'nai B'rith Holocaust monument in Israel...
...Commissioned by Mr...
...On the stone, in addition to the Sh'ma is inscribed, "Ararat, a city of refuge for the Jews founded by Mordecai Manuel Noah in the month of Tishri (September) 1825 and in the fiftieth year of American Independence...
...Raymond Zussman...
...William Samuelson, and Sgt...
...New Hampshire Bronstein Park in Manchester, New Hampshire, is named for Lieutenant Richard Bronstein, the first commissioned officer from New Hampshire killed in World War II...
...The General Henry Knox Building contains citations for each winner...
...from Harvard conferred in 1723...
...The lot for the synagogue was purchased for $187.50...
...There is no record of architect Peter Harrison ever receiving a fee...
...It contains an 18 by 5 foot mosaic, an eight-ton Star of David with an eternal flame, and" a small museum of objects related to the Holocaust...
...chesed, loving-kindness...
...Rhode Island Perhaps the best known Jewish landmarks in the Northeast are the Touro Synagogue and the Old Jewish Cemetery in Newport, Rhode Island...
...One honors Lieutenant Colonel Edward S. Salomon who commanded the 82nd Illinois Infantry, a regiment that included an all Jewish Company recruited and outfitted by B'nai B'rith's Ramah Lodge in Chicago...
...In 1864 three Jewish prisoners, Louis Meyerburg, Max Neugas, and Aaron Waterman, wrote to Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise for assistance...
...The Touro Synagogue may be America's quintessential Jewish landmark...
...One unique feature is an unfinished underground tunnel whose purposes and origins are now completely mysterious and open to speculation...
...They were housed in unsanitary pens...
...It was founded, partly with his own funds, by the late Lawrence Langner and directed for five years in the 1970's by Michael Kahn...
...and Mrs...
...The cemetery also has a simple memorial to the victims of the Holocaust consisting of stone replicas of the Ten Commandments with lions at each end...
...The Lauderdale Jewish Center in Mays Landing is the religious and cultural center of a community of poultry farmers, many of them survivors of the Holocaust...
...In Wilmington the Delaware Historical Society has a treasure trove of documentary material about American Jews in its archives...
...Diamond's contributions to navigational landing aids saved countless lives in World War II...
...In Cooperstown the Baseball Hall of Fame celebrates only two Jewish members, Hank Green-berg and Sandy Koufax, the greatest pitcher of all time...
...Leopold Karpeles, Benjamin B. Levy, Abraham Cohn, Henry Heller, and David Obransky...
...Department of the Interior...
...The John Hay Library at Brown University, Providence, has a collection of over 1,500 volumes devoted to the legend of the Wandering Jew...
...Connecticut's biggest tourist attraction is the Stratford Shakespeare Festival...
...Miles Lerman of New York, the sculpture is the work of Vermont artist Dennis Sparling...
...Massachusetts In Lexington the Minute-man Monument erected in 1949 on Lexington Green owes its existence to a seven-year campaign by the late Julius Seltzer, an immigrant tailor from Russia...
...Volunteer Fire Department...
...World War II—Staff Sgt...
...One such is Randolph's Holocaust Memorial Courtyard at Temple Beth Am, 871 North Main Street...
...Connecticut The Arnold Bernhard Arts and Humanities Center of the University of Bridgeport is named for a Jewish investment counselor from New York who is the university's greatest benefactor...
...The Delaware State Museum in Dover has a unique collection of fire-fighting memorabilia assembled and presented by Fred S. Brown of Wilmington a Jewish fire-buff who was known as "Mr...
...The marker identifies Monis as a rabbi...
...The congregation's Antique Judaica Museum contains 95 important ceremonial objects...
...Yiddish is New Square's primary language...
...De Hirsch Avenue in Woodbine is named in memory of Baron Maurice de Hirsch, philanthropist who gave away more than a hundred million dollars in the 19th century and one of whose major projects was aiding the mass emigration of Jews from Czarist Russia...
...The Air Force agreed to pay Blotner one dollar, to return the land if they again decided to leave, and to name the site after Blotner's father...
...Although the town is no longer predominantly Jewish, one of the earliest settlers in the area, the well-known artist Ben Shahn, left a 55 foot long by 11 foot high mural that can still be seen on the wall of the Roosevelt School...
...According to the Journal of Congress, the Magen David was planned as the official star on the American flag until the seamstress, Betsy Ross, argued that five-pointed stars would be easier to sew...
...In addition to teaching, Judah Monis sold hardware and tobacco, and the Hebrew Grammar he published in 1735 was the first Hebrew book published in North America...
...Community Synagogue in Port Washington was once part of Averell Har-riman's estate...
...and Mrs...
...Amherst and Bingham-ton, New York, also have Holocaust memorials...
