East European Jewish Detroit in the Early Twentieth Century

Judaism, Summer, 2000 by Kenneth Waltzer

Russian and Polish Jews, who were restricted in residence and occupation in the Russian Pale, barred from owning land or pursuing opportunities outside the Pale, and increasingly targeted by state persecution and popular violence, comprised the largest portion of the migrants. They moved from small market towns and villages (shtetlakh) to larger, industrializing cities in Poland, Lithuania, and the Ukraine, to Warsaw, Lodz, Vilna, Lvov, and Odessa. From these expanding centers and from the villages, they moved increasingly overseas to cities in the United States, mainly to New York, where more than half settled, and also to Chicago, Boston, Baltimore, Cleveland, Detroit, and elsewhere. Galician Jews, too, who inhabited the most primitive portions of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and who confronted spectacular poverty due to the privation of their peasant neighbors, moved in high proportions. Finally, Rumanian Jews, who were proscribed by state decree from whole lines of economic, activity and limited in right s, also joined in the exodus. [29]

There are no firm statistics on the places of origins of East European Jews in Detroit or what the paths of migration were to the Motor City. Some came straight away from New York, others from Chicago or after some experience in the west. Many came directly to relatives who helped the new arrivals find work and adjust. The efforts by the United States Immigration Commission to determine the number of children of "Hebrews" in the Detroit schools in 1908-1909 offers hints about their regions of origin. The Commission counted 1,744 children in the elementary grades whose fathers were identified as "Hebrew" and either Russian, Polish, Rumanian, or "Other" in background. Of these, 79 percent came from families where the nativity and race of the father were identified as "Hebrew/Russian," 9 percent from families where the father was "Hebrew/Polish," 8 percent "Hebrew/Other," and 4 percent "Hebrew/Rumanian." The Commission identified 337 more children from families headed by fathers who were "Hebrew/German." [30] A look at the synagogues the newcomers formed in Detroit's Hastings Street area in these years is also suggestive. Between 1900 and 1914, East European Jews established a dozen new Orthodox congregations, reflecting their diverse regional origins in Eastern Europe. These included Russian, Polish, Lithuanian, Galitzianer, Hungarian, and Rumanian synagogues. Among these new synagogues were B'nai David (the Russisehe shul), Beth Eliyahu, later B'nai Moshe (the Hungarische shut), Beth Abraham (the Galitzianer shut), and several others. [31]

The community East European Jews formed on Detroit's east side, together with German Jews with whom they interacted as coreligionists, was actually comprised of a group of communities. As John Bodnar writes in The Transplanted, immigrant communities were hardly harmonious or united in purpose or direction; and as Deborah Dash Moore stresses, Jewish immigrant communities were especially internally diverse and fractious. [32] Sidney Bolkosky emphasizes that there were a variety of often quite dissonant voices on all issues of immigrant life and culture in East EuropeanJewish Detroit and a variety of ways East European Jews organized and identified themselves. [33] Jewish newcomers argued over issues of Americanization, politics, labor Socialism, and Zionism. They divided between secularism and traditionalism and differed also in their attitudes to Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox religious belief and practice. East European Jews also participated in a variety of landsmanshaft organizations, based on smaller scale loyalties, which provided vital mutual aid and sociability according to Old World ties. Some forty landsmanshaftn existed in Detroit by the 1920s, joining landslayt from Pinsk, Brisk, Radom, Odessa, Kiev, Wohlin and elsewhere in support of mutual aid and benevolent activities. [34] Most Orthodox shuls, too, reflected in their bonds and practices similar Old World regional, cultural, and other differences. Such differences and diverse bases of Jewish identity would need to be bridged or displaced by shared or cooperative new responses to New World experiences to assemble a new Detroit Jewish or American Jewish identity.