The Moving Story of the Jews

...When in Abraham Cahan's classic novel of immigrant life...

...1914...

...The fact is that the Dalsheimer, built presumably to exploit demographic trends, may in part be generating-them...

...Surely evidence abounds that there's plenty of racial fear among Jews...

...the conditions they faced were likened by the American ambassador to St...

...Ama peziza is what the Talmud calls the Jews, according to Joseph Baum-garten, professor of rabbinic literature and institutions at Baltimore Hebrew College—"the hasty people...

...Based on a 1960's report predicting further outward spread of the Jewish community, the Dal-sheimer Center of the Jewish Community Center was built in Owings Mills, five miles up Park Heights Avenue from the existing center...

...The ones living here when we moved here are still living here...

...She's heard of blacks being "terrorized" in other areas until they're "literally scared out...

...Sue Timin, who twice left changing neighborhoods, says she's seeing evidence that Jews are "sticking together better about havTop: Woodland A mm...

...A few days ago I passed by Ruthi's house and wanted to go in...

...The insistence of some Jews on living only with other Jews, and the readiness of others to keep forever on the move are really, it seems to me, two sides of the same coin...

...In one of the more recently abandoned Baltimore neighborhoods, "Hilltop," a few Jews have stuck it out...

...Once an area has been deemed no longer fashionable it is apt to be branded downright undesirable— and ultimately abandoned...

...Not so long ago, in an area of elegant apartment buildings and handsome town houses just across from Baltimore's finest park, lived wealthy German Jews...

...Everybody knew Newark was going to blow," Silverberg recalls...

...Jews, for example, fill the ranks of middle class professionals, who tend to move around a lot whatever their ethnic backgrounds...

...One is the historic landmark, no longer in active use...

...But, she wrote, it was "far less rapid than the Jewish exodus...

...Sue Timin is a 37-year-old Baltimore beautician who has twice lived through the turning of Jewish neighborhoods...

...Yona Ginsberg described what went on in Mattapan as "a chain reaction of panic selling...

...This is of the very essence of Tuan's topophilia...

...As a youngster, Silverberg had a nickname—one that even now it pains him too much to repeat— and it stuck with him all the while he lived in Newark...

...The Jewish Educational Alliance building on East Baltimore Street is now a union hall...

...Topophilia rings false," he stresses, "when it is claimed for a large territory...

...Even as far back as 1947, fewer than 9 percent of Baltimore's 100,000-or-so Jews lived here in this, the cradle of the city's Jewish community...

...But finally, as Isaac puts it, "everybody else was gone...

...We'd sit on the stoop on a hot summer night wondering when...

...These are hardly effects from which Jews have been immune...

...On the other hand, there's been a price to pay...

...The phrase originated, he says, with how the Jews accepted the Torah at Sinai before really knowing what they were getting themselves into...

...The Jewish neighborhoods in cities like Detroit or San Francisco have long since broken up...

...We'd best keep to ourselves, or keep moving, but in any event keep out of their way...

...In 1970, the Lubavitcher Rebbe pronounced it morally wrong for well-off Jews to leave behind their poorer brethren...

...they are not how most of America, Jewish or not, lives...

...It's just that, as he puts it, "I don't want to be a sheep and run...

...For all the rooted ethnics still living in Baltimore's "Little Lithuania," thousands of others have made the trek out to "American" suburbs like Arbutus and Catonsville...

...Occasionally they wave to the old men sitting out on beach chairs in front of their houses: Here, in this hundred-year-old neighborhood of narrow row houses where Italian immigrants got off the boats that brought them to America, a new generation of Italian-Americans grows up...

...A geographer at the University of Minnesota, Yi-Fu Tuan, has coined a word to describe what he calls this "affective bond between people and place...

...On the other hand, in Baltimore's Liberty Road corridor, blacks often picked Jewish areas because, as a Baltimore Sun series on the area noted, "they did not have to fear cross burnings—which were not uncommon in some parts of the city as late as the mid-1960s—or violent attacks...

...Living always as Marginal Man, impermanent, maybe Jews have become constitutionally more willing to start over, to take fresh risks—whether spiritual, entrepreneurial, or intellectual...

...Perhaps, if America continues to prove as hospitable to Jews as it has so far, it may be time to throw off these psychic chains of our history and begin to cultivate the kinds of ties to home and town and neighborhood that can so enhance our individual and collective lives, but which Jews have often been denied...

