Ida (Chaya Sara) Cohen Selavan Schwarcz, z”l
Through a long and expansive career, Schwarcz built a foundation of scholarship that continues to shape our knowledge about the Jewish history of Western Pennsylvania.
One of my favorite syllables in all of local Jewish history comes from a December 1969 oral history from the National Council of Jewish Women-Pittsburgh Section.
In a recording with Herman Gordon, Ida Selavan asks a simple question about the day-to-day social life of Jews in the Hill District in the 1920s and 1930s: “Were there any local meeting places like restaurants or cafes or halls where the gang would meet?”
“Yeah,” Gordon says, “Weinstein’s Restaurant up on Center Avenue.”
“Ah!” Selavan exclaims. “That’s what I was waiting for!”
The way Selavan says, “Ah” is a historical document on its own. Over three quick notes — two rising, one falling — she gives the exclamation a scholarly soulfulness that sounds half way between a rebbe quizzing students and a bubbe figuring out which grandchild stole the cookies. Before the recording started, Selavan knew anecdotally about the importance of Weinstein’s Restaurant to the history of the Jewish labor movement of the Hill District, but she wanted to get that fact on the historic record.
In her style of questioning — the rapid-fire synonyms, the informality of “the gang” — I hear an attempt to make her subjects feel understood, and therefore willing to share. In her response, not only the “Ah” but also how she condenses “that’s what I was waiting for” into a single word, I hear a scholar who prioritizes human connection.
Dr. Ida Cohen Selavan Schwarcz passed away earlier this year at 93. She was a singular figure in the local Jewish community, a scholar with vast knowledge and skill and a true spirit of independence. She leaves behind a body of work that continues to be a foundational source of information about the history of the Jewish people in the region.
Ida Cohen was born in Brooklyn in 1930, the child of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. Her parents were older and had already lost three children. It created a sense of preciousness around her childhood. According to her obituary, her parents called her “Bubbele,” meaning “little grandmother,” as a good omen for a long and full life.
She was a native Yiddish speaker, which became an advantage when recording the voices of Jewish immigrants. She often slips into Yiddish in her oral histories.
She revealed her brilliance early, excelling at multiple subjects in school. She graduated from Brooklyn College and from Rabbi Moshe Feinstein’s Hertzliah Hebrew Teachers Institute. She completed a three-year degree at Dropsie College’s Middle East Institute in two years and went to Israel in 1950 to study at Hebrew University.
Her life and education gave her wide knowledge of Jewish identity — its cultural and its religious aspects, as well as its manifestations in Europe, America and Israel.
After marrying Amos Selavan in Israel, she relocated to Pittsburgh in the mid-1950s. In the late 1960s, while raising two small children, a former Dropsie College classmate named Dr. Ailon Shiloh asked Selavan to serve as a paid research assistant on a new oral history project being developed by the NCJW-Pittsburgh Section.
“My main asset, it seems, was my knowledge of Yiddish and Jewish history,” Selavan later wrote. Those assets were crucial. The initial goal of the oral history project was to record the stories of Jewish immigrants to Pittsburgh before 1924. Selavan was able to speak with these subjects on their terms. They were essentially her parents.
Her oral histories are lively, engaged, and fun with a conversational quality that remains entirely focused on her subject. Her personality shines but never out-shines.
The 1960s were a turning point for Western Pennsylvania archives. The University of Pittsburgh established its Archives of Industrial Society in 1961 to collect primary source materials of local ethnic, religious and labor groups. One of its first big collections was the NCJW-Pittsburgh Section Records in 1964. Understanding the connection between history and identity, NCJW launched its oral history project in 1968.
Following the project, Selavan returned to school. She earned a master’s in American history and a doctorate in international education from the University of Pittsburgh, and she later earned a degree from its School of Library and Information Sciences. She later taught Yiddish at the university — one of the 10 languages she knew.
Throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s, Selavan produced a series of essays on local Jewish history that are still a foundation for local scholarship, half a century later.
She was a key figure in the two books produced through the NCJW Oral History Project, “By Myself I’m a Book” from 1971 and “My Voice Was Heard” from 1981. Her research on Jewish labor, Jewish education and early Zionism in Western Pennsylvania are still regularly cited. She revived many forgotten figures of Jewish history, people like local politician and businessman Adolph Edlis, journalist and poet Joseph Selig Glick, public health nurse Anna Heldman, child advocate Sophie Irene Simon Loeb, pre-Herzlian Zionist Ralph B. Raphael, and prolific midwife “Bubbe” Hannah Sandusky.
To appreciate the significance of her scholarship, you have to understand a basic feature of community history: a lack of secondary sources. You cannot research these sorts of subjects by reading a stack of books. The information lives in primary sources.
Today, a network of archives and a universe of digital resources make it relatively easy to find primary sources. Before the internet, though, you needed real research chops.
Selavan discovered many of her research subjects through conversations with living people. She then had to cut her own trail through the historic record. There were few archival resources available to ease this process, and of course no search engines.
For example, speaking with a 90-year-old neighbor named Etta Meyers Katz, Selavan learned about a beloved Jewish midwife in the Hill District named “Bubbe Hannah.” Hannah’s granddaughter Jennie Lencher was still living in Oakland. Selavan requested an interview, leading to a 1973 article for the American Journal of Nursing.
While discussing Bubbe Hannah, Lencher mentioned that her father Ralph B. Raphael had written a book in Hebrew in 1893 titled, “She’elat Hayehudim,” or “Jewish Questions.” Several years before Herzl published “The Jewish State,” Raphael had proposed a Jewish return to the land of Israel as a response to global antisemitism.
With her training, Selavan was not only able to read the book but to understand its historic context, leading to a 1977 article in the American Jewish Historical Quarterly.
In addition to historian, speaker and teacher, Selavan was a gifted archivist.
In the decade before the creation of the Rauh Jewish Archives, she regularly sent important historical documents to the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati. She almost single-handedly preserved a local copy of the local Yiddish newspaper “Der Volkfruend.” She compiled an early inventory of the massive NCJW-Pittsburgh Section Records. She later became a librarian at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati.
Selavan had a wonderful independent streak. Frustrated with the lack of job prospects in the 1970s, she started her own school. It was called the Nonformal Academy of Jewish Studies. It was a modern cheder for adults. Just like the chederim of old, classes were held at her home but with “no pripetchik,” as she wrote in an advertisement, a reference to an old Yiddish song about Jewish children learning before a hearth.
She combined Jewish religious enthusiasm with broad commitment to truth and justice. She was one of the founders of the Squirrel Hill chapter of the National Organization of Women. Even into her final years, she regularly used letters to the editor to clear up inaccuracies in the historic record. Through a letter to the editor, she resolved a multi-decade mix-up involving the name of the first Jewish organization in Pittsburgh.
Upon her retirement in 1995, Selavan immediately made aliyah. She later married her second husband Dr. Joseph Schwarcz and settled in the Negev. Announcing her retirement in this newspaper in April 1995, she noted that she had already become “active in the local Hadassah-Israel groups, Yiddish culture club, Congregation Adat Shalom Imanuel, the Israel Genealogical Society and AACI Senior Citizens Kempner Club.” 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.
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