South Hills Jewish life explored at upcoming Jewish Genealogy Society of Pittsburgh event

U.S. history and the expansion of South Hills Jewish life will be explored at an upcoming Jewish Genealogy Society of Pittsburgh event. On Aug. 16 the member-supported group will host genealogist and former South Hills resident Jonina Duker for a Zoom talk titled, “The Admiral and The Submarine: The (South) Hills Are Alive with The Sounds of BBQ.”

Duker, a Maryland resident who also goes by Taibel bas Rachel Leah and Shlomo Yehoshua, grew up in Whitehall and attended Baldwin High School.

Speaking with the Chronicle by phone, Duker recalled her experience as one of a handful of Jewish teens at the high school.

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Her parents, she said, had moved the family from Long Island, New York, and New London, Connecticut, to western Pennsylvania for work.

Many of the other area Jewish teens Duker came to meet had similar roots in what she called “BBQ,” an acronym for Brooklyn, Bronx and Queens.

After Admiral Hyman George Rickover awarded Westinghouse federal contracts to build the first nuclear submarine, multiple Jewish families relocated to Baldwin, Pleasant Hills, Whitehall and surrounding areas, Duker said.

Those spaces saw an influx of residents and the erection of Beth Israel Center, a small Pleasant Hills-based Conservative synagogue whose membership boasted more than 100 families at its peak.

Formed in 1958 and closed in 2017, Beth Israel was powered by scientists, engineers and businessmen — often with ties to the Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory, a U.S. government-owned research and development facility in West Mifflin.

Duker said she reviewed Beth Israel’s records at the Rauh Jewish Archives, explored federal and local records, interviewed individuals who grew up in the South Hills and came to appreciate a quirk of South Hills Jewish history.

“All these engineers — and engineers think in a certain way — who were from BBQ, even if they didn’t grow up religiously observant, they grew up surrounded by the Jewish culture. They had no clue what culture they were going to be dumping their kids in,” she said.

With few other nearby landsmen, Jewish residents of Pleasant Hills, Jefferson Hills, Baldwin and Whitehall treated the congregation like a “tight-knit community.”

For two generations Beth Israel offered a Hebrew school and robust programming. Still, she continued, the children who grew up there largely moved away from the South Hills.

Duker said she plans to showcase Beth Israel’s records during the talk and also hopes to explore a question about hiring practices. “Why did Westinghouse — that had not hired Jews in Pittsburgh — start hiring Jews to build this nuclear submarine at Bettis when GE did not?”

Whether it’s an interest in those who helped shape small Jewish communities or a fascination with Rickover — “an extraordinary person who was tyrannical, but the strength of his will changed a whole bunch of things” — there is much to enjoy at the upcoming talk, Duker said. “When people are interested in other people, or even American history, there’s so many fascinating things.”

Steve Jaron, president of the Jewish Genealogy Society of Pittsburgh, said he’s excited to welcome Duker and looks forward to “bringing more local Jewish genealogical history to Pittsburgh.”

He hopes the Aug. 16 program is a further means of promoting growth.

Throughout 2025, the group welcomed 65 new members. Between January and June of this year, another 65 members joined.

“We look forward to growing that number even more with programs like this and other locally-related programming in the years to come,” Jaron said. “We’re excited about the incredible growth we’ve experienced over the past few months and hopefully this program helps us bring fresh faces.” PJC

Adam Reinherz can be reached at areinherz@pittsburghjewishchronicle.org.