High holidays

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Three Orthodox Jewish folktales, recalled in the 1930s by Mr. S. A. Friedlander (born around 1868)

Goat peering around a wooden wall

Today’s “guest blogger from the past” is Joseph Vogel, an early 20th century Yiddish- and English-speaking writer. In the 1930s, while working for the Federal Writers Project (FWP), he sometimes wrote down folktales and memories he collected from Jews he met in various parts of New York City.

He collected the tales below from Mr. S. A. Friedlander, who was born around the late 1860s near Prostejov (then part of Hungary but now in the Czech Republic). Their conversation took place at the Madison Jewish Center in Brooklyn around 1937-38. Like many such tales, the first two teach that God will provide for our needs. Some readers may find the second story, “God Helps the Poor,” a bit grotesque.

FWP writers would sometimes add cultural clarifications to their folklife reports. Here, Vogel explains that the Maggid in one tale is a “Yiddish Billy Sunday” type (a reference to the then-famous Christian itinerant preacher). The original typescript of this document is in the Library of Congress. I have fixed obvious typos and changed the order in which the stories are presented.

CONTENTS:

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Yom Kippur in the “White City”: Kol Nidre at the Chicago World’s Fair

Last time, we spent Rosh Hashanah with soldiers in 1918 France. Now we meet other Jews observing the holidays far from home: Ottoman Jews staffing the Turkish Village at the 1893 World’s Fair.

This description of their Yom Kippur services—published in 1901 but probably written earlier—reflects the exoticism that pervaded writings about the fair. 

Entrance to the Turkish Village on the midway of the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Most of the village closed for Yom Kippur.

YOM KIPPUR ON THE MIDWAY
By Isidor Lewi

About four-fifths of the inhabitants of the Turkish village on the Midway Plaisance at the Chicago Exposition were Jews. Merchants, clerks, actors, servants, musicians, and even the dancing girls, were of the Mosaic faith, though their looks and garb would lead one to believe them Mohammedans. That their Judaism was not of the passive character was demonstrated by the closed booths, shops, and curio places, by the silence in the otherwise noisy theaters and the general Sabbath day air which pervaded the “Streets of Constantinople” on Yom Kippur—the Day of Atonement.

A more unique observance of the day never occurred in this country, and to the few Americans who had the good fortune to be present it presented a picture of rare beauty and solemnity.

The Turkish mosque was so arranged that it could be used as a Jewish house of worship also—the paraphernalia was all there and the Moslem is liberal enough to allow religious service other than his own to take place in his houses of worship—a point which he thinks the Western people would do well to ponder.

It was in this gorgeously equipped and dimly lighted mosque that the oriental Jews assembled on Tuesday evening, September 19, 1893, and read the Kol Nidra service. A screen of carved wood was placed across one corner of the mosque, and behind this the women, robed in white, with Continue reading →

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High Holiday services for Jewish soldiers in WWI

This blog often features personal narratives written by Jews in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Today’s historical “guest blogger” is Rabbi Lee J. Levinger (1890–1966).

One of the most interesting books I’ve read in years was A Jewish Chaplain in France, a 1921 memoir by a young Reform rabbi from Chicago who, in World War I, was one of the few Jewish chaplains in the U.S. military. Today, we’ll read his account of High Holiday services for Jewish soldiers, but the whole book is worth your time. This excerpt doesn’t fully convey the very personal, point-of-view style in which he shares his wartime experiences.

Here Rabbi Levinger writes of his work in Nevers, France, in the cool, gray autumn of 1918, the last year of the “War to End All Wars”:

Rabbi Levinger as a Jewish welfare worker in postwar France - March 1919

Rabbi Levinger in France just after the war.

…Many Americans were stationed in or near the city—railroad engineers, training camps of combat units newly arrived in France, construction engineers, quartermaster units, and two great hospital centers. Every company I visited, every ward in the hospitals, had at least a few Jewish boys, and all of them were equally glad to see me and to attend my services. In fact, my first clear impression in France was that here lay a tremendous field for work, crying out for Jewish chaplains and other religious workers, and that we had such a pitiful force to answer the demand. At that time there were over fifty thousand Jewish soldiers in the A. E. F. [American Expeditionary Forces] at a very conservative estimate, with exactly six chaplains and four representatives of the Jewish Welfare Board to minister to them. When I took up my work at Nevers, I was simply staggered by the demands made on me and my inability to fulfill more than a fraction of them.

At first came the sudden rush of men into the city for the first day of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. The hotels filled up almost at once; then came others who could not find accommodations, and still others Continue reading →