...These three survived...
...Schindler Drive in South Plainfield was named by three Jews who were in concentration camps for Oskar Schindler, a Catholic who saved 1,400 Jews from Nazi gas chambers while working for the Nazis in Poland, Vineland's Congregation Beth Israel has a sculpture 18 feet long and six feet wide commemorating the Holocaust and the Jewish resistance...
...Roosevelt, New Jersey, was founded in 1935 as Jersey Homesteads by the Department of Agriculture's Rural Resettlement Administration...
...Seltzer was the president and one of the founders of the Lexington Minutemen, an organization that seeks to preserve colonial landmarks...
...Salomon later served as governor of the Washington Territory...
...Jobstown, New Jersey, was listed on Revolutionary War maps as Jews-town...
...Copyright © Bernard Postal and Lionel Koppman, 1977...
...Lionel Koppman is Director of Public Information and Publications for the National Jewish Welfare Board The Northeastern United States is teeming with Jewish landmarks...
...In June 1977, Fleet Press brought out the first volume of Bernard Postal and Lionel Koppman's three-volume Jewish travel guide for the entire United States...
...The mausoleum of showman Billy Rose stands in Westchester Hills Cemetery, 400 Saw Mill River Road, Has-tings-on-Hudson...
...Some are moving memorials to the glories, tragedies, and vicissitudes of Jewish history: others are small or whimsical reminders of lesser episodes or lighter moments in our past...
...While in Bridgeport a visitor might happen upon Geduldig Avenue, named for Abe S. Geduldig, a former city prosecutor...
...Bronstein was the medical officer on a destroyer sunk by a German submarine...
...Among the distinguished Jews buried there are Jacob Rodriguez Rivera, Moses Seixas, and Abraham and Judah Touro...
...In Saratoga Springs, the National Museum of Racing honors August Belmont, the House of Rothschild's United States representative who became the father of American horse-racing...
...In Rockville, a suburb of Washington, D.C., the drive in front of the Jewish Community Center is called Kochubiyevsky Drive in honor of one of the first Soviet Jews imprisoned for seeking permission to emigrate to Israel...
...Isadore Jackman and Lt...
...And these sepulchral stones, so old and brown, That pave with level flags their burial-place, Seem like the tablets of the Law, thrown down And broken by Moses at the mountain's base...
...The work is 55 feet wide and 15 feet high, and it includes a design for the Ark and the Eternal Light...
...simcha, joy...
...Founded in 1891 by the Baron de Hirsch Fund, Woodbine was the first all-Jewish town of modern times...
...At Valley Forge the Freedoms Foundation Medal of Honor Grove honors the more than 3,300 Congressional Medal of Honor winners...
...World War I—Sgt...
...His grave can be found in an old cemetery behind Northborough's Congregational Church...
...A gleam of human kindness came into the eyes of Le Loup Blanc, the hardened war chief...
...The Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Massachusetts, contains evidence of the Jewish contribution to American sports and particularly of the special affinity for basketball that Jews have demonstrated...
...Eleven Jews are among the most eminent of the 94 players and coaches enshrined in the Hall of Fame...
...He also pioneered in the development of the radio proximity fuse, used in bombs, rockets, and mortar shells, that explodes through electronic contact with its target...
...In 1929 in Morristown he founded Seeing Eye, famous institution for training dogs to aid the blind...
...A TOURISTS GUIDE © AAA—Reproduced by Permission Maine Just outside Caribou on U.S...
...Bernard Postal is editor of The Jewish Week...
...Sidney Gumpertz...
...Benjamin Brown, a pioneer in farm cooperatives and once known as the turkey king of New York, persuaded the New Deal administration to settle some 200 Jewish needle trade workers under a plan which would allow them to continue working at their trade...
...In Groton, Connecticut, the Submarine Library on Thames Street contains material about Admiral Hyman Rickover, father of the atomic submarine, and about Commander Edward Ellsberg, an expert in the raising of sunken submarines...
...The big cities, where Jewish landmarks are easier to seek out and almost too numerous to list, have not been included...
...Temple Beth El also has a collection of Hebraic art and ceremonial objects...
...When the Indians learned that among the young people were persons named Frank and Gratz...
...Among subjects depicted in the panoramic mural are scenes of Einstein arriving at Ellis Island and scenes of Nazi storm troopers mouthing menacing slogans...
...There are, however, a few more items of Jewish memorabilia...
...Its Bible Gardens of Israel purports to have all the plants, flowers, shrubs, and trees mentioned in the Bible, together with the quotation that mentions each one...
...If this party is composed of people of the blood of the Franks and the Gratzes...
...A group of young people on the way to a dance in 1757 is said to have been ambushed by a band of Mohawk Indians...
