Jews of Florida: Centuries of Stories

Jews of Florida: Centuries of Stories PDF

Author: Marcia Jo Zerivitz

Publisher: Arcadia Publishing

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 434

ISBN-13: 1467142530

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This first comprehensive history of the Jews of Florida from colonial times to the present is a sweeping tapestry of voices. Despite not being officially allowed to live in Florida until 1763, Jewish immigrants escaping expulsions and exclusions were among the earliest settlers. They have been integral to every facet of Florida's growth, from tilling the land and developing early communities to boosting tourism and ultimately pushing mankind into space. The Sunshine State's Jews, working for the common good, have been Olympians, Nobel Prize winners, computer pioneers, educators, politicians, leaders in business and the arts and more, while maintaining their heritage to help ensure Jewish continuity for future generations. This rich narrative - accompanied by 700 images, most rarely seen - is the result of three-plus decades of grassroots research by author Marcia Jo Zerivitz, giving readers an incomparable look at the long and crucial history of Jews in Florida.

Jewish Experiences across the Americas

Jewish Experiences across the Americas PDF

Author: Katalin Franciska Rac

Publisher: University Press of Florida

Published: 2023-08-01

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 1683403975

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Latin American Jewish Studies Association Best Edited Volume This volume explores the local specificities and global forces that shaped Jewish experiences in the Americas across five centuries. Featuring a range of case studies by scholars from the United States, Brazil, Europe, and Israel, it explores the culturally, religiously, and politically diverse lives of Jewish minorities in the Western Hemisphere. The chapters are organized chronologically and trace four global forces: the western expansion of early modern European empires, Jewish networks across and beyond empires, migration, and Jewish activism and participation in international ideological movements. The volume weaves together into one narrative the histories of communities and individuals separated by time and space, such as the descendants of Portuguese converts, Moroccan immigrants to Brazil, and U.S.-based creators of Yiddish movies. Through its transnational focus and close attention paid to local circumstances, this volume offers new insights into the multicultural pasts of the Americas’ Jewish populations and of the different regions that make up North, Central, and South America. Contributors: Lenny A. Ureña Valerio | Elisa Kriza | Raanan Rein | Adriana M. Brodsky | Lucas de Mattos Moura Fernandes | Katalin Franciska Rac | Zachary M Baker | Neil Weijer | Hilit Surowitz-Israel | Isabel Rosa Gritti | Tamar Herzog | Jose C Moya | Sandra McGee Deutsch | Dana Rabin Publication of this work made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Stories from Jewish Portland

Stories from Jewish Portland PDF

Author: Polina Olsen

Publisher: Arcadia Publishing

Published: 2011-11-23

Total Pages: 171

ISBN-13: 1614233470

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

These are the stories of Jewish Portland, whose roots stretch back to the Gold Rush, whose heart is 'the old neighborhood' of South Portland and the memories of its residents, whose identity is alive and well in synagogues and community institutions. Portland author Polina Olsen recounts the history of this richly layered community through a collection of letters, interviews, and stories drawn from her series "Looking Back," published in The Jewish Review. In this expanded collection, explore the lives of early settlers brought by opportunity and New York's Industrial Removal Office, walk the streets of the old neighborhood, alive with basketball games and junk peddlers, and learn the proud history of institutions like the Jewish Federation of Greater Portland, which continue the cultural traditions of Jewish Portland.

Maine's Jewish Heritage

Maine's Jewish Heritage PDF

Author: Abraham J. Peck

Publisher: Arcadia Publishing

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 136

ISBN-13: 9780738549651

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

According to historian Benjamin Band, the first record of a Jew in Maine concerns Susman Abrams, a tanner who resided in Union until his death at 87 in 1830. Historical records beginning in 1849 also tell of a small Bangor community that organized a synagogue and purchased a burial ground. But it was not until the late 19th century that Jewish communities grew large enough to establish multiple synagogues, Hebrew schools for boys, kosher butcher shops, and Jewish bakeries. Eventually there were Jewish charitable societies, community centers, and social clubs across the state. Now, 150 years later, Jews serve every Maine community in every possible capacity, free from the barriers of social or religious discrimination. This book honors the accomplishments of Maine's Jewish residents.

Words of the Uprooted

Words of the Uprooted PDF

Author: Robert A. Rockaway

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2018-09-05

Total Pages: 246

ISBN-13: 1501724630

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

American Jewish leaders, many of German extraction, created the Industrial Removal Office (IRO) in 1901 in order to disperse unemployed Jewish immigrants from New York City to smaller Jewish communities throughout the United States. The IRO was designed to help refugees from persecution in the Pale of Russia find jobs and community support and, secondarily, to reduce the Manhattan ghettoes and minimize antisemitism. In twenty-one years, the IRO distributed seventy-nine thousand East European Jews to over fifteen hundred cities and towns, including Chino, California; Des Moines, Iowa; and Pensacola, Florida. Wherever they went, these twice-displaced immigrants wrote letters to the IRO's main office. Robert A. Rockaway has selected, and translated from Yiddish, letters that describe the immigrants' new surroundings, work conditions, and living situations, as well as letters that give voice to typical tensions between the immigrants and their benefactors. Rockaway introduces the letters with an essay on conditions in the Pale and on early American Jewish attempts to assist emigrants.

