The shul that wasn’t there
HistoryA suburban-style community in the city

The shul that wasn’t there

Stanton Heights was one of the fastest growing Jewish communities in Pittsburgh after World War II but never built institutions of its own.

Dr. Barbara K. Shore (at podium) with (seated, left to right) Dr. Leonard A. Cohen, Norman Krochmal, and Arthur Abelson, presenting the findings of the Stanton Heights Self-Study Committee at a community meeting at Sunnyside Elementary School on April 25, 1956. (American Jewish Outlook, Pittsburgh Jewish Newspaper Project.)
Dr. Barbara K. Shore (at podium) with (seated, left to right) Dr. Leonard A. Cohen, Norman Krochmal, and Arthur Abelson, presenting the findings of the Stanton Heights Self-Study Committee at a community meeting at Sunnyside Elementary School on April 25, 1956. (American Jewish Outlook, Pittsburgh Jewish Newspaper Project.)

If you were born on Oct. 24, 1929, the day the stock market crashed, you would have been nearly 16 years old when the Japanese surrendered on Sept. 2, 1945 — not quite an adult but certainly old enough to have opinions about the world and your place in it.

After a decade and a half of restraint, you can imagine the yearning to build. And, in fact, 1946 was probably the single-most active year locally for synagogue developments.

Tree of Life announced plans in January to relocate to Squirrel Hill from Oakland. The new Young People’s Synagogue began holding services at the Hebrew Institute in February. Shaare Torah announced plans in May to relocate to Squirrel Hill from the Hill District. The new Temple Sinai held its first public services in August. Cneseth Israel relocated to Negley Avenue in Highland Park from the Hill District in September.

Those five developments reflect the consolidation of Jewish communities in the first-rung suburbs of Squirrel Hill and the East End. And yet, another development was underway.

Over the entirety of 1946, the Steelwood Corp. was constructing Millermont, a massive housing development at the old Stanton Heights Golf Course in the East End.

Steelwood Corp. began in 1941 as an offshoot of H. Miller & Sons Co., which had been the most active Jewish contractor in the Pittsburgh area throughout the 1910s and 1920s.

Steelwood pioneered systematized housing construction in Allegheny County and was incredibly productive. Between 1944 and 1954, the company built nearly 1,500 homes at Millermont in Stanton Heights, Shadycrest Village in Beechview, Riverside Manor in Sewickley, and a complex of five new apartment buildings in North Oakland now called the Royal Windsor, North Windsor, South Windsor, Stephen Foster and Mark Twain.

Steelwood marketed Millermont to the many young couples that struggled to find housing immediately after World War II, especially returning veterans eligible for help under the GI Bill. A lot of young Jewish families bought these new houses in Stanton Heights. The Jewish youth population of the East End doubled between 1946 and 1958.

By the early 1950s, Stanton Heights had become a Jewish neighborhood. It had more than 200 Jewish families. All these young, spirited families were part of the larger East End community, but they were also distinct from it. They brought a different energy.

“It was an extremely active community… You had people competing for positions at the PTA, and that sort of thing,” Dr. Barbara Shore recalled in a 1993 oral history.

Stanton Heights had no Jewish institutions of its own. Everyone went down the hill to patronize B’nai Israel, Adath Jeshurun, Torath Chaim, and the Irene Kaufmann Center.

A Stanton Heights Jewish Community Center was started in October 1953 under the chairmanship of Eddie Steinfield and a Sisterhood led by Frances Cartiff. Through the 1950s, the group arranged services and programs in community spaces and private homes. They were raising money toward opening a synagogue in Stanton Heights.

When the new Sunnyside Elementary School building opened in September 1954, about 400 Jewish residents of Stanton Heights signed a petition asking the Hebrew Institute to convert the previous Sunnyside School building on McCandless Avenue into a Jewish community space for the neighborhood. The Federation of Jewish Philanthropies intervened, worried about the impact on existing Jewish institutions in the East End.

That could have been the end of it. Federation instead did something interesting. It provided seed funding for the Stanton Heights community to conduct a needs assessment.

The move was neither a dodge nor an act of altruism. It was an experiment.

By the mid-1950s, second-rung suburban Jewish enclaves were emerging in Eastmont, Monroeville and Churchill to the east, and in Mt. Lebanon, Scott Township and Pleasant Hills to the south. Stanton Heights was an oddity, a suburban-style community in the city.

Federation was struggling to engage young suburban Jewish families as volunteers and as donors. In one of the first meetings of the new Stanton Heights group, the Federation’s Administrative Assistant Meyer Schwartz said that the self-study “may give the Federation a clue as to how to solve some of the problems arising in connection with the movement of population into other areas of Pittsburgh,” according to meeting minutes.

The concern was fragmentation. If each of those suburban communities viewed itself as self-contained, would they still support communal institutions? By having the Stanton Heights Self-Study Committee study itself, it seems that the United Jewish Federation wanted to broaden the vision of the neighborhood beyond its immediate needs.

Over the course of a year, the group analyzed the existing Jewish services available to East End residents. According to its November 1955 report, Stanton Heights had 555 children from 253 households were attending programs at six existing institutions: B’nai Israel, Adath Jeshurun, Torath Chaim, the East End branch of the Irene Kaufmann Center, the YM&WHA in Oakland and the Hebrew Institute in Squirrel Hill. That represented about two-thirds of the total Jewish youth population of the neighborhood.

The study found that daily and holiday religious services, daily religious schools, and adult education programs could all accommodate additional people, while the Sunday schools, Jewish recreational facilities and Jewish summer camps were nearing capacity.

According to a review of the final report found in the United Jewish Federation minutes, “There is a greater realization as a result of this Study that Jewish institutions, affiliated and not affiliated with the Federation, will have to reach out to Stanton Heights, and, in turn, there is a healthy feeling on the part of the leadership in Stanton Heights that they want to work with the leadership in the East End institutions and the Federation.”

The Stanton Heights Jewish Community Planning Committee was formed in April 1956 with 58 members and four subcommittees. It started holding Friday night services in private homes that fall, launched an adult education series and became increasingly active in communal affairs in the neighborhood. By 1963, Stanton Heights had more than 3,200 Jewish residents and more than 800 Jewish households — about the same size as the eastern suburbs and the South Hills and just a bit less than East Liberty/Highland Park.

“Just a bit less,” though, meant that communal institutions continued to invest in East Liberty and Highland Park. Stanton Heights never got a community space of its own. PJC

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

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