...These Hebrews in their graves Close by the street of this fair seaport town, Silent beside the never silent waves, At rest in all this moving up and down...
...Heilprin Avenue is named for Michael Heilprin, scholar, editor of The Nation, opponent of slavery, author of Historical Poetry of the Ancient Hebrews, and one of the prime founders of the Russian Emigrants Relief Committee...
...New Square, New York, was founded in 1961...
...Sol Feinstone came from Russia and devoted forty years to Americana book-collecting...
...Jewish winners have been: Civil War—Sgt...
...At Temple Beth El in Great Neck there is a Louise Nevelson sculpture memorializing the six million...
...Now largely (but not entirely) Jewish, Woodbine's residents farm, raise poultry and work in or own a number of small factories...
...Pennsylvania An interesting incident occurred at Wagontown, about three miles out of Coatesville...
...The town's name was supposed to be New Skvira, after a Ukrainian shtetl, but as happened so often earlier in this century, a clerical error Americanized the name...
...Items include objects used or worn by concentration camp survivors...
...Allan Goldfine of New York...
...For the tourist interested in literary expression, the rest of the poem is worth seeking out...
...The oldest synagogue building in the United States, the Touro was founded in 1658, and the Jewish burial ground dates back to 1677...
...There is also an Archway to Israel with an enormous relief map depicting major biblical events, and there are twelve archways dedicated to the Twelve Tribes...
...and emet, truth...
...Temple Israel in Silver Spring has a garden-patio memorial of the Holocaust along with sculptured tablets of the Ten Commandments...
...A year later the Air Force wanted it back...
...Red Auerbach, Nat Holman, Dolph Schayes, Abe Saperstein, and Maurice Podoloff have all been virtually legendary pioneers in the development of the game...
...Randolph—throughout the United States there are memorials to the victims of the Holocaust...
...Belle Margolis, for whom the collection is named, lost 32 relatives in the Holocaust...
...At Amherst's Jewish Center a sculpture in the courtyard rests on a 16 foot high center post and represents a book with movable pages inscribed with quotations and thoughts of Holocaust survivors...
...Randallstown has a Memorial to Holocaust victims in the form of a nine-foot marble shaft on which is inscribed in Hebrew an Eleventh Commandment, Thou Shalt Not Forget...
...The hand-sewn mantles of eight Torahs depict the words tz'dakah, light...
...shalom, peace...
...Delaware On Pea Patch Island, Delaware City, Fort Delaware was a Union prison for Confederate POWs who were held under horrible conditions...
...Volume One covers just the Northeast, and from its wealth of material we've assembled one possible trip that hugs the East Coast from Caribou, Maine, to the outskirts of Washington, D.C., not far from the Mason-Dixon line...
...How could we forget the cap of Bo Belinsky, who once pitched a no-hitter, or the bat with which Ron Blomberg rapped out the first base-hit ever achieved by a 'designated hitter?' Woodlawn National Cemetery in Elmira contains the graves of twenty-four Jews who died as confederate prisoners of war...
...New Jersey Egg Harbor City was a port used by Mordecai Sheftall and his son Sheftall Sheftall, Jews from Georgia, for their privateering ventures against the British in the American Revolution...
...Gettysburg National Military Park has many monuments memorializing heroes of the 1863 Battle of Gettysburg...
...No nails were used, only wooden pegs, and 196,715 bricks imported from England...
...The mausoleum of George Gershwin stands opposite Billy Rose's at the entrance to the cemetery...
...Three stained-glass windows depict a pen, a telephone, notes of songs, a map of Israel, a medal Rose received from Israel on his donation of a million dollars worth of art for the Billy Rose Art Museum in Jerusalem, and the word "Wolf," David Ben-Gurion's nickname for Rose...
...In 1947 the Touro Synagogue was designated a national shrine by the U.S...
...Hightstown is the site of Hechalutz Farm Shomria, training farm for young Americans planning to settle in Israel and scene of frequent Jewish youth conferences...
...The first Holocaust museum on Long Island can be found at Congregation Ohr Torah, North Woodmere...
...Believing the Indians to be descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes, Noah included them in his plan and invitation...
...Northborough—Judah Monis, who taught Hebrew at Harvard for forty years, was the first Jew in America to receive a university degree, an honorary M.A...
...Morris Franks was the first blind man in America to use a seeing-eye dog...
...you are paroled and may return to Hickory Town.'" Here was an early case of Jews benefiting from good relations with other minorities...
...Also at Valley Forge, The Spirit of'76 Library was built by Sol and Rose Feinstone...
...Beth Israel Memorial Park in Woodbridge is a cemetery with several features of interest...
...Newport's old Jewish Cemetery is fascinating as well...
Vol. 3 • May 1978 • No. 6
