Journalism is the first draft of history
Pittsburgh Jewish journalism has chronicled the history of the Pittsburgh Jewish community for more than 125 years.
I recently had the opportunity to sit down for coffee with a prominent leader and champion of our community. As the board leaders of our respective organizations, we chatted about the state of Pittsburgh’s Jewish community, recent “wins” we’ve had in each of our camps, and commiserated about the sad state of affairs on the world stage.
In my role as board chair of the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle, touting the virtues of our paper to anyone who will listen has become second nature to me. But I hadn’t prepared myself that morning to be on the receiving end of a small lecture about how important the Chronicle is as our community’s official archive. My ears had heard these words come out of my own mouth thousands of times but it was unexpectedly refreshing to hear these words coming from someone else.
I left our meeting invigorated and validated.
The work we’re doing doesn’t just have a one-week shelf life. The entire archive of every Chronicle — and our predecessor papers, the Jewish Criterion and the American Jewish Outlook – from 2010 stretching back to 1895, has been painstakingly digitized, a collaboration of Carnegie Mellon University Libraries, the Rodef Shalom Congregation Archives, the Rauh Jewish Archives at the Senator John Heinz History Center and the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle.
More current editions of our paper live online in Issuu and are browsable from our website.
I’ve spent more hours browsing our archives than most others. There’s just something great about clicking over to the digital archives looking to go down a rabbit hole I haven’t been down before.
When I got back to my office after the meeting that morning, I found my way to the Aug. 23, 1979, edition and scrolled through to the Social and Personal section of the paper. I was faced with a picture of my mother looking back at me from my parents’ wedding announcement as the newly wedded Mrs. Barry Stein. I had found my rabbit hole.
Next was over to the Aug. 12, 1982, paper. A birth announcement most likely would not be in the paper immediately following the baby’s birth, right? Give the family a few weeks to get their sea legs. Low and behold, directly across from an ad for Larry Rubin’s Specialty Clothing (the clothier, by the way, who sold my father my bar mitzvah suit) was the birth announcement of yours truly. This was shaping up to be an episode of “This Is Your Life.”
Onward!
The Oct. 26, 1995, paper announced that I would become a bar mitzvah on Oct. 28, 1995, and there to prove it was a grainy black-and-white of my 13-year-old mug. The paper ran my wedding announcement, and when my sons, Samuel and Ronen, were born in 2018 and 2020 — although we literally could have announced their births by shouting from the top of the U.S. Steel Tower — we instead announced them in the Chronicle.
And, baruch Hashem, when my wife delivers our third child in the middle of January, you’ll be reading about it in the pages of this paper.
They say, “journalism is the first draft of history.” Pittsburgh Jewish journalism has chronicled the history of the Pittsburgh Jewish community for more than 125 years. Our hallowed archives are yours to peruse whenever and wherever you find the inspiration. And new history is added every week.
We can’t continue doing this work without your support. (Don’t tell me you didn’t see this coming.) If you’re reading these words, you clearly support the award-winning journalism the Chronicle delivers to you every day online and every week in print. Please join me in making a generous donation online at pittsburghjewishchronicle.org, or by clipping the coupon on the opposite page to support News For Jews, honoring our past, our present and our future. PJC
Evan H. Stein is board chair of the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle.
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