...The city's Jewish historical society has made up a guide and map to the area, occasionally conducts tours...

...Cleveland, ca...

...For all the push to suburbia, enough Italian-Americans move back and enough fresh Italian-American blood is generated within the neighborhood to assure its continued health...

...They've pointed to a lack of commitment in interpersonal relations, undue family strains, disrupted educations, and downright loneliness...

...To a great extent, rootlessness has been thrust upon the Jews, sometimes by laws quite literally denying them roots in the soil...

...How neighborhoody is a neighborhood laid out on two-acre house lots...

...I don't know," one confided to Ginsberg...

...The May Laws of 1882 in Tsarist Russia, which prohibited Jews from buying and selling farm land, were merely a throwback to similar restrictions going back to the Middle Ages...

...The Rise of David Levinsky, the immigrant Torah student comes to America, he discards much in the way of traditions and old values...

...It was a dispersal, an exodus, an evacuation," he says, searching for words that adequately express its magnitude...

...Now, though, with America becoming more "ours," or at least not so exclusively "theirs," Jews may come to feel more willing to stake claims to their homes and neighborhoods, more willing to sink deep roots, more willing to fight for their turf...

...1978...

...I see all the Jews selling, but Gentiles in this area don't sell...

...Corned Beef Row...

...Jewish history might well be written in terms of migration and resettlement, from Abraham's move to Canaan to the recent exodus from the Soviet Union and perhaps now Iran, too," writes Sidney Goldstein, professor of sociology at Brown University, in a recent analysis of likely Jewish demographic trends for the 1980s...

...Hard hit by the riots that followed the King assassination in 1968, this battered old street is these days getting city money to spruce itself up...

...though they and others have maintained remarkably stable neighborhoods, tolerance for racial diversity hardly seems a likely factor in explaining why...

...Isaac Pes-sah, for instance, a graduate student at an eastern university, was born in Egypt...

...Since Israel's founding there'd been a rising chorus of hostility toward Jews...

...Ruthi moved two weeks ago and Stella sold her house and will move soon...

...Faced with declining Hebrew school enrollments, B'nai Israel nevertheless fought to hold on...

...Only the Jews came and left...

...One is Simon Scherr, a 68-year-old state accountant who, out of his fondness for unusual headgear, likes to call himself The Mad Hatter...

...But what of the impact specifically on Jewish community and Jewish identity...

...He calls it "topophilia," meaning by it the whole constellation of feelings one can muster for a place or setting..These may, for example, be aesthetic—as for a particular panoramic view...

...He seems to be succeeding: At least one new housing development has used its proximity to the Center as a selling point, and is today largely Jewish...

...After all, when Vance Packard wrote A Nation of Strangers, the nation he had in mind was not Jewry, but America...

...or reflect patriotism...

...The temptation is to see the frenetic Jewish flight of the late sixties and early seventies as, at bottom, a racial issue and let it go at that...

...The Western Reserve Historical Society and The Jewish Community Federation of Cleveland...

...They start frying up all that bacon and chitlins and you know it's time to go," said one Baltimore Jew in explaining why he'd moved...

...When the door to safety and freedom opens, take it—before it again swings shut...

...The Jewish community of Egypt that once numbered some 150,000 is now down to barely a few hundred...

...His parents, leaving Newark at the time of the 1968 riots, moved to Long Branch, N.J...

...It is part of who we Jews are, and part of who we are is innovative, intellectually bold, resourceful...

...A reporter covering black-Jewish tension in a Baltimore suburb seen as threatened by a low cost housing project says he's noticed a stiff-necked intransigence on the part of Jews of a kind he's previously encountered only in a working class Italian neighborhood...

...Back in the city's mostly Jewish Wequahic district, "you were typecast in the first grade...

...1910.1 Vincent and Rubvulewl Middle: Uoyd Street Synagogue...

...But there are no squealing Jewish babies here, no talmud torahs, no JCCs, no adolescents chanting their haf-torahs...

...in fact he says he doesn't have much to do with his black neighbors...

...And in New York, a 1976 report revealed that fewer Jews now lived in either Brooklyn or the Bronx than in the city's Long Island suburbs...

...Copyright • 1979 Elinor B. Cahn...

...When, as Goldstein puts it, people "know in advance that their residence in a community is not likely to be permanent," they may resist putting their all into bettering it—into strengthening the Sisterhood, cooperating with police on anti-crime measures, or helping to plan a new youth center...

