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Jewish Baltimore: A Family Album
A wide-ranging history of Baltimore's Jewish community from the 1850s to the present. From East Baltimore to Forest Park to Park Heights, from Nates and Leon's deli to Hutzler's department store, Jewish Baltimore tells stories of neighborhoods, people, and landmarks that have been important to Baltimore's Jewish experience. Gilbert Sandler, whose popular columns have appeared in Baltimore's Jewish Times and the Baltimore Sun, offers a wide-ranging history of the region's Jewish community from the 1850s to the present, covering both German Jewish and Russian Jewish communities. Sandler's archival research uncovers new details about important people and events, but the heart of his book lies in its anecdotes and quotations―the reminiscences of those who recall the rich tapestry of days gone by. More than a hundred nostalgic photographs help to bring the memories to life. Many of Sandler's essays invoke famous names in Baltimore history―names like Jack Pollack, the ex-boxer turned politician; Joseph Meyerhoff, who gave his city a symphony hall; Samuel Hecht, founder of the last surviving local department store chain. But just as often, these essays remind us of unsung rabbis, merchants, teachers, and camp counselors. Sandler tells many inspirational stories, including how one young woman, escaping from Germany in 1939 on a ship headed to Bolivia, seized an opportunity when she learned the ship would stop in Baltimore. She sent a cable to her boyfriend in Richmond, Virginia, telling him to meet her at the dock, and the two were married onboard―which eventually allowed her to enter the United States. Sandler always uncovers the "human interest" in his stories. His account of the S.S. President Warfield ―refitted as the Exodus to carry food, supplies, and 4,500 European refugees to Palestine in 1947―contains personal recollections from one of the local businessmen who played a key role in the secret operation, and even a statement from someone who, as a young workman, helped to load the ship. Jewish Baltimore also highlights fondly remembered institutions. Hutzler's department store, for example, was a common meeting place for weekend shoppers; a notebook in Hutzler's balcony allowed friends to trade messages and track each other down in the large store. Hutzler's celebrated return policy stated that "anything could be returned within a reasonable amount of time"―with the word reasonable conveniently left to the customer's discretion. There was also Hendler's ice cream, whose advertisements featured a kewpie doll, proclaiming "Take home a brick!" When a competing chain bragged about producing twenty-eight flavors, Albert Hendler counted fifty flavors in his father's stock―including licorice, eggnog, and tomato aspic (the last flavor produced as a speciality for the Southern Hotel). Focusing on religious education, Sandler tells of the Talmud Torahs, the area's first highly visible, community-wide system committed to providing a Jewish education―two hours of instruction daily, in addition to a Jewish student's other lessons. The Talmud Torahs, dating from 1889, laid the foundation for later Jewish schools, such as the Isaac Davidson Hebrew School. Sandler also visits P.S. 49, a public school remembered for its high concentration of Jewish students. For recreation, the Monument Street "Y" was a popular site, providing a health club, game rooms, six-lane swimming pool, soda fountain, and library. In his essays on summer vacations, Sandler discusses family visits to Eastern Shore beaches and describes the summer camps that were frequented by Jewish children. Sandler has a knack for getting the people he interviews to recall every detail, from the names of favorite teachers or rabbis down to the price of a movie at the Avalon theater and which streetcar line they used to get there. Baltimore has a strong and historically important Jewish presence, and this book engagingly tells the story of that community.
232 pages, Hardcover
First published September 12, 2000
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October 3, 2024
The Jewish community in Baltimore has a long and proud history, and Gilbert Sandler chronicles that history concisely and effectively in his book Jewish Baltimore: A Family Album. The “Family Album” subtitle is appropriate here, as Sandler takes a quiet, subdued approach to the Jewish history of Baltimore, conveying how members of the Jewish community in Maryland’s largest city lived, worked, prayed, and prevailed through good times and bad.
Sandler, a native Baltimorean who for years contributed sketches about Baltimore life to the Baltimore Sun and the old Baltimore Evening Sun, takes the reader back to the beginnings of Jewish life in Baltimore, in the Oldtown area northeast of the Inner Harbor, where a few delicatessens on westbound Lombard Street still convey something of the area’s history.
Part of this book’s charm is the way in which Sandler draws upon the personal testimony of Jewish Baltimoreans as they discuss the everyday, quotidian aspects of the community’s life – as when Sigmund “Siggy” Shapiro recalls hanging out with his friends at Manheimer’s Pharmacy:
“As kids we were in and out of the place all day, and we became masters of the pinball machines – which paid off only in free games. Bobby Hess could handle a pinball machine like a brain surgeon – tickling it to within an inch of its life. Cantor Abba Weisgal was another pinball machine player. After Shabbos he would go home, pick up his cane and make his appearance in Manheimer’s. His ritual was to hang the cane on the rack, and then very seriously engage the machine in struggle. When the machine tilted on him, he would curse it in Yiddish.” (p. 51)
Baltimoreans of a certain age will remember many of the retail stores established and run by Jewish Baltimoreans, stores whose importance in the lives of Jewish and non-Jewish Baltimoreans Sandler emphasizes: Hutzler’s, Hochschild Kohn, Hamburgers, Hess Shoes, the Hecht Company. I used to enjoy shopping at Hecht’s stores in the suburban Maryland communities around Baltimore and Washington, D.C. It saddened me when Macy’s acquired all those stores in the mid-1990’s, and another unique aspect of local life passed from the scene – and with it, a reminder of the great contributions of Jewish Baltimoreans.
