White-out and hand lettering reveal a 1920s crisis in Jewish education

The Rauh Jewish History Program & Archives found the photograph pictured above while collecting materials from the estate of the late Sally Kalson. A second photo, nearly identical to this one, shows the same building from the same angle, but unaltered. In that one, a smiling man stands in each of the doorways. One of the smiles belongs to Sally’s grandfather Harry Kalson, a Jewish community leader from the Hill District.

The crude doctoring done to this photograph suggests a promotional image. You get the sense that Kalson and his partner were announcing their vision for the building.

But that’s just a hunch, and a hunch is just a place to start. Confirming this hypothesis — figuring out what was being promoted and why — requires some research.

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An easy first step for solving a mystery such as this one is the Pittsburgh Jewish Newspaper Project. The project is a website where anyone can read back issues of local Jewish newspapers — including this one — for free.

Plugging “Hebrew Religious Academy” into the search bar brings up a full-page ad from the May 4, 1923, edition of the Jewish Criterion. The ad announces “An Appeal for the Hebrew Religious Academy Building Fund,” and it prominently features this doctored photograph, cropped closely along its left side to remove any trace of the church looming in the background.

The ad goes on to explain that the Hebrew Religious Academy was started in the spring of 1921 for “the purpose of teaching the Jewish Religion, the Hebrew Language and Literature, fostering a knowledge of Jewish History and Ethics and promoting the tenets and practices of traditional Judaism.”

Three rabbis, three religious schools. It sounds like a turf war.

The academy initially met at Kneseth Israel on Miller Street. It outgrew those accommodations over the summer and soon acquired this building at 81-83 Tannehill Street. The “building fund” was an attempt to pay down two mortgages plus some debt incurred during renovations to the former boarding house.

The building no longer exists. Neither does Tannehill Street. The church still survives. It is currently St. Benedict the Moor at Crawford Street and Center Avenue.

The founder of the Hebrew Religious Academy was Rabbi Eliyahu Wolf Kochin of Tiphereth Israel Congregation. He was following the example of two other prominent Hill District rabbis. Rabbi Moshe Shimon Sivitz started the Pittsburgh Hebrew School in 1886, and Rabbi Aaron Mordechai Ashinsky started the Hebrew Institute in 1916.

Three rabbis, three religious schools. It sounds like a turf war.

But one small detail suggests otherwise. At the bottom of the ad is a list of the charter members of the Hebrew Religious Academy. Among them is Sol Rosenbloom.

Rosenbloom was a descendent of the Vilna Gaon and a star of two European yeshivas. He became a businessman after immigrating to Pittsburgh in 1886, but he remained a lifelong advocate of Jewish education.

“The best citizen is the Jew with the best Jewish education and the most religion,” he said in a 1923 interview in the Jewish Criterion, in which he also predicted the advent of collegiate Jewish studies programs.

Rosenbloom signed the charter for Rabbi Kochin’s Hebrew Religious Academy while he was serving a term as president of Rabbi Ashinsky’s Hebrew Institute. There must have been a reason he wanted both schools to exist. Statistics suggest an answer.

A survey in the Criterion in June 1922 counted 5,262 Jewish children between the ages of 6 and 15 attending public schools in downtown, Uptown, the Hill District and Oakland. The Jewish religious schools in those neighborhoods could only accommodate between 1,700 and 2,300 students. More than half the children didn’t have a place to go.

An effort to expand the accommodations appears to have been successful. A second survey published the following year counted 4,909 children receiving some Jewish education, with about two thirds attending Sunday school and the rest attending daily afterschool classes such as those provided by the Hebrew Religious Academy.

The Jewish community solved the problem of having too many students in the Hill District just in time to address the problem of having too few.

A migration to Squirrel Hill, Greenfield and the East End started in the late 1920s and really picked up in the 1930s. The Hebrew Religious Academy building was sold at a sheriff’s sale in 1929. PJC

Eric Lidji is the director of the Rauh Jewish History Program & Archives at the Sen. John Heinz History Center. He can be reached at eslidji@heinzhistorycenter.org.