...Jews, then, aren't constitutionally unable to experience love-of-place...

...Were it the old East Baltimore Jewish quarter alone that is no more, there might be little enough to say...

...But will there ever be, out here, a true Jewish community...

...One would be hard pressed to assemble statistics to prove Jews have weaker ties to their cities and neighborhoods than others...

...topophilia is not chauvinism...

...Back some years ago, when real estate speculators first descended on Hilltop, there'd been an effort to stem the exodus through establishment of a neighborhood improvement association...

...Whereas Cleveland's Jewish institutions successfully slowed the dispersal, Baltimore's may have acted to speed it...

...Indeed, it "may result in the failure of families and individuals to identify at all with organized life of the local community...

...What's happened...

...memory Project...

...Top: The Han Company, a Yiddish theater group...

...Back in Wequahic, David Silverberg recalls, both the YMHA and the Hebrew school he attended had been built just a few years before the neighborhood's abandonment...

...In Baltimore, the Jewish community has remained more tightly clustered than most...

...There, Silverberg recalls, he was "tremendously liberated...

...Other Jews even wondered whether it was such a good idea to live in a Jewish area...

...I still cuss the guys that left," he says...

...What happens once blacks do drive that wedge is another story...

...Bottom: Baltimore...

...Polish Catholics resist moving, while Polish Jews are quick to move if they feel pressured by some other ethnic group, the sociologist observed...

...Both reflect insecurity with the wider world outside the orbit of Jewish life...

...Or head out further still, to lower Park Heights, Jewish until the fifties: Today it's black, almost entirely so...

...You try to anticipate them...

...In Boston's Mattapan, in Brooklyn's Brownsville, in Baltimore's Park Circle, Jewish flight has seemed to follow substantial black house purchases as if in obedience to divine law...

...Simon Scherr—very definitely of 4003 Lewiston avenue, Baltimore, thank you—puts one side of the problem in distinctly more down to earth terms: Better watch out, he warns Baltimore's Associated Jewish Charities, "At the rate they're going, with Jews spread out and assimilated, there'll be nobody to give them any money...

...Social critics like Alvin Toffler, in Future Shock, Ralph Keyes, in We, the Lonely People, Top: Woodland Avenue...

...Small wonder that following a coup by a military junta in Argentina, resumed publication of anti-Semitic tracts, and the bombing of synagogues, 100,000 Jews have left the country...

...The area of northwest Washington that in 1952 had been at the geographic center of a prosperous Jewish community had in the space of 18 years become, in the words of its rabbi, "completely depopulated...

...By 1972—just four years later—it was down to 2,500...

...Cleveland, ca...

...For example, what about the Jews-left-behind...

...In World of Our Fathers, Irving Howe tells of the landsmanshaftn—lodges made up of immigrants from the same town or district in the old country—that in his estimation were "closest in voice and spirit to the masses" of all East Side institutions...

...In fact, said one of the first blacks to move into the area, his white Jewish neighbors had actually been quite friendly to him...

...Nor do Jews today lightly leave their homelands and home towns...

...But no Jews live down here, and none have for years...

...Everything's gone...

...Meanwhile, along Lombard Street, five minutes away on foot across the grounds of a high-rise housing project, stands "Corned Beef Row," lined with half a dozen Jewish delicatessens...

...Can it afford to keep Jews-on-the-move lavishly supplied with Jewish services...

...Simon Scherr, the Hilltop neighborhood stay-putter, almost wails with grief as he lists the Jewish shops and food stores, now gone, from which he once drew such pleasure...

...We're starting to get tougher now...

...Italians coming to the U.S., on the other hand, were almost all contadini, or "men from the country...

...No school crossing guard is needed here, because there are no schoolchildren, no Jewish schoolchildren anyway, to watch out for...

...Bottom: Jewish Community Center...

...Telltale nailholes in doorposts to which mezuzahs were once affixed...

...landing one may well mean moving to another city...

...Blacks moving into predominantly Jewish neighborhoods in the Liberty Road area agreed there was little open hostility directed at them...

...In time, perhaps, cohesiveness and warmth can develop in the new neighborhood...

...For American Jews, it seems, there are only the "old neighborhoods" where they no longer live, the neighborhoods they live in now, and some future neighborhoods, a few miles further out, where they will live someday...

