A Pittsburgh institution, conceived in Cleveland

Our friends at the Cleveland Jewish Archives recently celebrated their 50th anniversary with exciting news. A $2 million gift from the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Supporting Foundation will allow the archive to undertake an ambitious processing and digitization campaign, as well as publish a new community history.

The Rauh Jewish Archives celebrated its 38th anniversary this month, and so this is a good opportunity to recall the connections between these two Jewish archives.

In the aftermath of World War II, the American Jewish Historical Society convened some leading Jewish organizations to brainstorm ideas for marking the 300th anniversary of the documented arrival of Jewish people in North America in 1654. The American Jewish Tercentenary Committee was incorporated in April 1952. A yearlong celebration was launched in New York in September 1954, concluding in June 1955.

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Throughout that commemorative year, Jewish communities across the country formed similar Tercentenary committees to organize local projects. A group in Cleveland decided to publish a community history. As work got underway, the Jewish Community Federation of Cleveland hired a young historian from the Jewish Theological Seminary named Judah Rubenstein. He was supposed to spend two years researching Federation agencies. He stayed for the next 30 years as Jewish community archivist and historian.

The long-delayed history project culminated in 1978 with two books. Lloyd Gartner’s “History of the Jews of Cleveland” told the story through 1945, while Judah Rubenstein and Sidney Vincent’s “Merging Traditions: Jewish Life in Cleveland” extended the story to 1975 and included a pictorial record from 1839 to 1975.

To find these images, Rubenstein spent decades digging through agency records, as well as collections in local repositories like the Western Reserve Historical Society. The experience highlighted the need for better coordination to identify and preserve Jewish records. As early as January 1958, he had an idea to form a “Cleveland Jewish Archive,” but he struggled to define its relationship to the local Jewish community. He worried that an archive based in Cleveland might become inaccessible to the community of Jewish scholars, and so he recommended that any future archive be housed within a national Jewish repository, such as the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati.

And yet, he also sensed an additional value to the records, something deeper and more essential than scholarly research. Creating a community archive would, in his words, “dignify” the Jewish community in Cleveland. It would encourage people to see their individual experiences as part of an older and larger communal experience.
This secondary benefit gained importance. The Jewish Community Federation of Cleveland partnered with the Western Reserve Historical Society in 1976 to establish the Cleveland Jewish Archives, one of the first regional Jewish archives in the country.

Throughout the 1970s, Howard Rieger was on staff at the Jewish Community Federation of Cleveland, working in almost every department. He came to Pittsburgh in early 1981 to lead the United Jewish Federation of Pittsburgh. In the early 1980s, our Jewish community was pursuing several ambitious projects to better document its history.
Corinne Krause was finishing “Roots & Branches,” the first interpretive exhibit of the Jewish history in this region. It opened at the Pittsburgh Plan for Art in April 1982.

Krause had spent two years researching the exhibit. Just like Rubenstein, she acquired materials directly from people and organizations involved, while also making use of collections at the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh and the University of Pittsburgh.

By the time the exhibit opened, Krause already had a long association with the Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania. She was part of a larger effort in the 1970s and 1980s to expand the scope of the society to better document ethnic communities in the region. That philosophy also led the Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania to publish Jacob Feldman’s “The Jewish Experience in Western Pennsylvania” in 1986.

It was the first book-length history of the Jewish people of western Pennsylvania, the result of more than 30 years of painstaking research. Earlier efforts to tell the story of the Jews of this region had relied mostly on oral testimony. Feldman was part of a new wave of community historians who were relying on the documentary record.

Without the benefit of a community archive, he had to track down hard copies of census schedules, city directories, charter books, collegiate research papers and whatever newspaper articles he found through tedious page-by-page research in microfilm reels.

As had happened in Cleveland, these labor-intensive efforts to create history projects in Pittsburgh highlighted the need for a centralized Jewish communal archive.

An attempt by two University of Pittsburgh professors in the late 1960s was ahead of its time. By the late 1980s, circumstances had changed. The immigrant generation was dying. Industry was contracting. A way of life was disappearing. Ethnic studies departments were more widespread, and demand for community history was growing.

Based on his experiences in Cleveland, Rieger supported the idea of embedding a Jewish communal archive within a regional historical center. This structure promoted the communal benefits of an archive while still meeting the needs of academic researchers.

The United Jewish Federation and the Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania partnered in 1987 on a yearlong Jewish Archival Survey, which inventoried archival collections held by more than 100 local Jewish organizations and families. The survey led to the establishment of the Western Pennsylvania Jewish Archives on Nov. 1, 1988, with Krause as its first chair and Faye Leibowitz as its first archivist. It was underwritten by a founding gift from Selma and Allen Berkman. Leibowitz went on maternity leave the following year, and Rieger’s wife Tina served as interim archivist for a time.

In the five decades since the Cleveland Jewish Archives was established, many Jewish communities throughout the United States and Canada have established their own archives. Each developed differently. Some are part of local Jewish museums. Some are special collections within universities archives. Some rent space within their local Jewish Federations. To my knowledge, though, Pittsburgh most closely replicated the original model developed in Cleveland: situating the Jewish archive within a regional history center with a dedicated staff person and an independent advisory committee. PJC

Eric Lidji is the director of the Rauh Jewish Archives at the Heinz History Center and can be reached at rjarchives@heinzhistorycenter.org or 412-454-6406.