Along with evocative photography and engaging testimony from members of Baltimore’s Jewish community, Jewish Baltimore also engages certain core themes. One is the cultural tension that sometimes existed between different communities of Jewish Baltimoreans, depending on whether they or their ancestors had come from Germany or Russia. Sandler writes that “From the 1880s to well into the 1960s, the Baltimore Jewish community was divided along country-of-origin lines – German Jews and Russian Jews. The division was manifest in every aspect of family life – neighborhoods, social circles, schools, country clubs, summer camps” (p. 119)
Another is the way in which the heart of Baltimore’s Jewish community has consistently moved north and west – at first, from Oldtown up to the Liberty Heights area of northwest Baltimore. The Barry Levinson film Avalon (1990) dramatizes this process, with an older generation of Jewish Baltimoreans living in the heart of the city, and a younger generation moving out into green and leafy suburbs, earning the denunciation of a tradition-minded family patriarch who thunders that “You live miles from nowhere!”
That movement of Baltimore’s Jewish community, as Sandler chronicles it, continued across the city line into the Baltimore County suburb of Pikesville, and then farther out toward Owings Mills and Reisterstown. And as of the time of the book’s publication in 2000, there were signs that that movement might continue into once-rural Carroll County. One rabbi interviewed by Sandler “cautions against calling Owings Mills and Reisterstown the ‘furthest out’ of Baltimore’s Jewish communities” (p. 208).
Sandler also takes care to note that a vital moment from the worldwide history of the Jewish people – the voyage of the ship Exodus to Palestine, in violation of the British mandate, to help found the State of Israel – had its beginnings in Baltimore. As Sandler recounts, “The story of the Exodus is a Baltimore story. In the center of it was Baltimore Jewish businessman Mose Speert” (p. 169). And Speert himself recalled meeting with David Ben-Gurion in 1945, and hearing the future founder of Israel set forth the stark realities of the situation in Holocaust-era Europe:
“Ben Gurion pulled no punches. He told us money and supplies were vital to save those European Jews who could still be saved. We were sworn to secrecy. There were two of us from Baltimore. Adolph Hamburger and myself. We pledged to help.” (p. 169)
Speert and Hamburger, in accordance with Judaism’s long tradition of humanitarianism and philanthropy, did their work well, and two years later the Exodus set off on her historic voyage. The Exodus is gone now, destroyed by fire many years ago; but if you want to see where her story began, Sandler has provided a helpful road map: "[D]rive over to Pratt Street by Pier 5, and then over to President Street, past the old station on Aliceanna Street, to see where, half a century ago, ordinary people with extraordinary passion banded together to write the opening chapter in the historic saga of the Exodus, which sailed out of Baltimore and into history" (p. 172)
That tone of pride in Sandler’s recounting of the story of the Exodus characterizes all of Jewish Baltimore, as the book chronicles how the Jewish community of Baltimore faced and overcame cultural prejudice and economic challenges, and made vital contributions to the life of a great American community.
Sandler concludes with a moving tribute to the past, present, and future of Jewish Baltimore:
Generations have come and gone since the great migrations of Jews from Central and Eastern Europe found their way into Baltimore. They arrived with far-reaching dreams for a Jewish community in which they could take their place, but whatever the size of those dreams, they are small indeed against the record of the years….How it would have lightened the hearts of the Jewish immigrants arriving in Baltimore, with their fears and wavering dreams, if they could have known what kind of Baltimore Jewish community they would help bring into being, and leave as a legacy to their children and their children’s children. (p. 209).
Drawing for photos and illustrations on the extensive collection of the Jewish Museum of Maryland, and thoughtfully providing a “Glossary for the Uninitiated” that includes definitions for Hebrew and Yiddish terms that are important elements of Jewish religious and cultural practice, Sandler works to ensure that any reader, of any religious or cultural background, will have the opportunity to understand, by the time they have finished reading Jewish Baltimore: A Family Album, what makes Baltimore's Jewish community the strong, cohesive, and culturally rich community that it is today.
Sandler, a native Baltimorean who for years contributed sketches about Baltimore life to the Baltimore Sun and the old Baltimore Evening Sun, takes the reader back to the beginnings of Jewish life in Baltimore, in the Oldtown area northeast of the Inner Harbor, where a few delicatessens on westbound Lombard Street still convey something of the area’s history.