...In Cleveland, according to Sidney Vincent, executive director of the city's Jewish Community Federation, even as far back as 20 years ago, virtually no Jews still lived in the city proper...

...Five years later, blacks moved into some of the area's comfortable brick houses...

...A community may thus be rendered a ripe candidate to be moved from...

...In A Nation of Strangers, his best-selling indictment of American mobility, Vance Packard talked with a De Paul University sociologist about ethnic migration patterns in Chicago...

...He loved Egypt for the warmth of its people, and its dry climate, and the fond memories he'd collected over the years...

...Certainly there is some truth to this, and certainly the extent of Jewish residential mobility oughtn't be overstated...

...Among one's peers, this role or that was assigned to you, and that was it...

...There are only so many positions for a professor of molecular biology...

...Whole Jewish communities—once thriving, full of synagogues and delis, kosher butchers and Hebrew book stores—have been rendered Judenrein within a decade...

...Around the corner, a handsomely restored, Greek Revival-styled synagogue boasts a brass plaque attesting to its standing as an historic landmark...

...The Jews did not leave Russia lightly...

...The Jewish Community Center has come to Owings Mills, and surely many Jews will follow...

...Always a minority, they've learned that the security that "ought" to go with tenure in a town or country is never theirs...

...To recreate its extensive network of institutions, like synagogues and community centers, would run up a tab of, the study determined, one hundred million dollars...

...And in 1978, it was 56 percent...

...If that could go into the content of Jewish life, rather than bricks and mortar, it would be a whole lot better for everyone...

...By extension, it pictures the Jews as people with, as Baum-garten puts it, "a tendency to adopt current fashions thoughtlessly...

...But by 1976, it was still 41 percent...

...It didn't...

...To protect that investment, they worked to elect their people to local community boards, to poverty corporations, to school district offices...

...Suburbanites and tourists are being invited down here for a trip into the Jewish past, for a "real" Jewish corned beef sandwich that is somehow, by dint of location, more Jewish, more truly ethnic, than corned beef sandwiches elsewhere...

...From Merging Traditions—Jewish Life in Cleveland, by Sidney Vincent and Judah Rubinstein...

...The other is B'nai Israel, for years tended by a rabbi who lived nearby and devoted himself to its preservation, but who recently passed away...

...Much the same occurred in Newark after the 1968 riots...

...In Mattapan, according to Yona Ginsberg, a typical comment was "You won't find a black in South Boston or in the North End— they'd kill them...

...Or take the Mattapan neighborhood of Boston, for which a rich store of information is available thanks to Yona Ginsberg's thorough study, Jews in a Changing Neighborhood...

...Jewish employees lost their jobs, Jewish stores were boycotted...

...The Jewish population of Mattapan in 1968 stood at about 10,000...

...Scherr is angry...

...This mark on the Jewish psyche has, quite aside from its survival value, hardly proved an unalloyed curse...

...Today in Crown Heights, blacks worry about Jews trying, as one black leader put it, to "take over...

...The Little Italys and South Bostons capture the public imagination because they are exceptions...

...Once kosher butcher stores now selling pork...

...Top: Glenvilte neighborhood...

...After feeling the need to leave two neighborhoods in which she'd come to feel at home, Sue Timin now lives in the Pickwick area of Baltimore...

...When Jews first came to Hilltop the people already living there were mostly white and mostly gentile...

...Like the proverbial peddler who carries his livelihood over his shoulder, the Jew, lacking a permanent physical home, has carried his psychic home with him on this travels—his wits, his humor, his faith...

...Sidney Vincent of the Jewish Community Federation of Cleveland even has a handle on how large that "fortune" can be: In the late 1960s, the Federation looked into what might happen were the heavily Jewish suburb of Cleveland Heights to go the way of other, older Jewish neighborhoods...

...The Orpheum Theater, where Boris Thomashevsky and Molly Picon once played, is now the site of a gas station...

...There's a fortune's worth of Jewish communal facilities that go down the drain with these dislocations," says Joseph Baumgarten of Baltimore Hebrew College...

...The East Baltimore Ooru...

...The kids trek home along narrow streets, laughing and shouting, trading insults, arranging to meet later to play...

...Cleveland, ea...

...but it too is fanning out across the countryside, and Jews are cropping up in isolated enclaves far distant from organized Jewish life...

...The notion of the Wandering Jew is one the Oxford English Dictionary traces back to the 13th century, construing it to typify a "restless and profitless traveling from place to place...

