One acre

The Turtle Creek Valley was lightly populated before George Westinghouse expanded his operations in the 1890s. Then came people. With people, came new boroughs. Wilmerding incorporated in 1890, Turtle Creek and Rankin in 1892, Pitcairn in 1894, East Pittsburgh in 1895, North Braddock in 1897, Wall and Trafford in 1904.

A group of Jewish immigrants from the Austro-Hungarian Empire settled in East Pittsburgh and chartered Congregation Ohav Zedeck Anshai Austria-Hungary in 1904. The first death in the congregation came in 1907 with a teenager named Siegmund Hersh. He was buried on available land in Wilkins Township belonging to Robert and Theresa Breeger. Robert Breeger was an Evangelical Lutheran from Germany who served as tax collector for Wilkins Township and was also caretaker of the nearby Churchill cemetery.

Some months later on Jan. 20, 1908, Helen Gross died and was buried in the same lot. Ohav Zedeck needed a proper cemetery. It purchased some 15,000 square feet of property from the Breegers on Feb. 28, 1908, and established the Ohav Zedeck Cemetery.

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By the time Ohav Zedeck founded its cemetery, the Mon Valley was becoming an important Jewish settlement. Braddock and McKeesport were already home to at least 600 Jewish people each, and Jewish families were moving into nearby small towns.

Opportunity was great. So were challenges. When people struggled, there was no public assistance. Everything fell to families and communities. The Free Sons of Judah was one of several Jewish mutual benefits organizations created before World War I. It began in 1890, primarily to cover burial costs. By 1910, it had two lodges in this region: Zion Lodge No. 59 in McKeesport and Moses ben Amrom Lodge No. 158 of Braddock.

With a mandate to assist with burials, the Moses ben Amrom Lodge needed a cemetery. It returned to the Breegers in June 1910 and purchased a 22,000 square foot lot next to the Ohav Zedeck tract. The national head of the Free Sons of Judah visited Wilkins Township in early 1911 to dedicate gates at the Moses ben Amrom cemetery.

The Free Sons of Judah filed for bankruptcy in 1917. The death rate of its members surpassed estimations, draining the available funds. The McKeesport lodge disappeared, but the Braddock lodge continued. It incorporated in March 1917 as the Independent Order Moses ben Amrom to “furnish financial aid to its members in case of sickness, accident or distress, to provide for the burial of its deceased members and to furnish financial aid and benefits to the widows or orphans of its deceased members.”

There was a third Free Sons of Judah lodge in western Pennsylvania, but it came and went quickly. It was called the David Rosenberg Lodge No. 154 of McKeesport.

David Rosenberg had landed in New York from Hungary as a teenager in the 1880s and later said he walked to western Pennsylvania. After peddling and working at a mill, he opened a grocery in McKeesport. “Through a genuine love of people, a gift for languages, and political astuteness, he became a force to be reckoned with in the Republican party machine of Allegheny County as well as in city government,” Sarah Landesman wrote in 1954, in a history of the Jewish community of McKeesport. “He had a great following among all foreigners and his influence with his coreligionists had much to do with the quick development of civic responsibility and interest they manifested.”

When the national Free Sons of Judah held its convention in April 1906, Rosenberg was its second deputy grand master. A split occurred that spring. Rosenberg filed incorporation papers in Allegheny County in June 1906 for a new mutual benefits society known as “the Independent Order of David Rosenberg of Western Pennsylvania.”

A few years later, in 1909, the society changed its name to the Independent Order Sons of David. By the late 1920s, the Sons of David had created no less than 20 lodges in this region, including the Sons of David Betty Rosenberg Lodge No. 8 of East Pittsburgh.

With a burial mandate of its own, three trustees for this lodge — Peter Rosenberg, Samuel Weiss and Armin Roth — returned to the Breeger family sometime before March 1914 and placed a $50 deposit on a nearly 7,300-square-foot lot next to the Moses ben Amrom Cemetery. They paid the remaining $100 by the end of 1915 and established the Betty Rosenberg Lodge Cemetery. It was named for Peter Rosenberg’s mother, who died in 1911 and was the fourth burial in the Ohav Zedeck Cemetery, just up the way.