Part of this book’s charm is the way in which Sandler draws upon the personal testimony of Jewish Baltimoreans as they discuss the everyday, quotidian aspects of the community’s life – as when Sigmund “Siggy” Shapiro recalls hanging out with his friends at Manheimer’s Pharmacy:
“As kids we were in and out of the place all day, and we became masters of the pinball machines – which paid off only in free games. Bobby Hess could handle a pinball machine like a brain surgeon – tickling it to within an inch of its life. Cantor Abba Weisgal was another pinball machine player. After Shabbos he would go home, pick up his cane and make his appearance in Manheimer’s. His ritual was to hang the cane on the rack, and then very seriously engage the machine in struggle. When the machine tilted on him, he would curse it in Yiddish.” (p. 51)
Baltimoreans of a certain age will remember many of the retail stores established and run by Jewish Baltimoreans, stores whose importance in the lives of Jewish and non-Jewish Baltimoreans Sandler emphasizes: Hutzler’s, Hochschild Kohn, Hamburgers, Hess Shoes, the Hecht Company. I used to enjoy shopping at Hecht’s stores in the suburban Maryland communities around Baltimore and Washington, D.C. It saddened me when Macy’s acquired all those stores in the mid-1990’s, and another unique aspect of local life passed from the scene – and with it, a reminder of the great contributions of Jewish Baltimoreans.
Along with evocative photography and engaging testimony from members of Baltimore’s Jewish community, Jewish Baltimore also engages certain core themes. One is the cultural tension that sometimes existed between different communities of Jewish Baltimoreans, depending on whether they or their ancestors had come from Germany or Russia. Sandler writes that “From the 1880s to well into the 1960s, the Baltimore Jewish community was divided along country-of-origin lines – German Jews and Russian Jews. The division was manifest in every aspect of family life – neighborhoods, social circles, schools, country clubs, summer camps” (p. 119)
Another is the way in which the heart of Baltimore’s Jewish community has consistently moved north and west – at first, from Oldtown up to the Liberty Heights area of northwest Baltimore. The Barry Levinson film Avalon (1990) dramatizes this process, with an older generation of Jewish Baltimoreans living in the heart of the city, and a younger generation moving out into green and leafy suburbs, earning the denunciation of a tradition-minded family patriarch who thunders that “You live miles from nowhere!”
That movement of Baltimore’s Jewish community, as Sandler chronicles it, continued across the city line into the Baltimore County suburb of Pikesville, and then farther out toward Owings Mills and Reisterstown. And as of the time of the book’s publication in 2000, there were signs that that movement might continue into once-rural Carroll County. One rabbi interviewed by Sandler “cautions against calling Owings Mills and Reisterstown the ‘furthest out’ of Baltimore’s Jewish communities” (p. 208).
Sandler also takes care to note that a vital moment from the worldwide history of the Jewish people – the voyage of the ship Exodus to Palestine, in violation of the British mandate, to help found the State of Israel – had its beginnings in Baltimore. As Sandler recounts, “The story of the Exodus is a Baltimore story. In the center of it was Baltimore Jewish businessman Mose Speert” (p. 169). And Speert himself recalled meeting with David Ben-Gurion in 1945, and hearing the future founder of Israel set forth the stark realities of the situation in Holocaust-era Europe:
“Ben Gurion pulled no punches. He told us money and supplies were vital to save those European Jews who could still be saved. We were sworn to secrecy. There were two of us from Baltimore. Adolph Hamburger and myself. We pledged to help.” (p. 169)
Speert and Hamburger, in accordance with Judaism’s long tradition of humanitarianism and philanthropy, did their work well, and two years later the Exodus set off on her historic voyage. The Exodus is gone now, destroyed by fire many years ago; but if you want to see where her story began, Sandler has provided a helpful road map: "[D]rive over to Pratt Street by Pier 5, and then over to President Street, past the old station on Aliceanna Street, to see where, half a century ago, ordinary people with extraordinary passion banded together to write the opening chapter in the historic saga of the Exodus, which sailed out of Baltimore and into history" (p. 172)
That tone of pride in Sandler’s recounting of the story of the Exodus characterizes all of Jewish Baltimore, as the book chronicles how the Jewish community of Baltimore faced and overcame cultural prejudice and economic challenges, and made vital contributions to the life of a great American community.
Sandler concludes with a moving tribute to the past, present, and future of Jewish Baltimore:
Generations have come and gone since the great migrations of Jews from Central and Eastern Europe found their way into Baltimore. They arrived with far-reaching dreams for a Jewish community in which they could take their place, but whatever the size of those dreams, they are small indeed against the record of the years….How it would have lightened the hearts of the Jewish immigrants arriving in Baltimore, with their fears and wavering dreams, if they could have known what kind of Baltimore Jewish community they would help bring into being, and leave as a legacy to their children and their children’s children. (p. 209).
Drawing for photos and illustrations on the extensive collection of the Jewish Museum of Maryland, and thoughtfully providing a “Glossary for the Uninitiated” that includes definitions for Hebrew and Yiddish terms that are important elements of Jewish religious and cultural practice, Sandler works to ensure that any reader, of any religious or cultural background, will have the opportunity to understand, by the time they have finished reading Jewish Baltimore: A Family Album, what makes Baltimore's Jewish community the strong, cohesive, and culturally rich community that it is today.
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