...And yet in 1959, finding conditions as a Jew unbearable, he felt forced to leave...

...Of Russia's five million Jews at the time of the late nineteenth century migrations, reports Thomas Ressner in The Golden Door, his study of Italian and Jewish immigrant mobility in New York City, only about three percent held farm-related jobs—and this in an overwhelmingly agricultural economy...

...I can't say we've totally stopped the migration," says Vincent...

...It is a museum of the past and maybe, if the city fathers and the corned beef merchants have their way, a bustling tourist magnet of the future...

...There's no kosher butcher shop here anymore," he says, citing one example...

...Corned Beef Row...

...After three years there, she complains the new neighborhood just isn't as friendly as what she'd been used to...

...Thus it may actually be the relative liberalism of the Jews, not their racism, that provides the opening wedge for the dissolution of Jewish neighborhoods, once that wedge is driven...

...Stephen Solender, executive director of Baltimore's Associated Jewish Charities, points out that the speed of Jewish migration since World War II may simply be "a response to the open housing market...

...But it's a kind of disingenuous laissez-faire, isn't it, to say that Jewish institutions can only watch helplessly as impersonal "market" forces direct where people live, that the scattering of Jews across the landscape is somehow ordained from on high...

...But finally, in 1970, in what its rabbi later described as "one of the most wrenching experiences of my life," the congregation sold its synagogue to a Baptist church and moved to a 14-acre site in the Maryland suburbs...

...The way she sees it, Jewish neighborhoods represent a path of least resistance to blacks...

...But Tuan carefully distinguishes between local topophilia and what he calls "imperial patriotism" evoked by "abstract categories of pride and power...

...1940...

...ing to move...

...People's habits have to be turned around, he says, and a good part of his job is simply dreaming up ways to do that, to lure them out...

...At the corner of South Exeter and Stiles Streets in Baltimore's Little Italy, a school crossing guard, a crisply-outfitted woman in her thirties, watches over them...

...says Scherr...

...Or take David Silverberg...

...His father didn't leave Egypt for the sake of a job, Isaac says, nor because he wished to travel, nor because he simply no longer cared for his native land...

...Things don't seem to work this way for Jewish neighborhoods...

...Detroit is said to no longer have any specifically Jewish neighborhoods at all...

...He has lived at 4003 Lewis-ton Avenue for 26 years and says he has no plans to move—despite the neighborhood's racial complexion, which he puts at 95 percent black...

...But, his senses and spirit electrified by the New World, he gains something as well—a rough-and-tumble dynamism that transforms him into a fabulously successful, if not entirely happy, businessman...

...Still, they do endure...

...tCahnl Robert Kanigel is a writer living in Baltimore...

...But that this adds up to some particularly virulent strain of Jewish racism hardly follows...

...On the other hand...

...But that Jews had indeed moved out faster she apparently had no reason to question...

...History has taught them to exploit safe passage, to always keep their bags packed...

...1979...

...It is perhaps no accident that many who have fled "changing neighborhoods" have done so one or more times before...

...Topographically, the city of Newark lies in a basin, its suburbs lying atop and beyond the hills surrounding it...

...The Holocaust hammered the lesson home again...

...In fact, it may be intolerance of racial diversity that explains it better...

...Boston's Mattapan was apparently never as warm a place as Scherr's neighborhood once was...

...Newcomers take a while— demographer Sidney Goldstein figures about five years—to adjust to a new community...

...Love-of-place, then, need not conflict with the healthy distrust Jews have traditionally held for extreme nationalsim...

...But you know what...

...Vincent and Rubinsteinl Bottom: Baltimore...

...It was hard to grow^ up to be a person...

...In the wake of the riots (which didn't touch Wequahic itself), says Silverberg, the Jews "literally ran for the hills...

...They are a minority, to be sure, but in any movement there are always some...

...Goldstein sees crucial policy questions relating to the dispersal characteristic of recent Jewish settlement—a dispersal that inhibits central location of everything from synagogues to bagel shops...

...Small wonder that Jews have sometimes fled neighborhoods they loved, at the first appearance of danger, rather than risk getting caught up in another round of violence...

...it's been a luxury they could rarely enjoy...

...After all, no one seriously suggests that the Irish of South Boston, say, or the Italians of South Philadelphia, are any more disposed to genuinely integrated living than most Jews...

...Small wonder, then, that today, with the rise of Quebec nationalism, as many as 15,000 Jews have reportedly left Montreal...