Just as this Jewish cemetery complex in Wilkins Township was completed in early 1916, a migration was underway in Pittsburgh. Jews were leaving the city center for emerging eastern suburbs like East End, Squirrel Hill and Homewood. The Squirrel Hill contingent started Beth Shalom in 1917 and dedicated a “community house” in 1923.

Chofetz Chaim was the second Jewish congregation in Squirrel Hill. It began meeting as early as 1923 and incorporated in 1925. As a first-mover for traditional Orthodoxy in the fastest growing Jewish section of Pittsburgh, it likely expected to soon have the resources to build a grand house of worship. But with the opening of the beautiful new Poale Zedeck synagogue in 1928, Chofetz Chaim was suddenly behind.

In a burst of activity, Chofetz Chaim hired Rabbi Aaron Mordechai Ashinsky as its spiritual leader, converted a house on Beacon Street into a small synagogue in 1930, started a sisterhood and religious school in 1931, and began looking for cemetery.

The Jewish population of the Turtle Creek Valley peaked in the late 1920s with more than 2,500 people spread across nine towns and five synagogues. By the late 1930s, the data reveals a shift: The Braddock community had shrunk by one third. Amid this shift, the Moses ben Amrom Lodge sold its burial ground to Chofetz Chaim for $650 in 1934. Chofetz Chaim soon replaced the cemetery gate that had been installed in 1911.

The 1920s and 1930s saw growth in a ring of communities nestled between the city limits and the Turtle Creek Valley, places like Wilkinsburg, Swissvale, Edgewood and Forest Hills. A survey of Wilkinsburg in 1936 found 100 Jewish families. They started Beth Israel Congregation later that year. Among them was Peter Rosenberg.

Betty Rosenberg Lodge No. 8 began fading. Armin Roth died in 1937. Samuel Weiss died in 1944. Both were buried in the Ohav Zedeck Cemetery. Left without his two original partners, Peter Rosenberg brought together a new group of men in 1948 to incorporate the Betty Rosenberg Cemetery Corporation to oversee the old cemetery.

Betty Rosenberg was never the official cemetery of Beth Israel, but it was extensively used by two of leading Wilkinsburg families: Rosenberg and Reich.

World War II ended. Growth resumed. The first section of the Parkway East opened in 1953. Young families followed the new highway to Penn Hills, Churchill, Eastmont and Monroeville. Some were Jewish. Harry Katz hosted a Friday night service at his home in June 1954. By the end of the year, Parkway Jewish Center was born.

The new congregation needed a cemetery. It spent almost 10 years trying to work out a deal with Sons of Israel in Rankin but was never able to reach agreeable terms.

By spring 1969, Parkway Jewish Center was negotiating with three remaining families at the Betty Rosenberg Cemetery. The two sides worked out acceptable terms in March 1970. They would split the grounds. Parkway Jewish Center would purchase as many as 93 plots. The deal was finalized at a board meeting on April 14, 1970.

A few weeks later on May 4, 1970, Parkway Jewish Center congregant Allison Beth Krause was one of the four students killed by National Guard troops at Kent State University. Parkway Jewish Center had barely had time to mark its new burial ground, and so national coverage of her burial all mentioned the “Betty Rosenberg Cemetery.”

As suburbanization was underway in the eastern boroughs in the early 1950s, developers were also planning suburban-style developments throughout Pittsburgh.

The new Bigelow Heights development more than tripled the Jewish youth population of Greenfield in just a few years. This burst of people rejuvenated B’nai Emunoh Congregation, which had been somewhat small since opening in the 1920s.

With the passing of the immigrant generation, shteiblach throughout the region began closing in the 1960s and 1970s. Chofetz Chaim had fewer than 15 members by the early 1970s. It sold its cemetery to B’nai Emunoh in November 1985 for $1 with the understanding that the grounds would always be available to former members of Chofetz Chaim, as well as the long gone Independent Order Moses ben Amrom.

Ohav Zedeck closed its East Pittsburgh synagogue by the late 1960s and sold its cemetery to Yeshiva Achei T’mimim in November 1986. Westinghouse closed its East Pittsburgh facility in early 1988, bringing an end to a century in the Turtle Creek Valley.

Altogether, this trio of modest cemeteries hidden off Negley Road in Wilkins Township totals just 44,354 square feet. What other acre of Western Pennsylvania is so reflective of the many movements and changes of Jewish life throughout this region? PJC

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