Sephardic Jews in America

Sephardic Jews in America PDF

Author: Aviva Ben-Ur

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 0814725198

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

A significant number of Sephardic Jews, tracing their remote origins to Spain and Portugal, immigrated to the United States from Turkey, Greece, and the Balkans from 1880 through the 1920s, joined by a smaller number of Mizrahi Jews arriving from Arab lands. Most Sephardim settled in New York, establishing the leading Judeo-Spanish community outside the Ottoman Empire. With their distinct languages, cultures, and rituals, Sephardim and Arab-speaking Mizrahim were not readily recognized as Jews by their Ashkenazic coreligionists. At the same time, they forged alliances outside Jewish circles with Hispanics and Arabs, with whom they shared significant cultural and linguistic ties. The failure among Ashkenazic Jews to recognize Sephardim and Mizrahim as fellow Jews continues today. More often than not, these Jewish communities are simply absent from portrayals of American Jewry. Drawing on primary sources such as the Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) press, archival documents, and oral histories, Sephardic Jews in America offers the first book-length academic treatment of their history in the United States, from 1654 to the present, focusing on the age of mass immigration.

House of Glass

House of Glass PDF

Author: Hadley Freeman

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Published: 2020-03-24

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 1501199153

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

A writer investigates her family’s secret history, uncovering a story that spans a century, two World Wars, and three generations. Hadley Freeman knew her grandmother Sara lived in France just as Hitler started to gain power, but rarely did anyone in her family talk about it. Long after her grandmother’s death, she found a shoebox tucked in the closet containing photographs of her grandmother with a mysterious stranger, a cryptic telegram from the Red Cross, and a drawing signed by Picasso. This discovery sent Freeman on a decade-long quest to uncover the significance of these keepsakes, taking her from Picasso’s archives in Paris to a secret room in a farmhouse in Auvergne to Long Island to Auschwitz. Freeman pieces together the puzzle of her family’s past, discovering more about the lives of her grandmother and her three brothers, Jacques, Henri, and Alex. Their stories sometimes typical, sometimes astonishing—reveal the broad range of experiences of Eastern European Jews during Holocaust. This thrilling family saga is filled with extraordinary twists, vivid characters, and famous cameos, illuminating the Jewish and immigrant experience in the World War II era. Addressing themes of assimilation, identity, and home, this powerful story about the past echoes issues that remain relevant today.

Jews on the Frontier

Jews on the Frontier PDF

Author: Shari Rabin

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2017-12-12

Total Pages: 201

ISBN-13: 147983047X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

"Jews on the Frontier offers a religious history that begins in an unexpected place: on the road. Shari Rabin recounts the journey of Jewish people as they left Eastern cities and ventured into the American West and South during the nineteenth century. It brings to life the successes and obstacles of these travels, from the unprecedented economic opportunities to the anonymity and loneliness that complicated the many legal obligations of traditional Jewish life. Without government-supported communities or reliable authorities, where could one procure kosher meat? Alone in the American wilderness, how could one find nine co-religionists for a minyan (prayer quorum)? Without identity documents, how could one really know that someone was Jewish?"--[Site internet éditeur].

The Jews of Key West

The Jews of Key West PDF

Author: Arlo Haskell

Publisher:

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780984331277

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Literary Nonfiction. Jewish Studies. History. 2017 Florida Book Award, Phillip and Dana Zimmerman Gold Medal for Florida Nonfiction. The dramatic story of South Florida's oldest Jewish community and a major addition to the history of this unique island city. Long before Miami was on the map, Key West had Florida's largest economy and an influential Jewish community. Jews who settled here as peddlers in the nineteenth century joined a bilingual and progressive city that became the launching pad for the revolution that toppled the Spanish Empire in Cuba. As dozens of local Jews collaborated with José Martí's rebels, they built relationships that supported thriving Jewish communities in Key West and Havana at the turn of the twentieth century. During the 1920s, when anti-immigration hysteria swept the United States, Key West's Jews resisted the immigration quotas and established "the southernmost terminal of the Jewish underground," smuggling Jewish aliens in small boats across the Florida Straits to safety in Key West. But these and other Jewish exploits were kept secret as Ku Klux Klan leaders infiltrated local law enforcement and government. Many Jews left Key West during the 1930s and their stories were ignored or forgotten by the mythmakers that reinvented Key West as a tourist mecca. Arlo Haskell's THE JEWS OF KEY WEST is an entertaining and authoritative account of Key West's Jewish community from 1823-1969. Illustrated with over 100 images, it brings to life a history that had long been forgotten.