...1910...

...It is virtually the sole vestige of a once-bustling Jewish community...

...There's no vestige of anything...

...Baltimore...

...But in Long Branch, things were different...

...And way back in the 1850s, when a Census Bureau official expressed the hope that someday "our countrymen will exhibit that attachment to the homes of their childhood, the want of which is sometimes cited as an unfavorable trait in our national character," he was singling out not Jews, but Americans in general...

...But what about the meantime...

...It's like we never existed...

...Similarly, Jews did not leave Spain 400 years earlier because they were mildly displeased with their lot, but because they were expelled...

...But gone is not just this old Jewish quarter in this city, but virtually all old Jewish quarters in all cities...

...A loyal Jew, active in keeping the nearby shul where it is, he can muster nothing but contempt for those he feels deserted the neighborhood...

...There are almost no equivalents to Baltimore's Little Italy in Jewish experience, nothing like Irish South Boston, or San Francisco's Chinatown—no neighborhoods that were Jewish 50 years ago, are Jewish today, and will likely remain Jewish 50 years from now...

...Crown Heights was not to be abandoned...

...In Cleveland, after its Federation came up with that hundred million dollar figure, the Heights Area Project was launched as a massive and sustained effort to stabilize the area...

...You got a house...

...Normally, tenure in a place breeds caution, concern for the status quo...

...It's just that, batted around and forced to run so much, they've had it kicked out of them...

...In one area within the Heights, from 1969 to 1973 the proportion of houses bought by whites did continue to slide, from 84 percent to 43 percent...

...There, in 1952, B'nai Israel Synagogue moved to a new million dollar building on a site near the heart of a burgeoning Jewish neighborhood...

...Sidney Goldstein worries that "the high degree of population movement characterizing Jews" may, by disrupting participation patterns and weakening loyalties, cut into synagogue membership, Hebrew school enrollment, and the work of charitable and philanthropic organizations...

...The forces in Jewish history making for this "jumpiness" are not hard to trace...

...Almost never are they one and the same...

...The area, mostly Jewish as late as the forties, is today one of those poor black neighborhoods becoming "gentri-fied" by well-off white renovators...

...You don't want to build behind" the demographic trends, he says...

...So here, fifteen miles from Lombard Street, past the heart of Baltimore's Jewish community in Pikes-ville, past the Beltway that encircles the city, past historic towns that still sport little porch-fronted rural post offices, past fields of corn and as yet unbulldozed woods, sits the Dalsheimer Center, built into the side of a low hill overlooking the Maryland countryside...

...Even fashions in residence, where Jews do, Baumgarten agrees, seem to exhibit "a certain amount of jumpiness...

...The Associated's Stephen Solender terms the move "far-sighted...

...tCahnt Moment/29 and especially Vance Packard in A Nation of Strangers, have lamented the psychic and social costs of high mobility...

...In the three or four months after the National Guard had cleared out, virtually every house went up for sale...

...but its dissolution imposed its own measure of grief on those left behind...

...Suddenly I remembered that she left and I started crying...

...f Vincent and Rubinstein...

...It is a normal drift of people to where they would have moved 15 or 20 years ago" had they not otherwise been barred by restrictive covenants and other forms of housing discrimination...

...THE MOVING STORY OF (OR, WHATEVER HAPPENED ROBER THE JEWS TO JEWISH NEIGHBORHOODS...

...So it goes: Synagogues turning into churches...

...But certainly they are often so perceived...

...Can a sense of being Jewish blossom in such a setting...

...All the machers in the association—they were the first to run...

...Marquee announces performance of "The White Slaves...

...But by 1968, on the eve of the riots, there was already a steady outmigration underway...

...This "greater dispersal and integration are critical factors in explaining how ties to Judaism are changing," writes Goldstein...

...You ought to stay in it...

...It's their country," the thinking goes in both cases...

...to weakened participation in civic affairs, indifference to local happenings, and even the growth of crime...

...In Little Italy today, houses going up for sale are still gobbled up through the neighborhood grapevine long before they ever appear in classified ads of the Baltimore Sun...

...How often has that same psychic liberation been played out in migrations from Russia and from Spain, from Brownsville and from Lombard Street...

...Blacks avoid other ethnic neighborhoods, she believes, because they'd feel "uncomfortable or downright scared" in them...

...Petersburg to the barbarities of the Dark Ages...

...And what about the kinds of places to which Jews have been flocking...

...Nor did her informants...

...The reaction to the Jewish flight among the white gentiles was, according to Scherr, "What the hell are you moving for...

...They were friendly," he said, "up to the day they moved out...

...the forbearance of the Cossacks or the storm troopers could never be taken for granted...

...So Jews have largely been denied the luxury of generations of rooted-ness in a land that was their own...

...A lot of energies repressed in all that suffocating closeness were released...

...On the contrary, he had a fine position, and his own father was a respected rabbi...

...Dollars and cents: Can the organized Jewish community afford to rebuild the infrastructure of Jewish life every twenty years...

...There must be 10 or 15 or 20 families...

...or come by virtue of long residence...

...They are less attached to a specific territory and tend to yield...

...We can't run anymore...

...Cleveland...

...Scherr isn't a gung-ho love-your-brother type...

...The Jews have moved out...

...Jews get panicky and run away," said one who hadn't...

...Signs of a greater willingness to press territorial claims are already appearing...

...In a footnote, she went on to consider why this might be, pointing to such possible factors as the better organization of the Catholic community and the vagaries of the local mortgage market...

...Baltimore...

...Bottom: Baltimore, the old neighborhood...

...Isaac's father held on longer than almost everyone else...

...Who can say how much those qualities stem from being perpetually on the run...

...Where once thirty-five synagogues ministered to the neighborhood's spiritual needs, today there are but two...

...Jews "seldom felt much loyalty to Russia or Poland as nations," he writes, but "they brought with them fierce affections for the little places they had lived in, the muddy streets, battered synagogues, remembered fields from which they had fled...

...Similar scenarios have been played out in Jewish communities around the country, including the nation's capital...

...Those doing the moving also suffer...

...1979...

...The East Baltimore Documentary Project...

...And at least for some Diaspora Jews, distant, never-seen Israel has commanded as much loyalty and affection as the country in which they lived: "Next year in Jerusalem," however mechanically uttered at the Seder table, does not help one feel rooted in a Kiev or Montreal or Baltimore neighborhood...

...This seems to apply to Jewish groups whatever their national background," Packard added...

...Back in 1969 the fear had been that, as CJF executive director Sidney Vincent puts it, "the Heights would soon empty out...

...Today, says Scherr, the whites remaining are still mostly gentile...

...David Silverberg, a Baltimore journalist who grew up there, remembers the city's mostly Jewish Wequahic district as "a very stable neighborhood, a place where people didn't move much, where people felt secure...

...As of 1975 at least, not one of the area's 15 synagogues had moved out, and kosher bakeries, butchers, and the like were thriving...

...East Baltimore Documentary Project...

...It made available low cost loans to housebuyers, ran a public relations campaign stressing the area's Jewish appeal, worked actively with local government, and organized block clubs and neighborhood associations...

...New vistas, the moving and travel industries would have it, broaden us, introduce us to different kinds of people, offer us new economic opportunities...

...Now the new Jewish-black border zone extends out Liberty Road, well past the city line...

...Perhaps being only loosely rooted in the soil of any particular place, Jews have felt freer to graft new ideas to old, to take leaps of the imagination that paralleled their continual territorial leaps...

...And certainly Jewish neighborhoods have seemed to experience particularly tumultous racial transformations...

...Ginsberg found there'd also been an outmigration of white Catholics...

...These days, says Lenny Moskowitz, Dalsheimer program director, it's costing big bucks to bus 40 to 100 kids a day out to the Center, which is not served by public transit...

...And so, while more assimilated Jews were scooting out to The Island, the Lubavitchers dug in, investing millions...

...Much of the moving-out has come in haste, sometimes in panic...

...I could be anybody I wanted to be," he says...

...But we did completely stop the panic...

...The flight from Egypt, the wandering in the desert, and the Diaspora are all central to Jewish thought...

...The same goes for Forest Park...

...There was nothing I was afraid to try...

...I had two good friends on the street, Stella and Ruthi," one woman told Yona Ginsberg...

...Meanwhile, above Lombard Street, pigeons perch atop the ragged roofs of boarded-up, gabled houses where Jews once lived, baking in the early autumn sun...

...Jewish institutional leaders are apt to pooh-pooh any seeming tendency on the part of Jews to "run" more than others, chalking up any differences to various socio-economic factors...

...And in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, there's the tenaciousness of the Hasidic Jews...