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Page 42
DETROIT JEWISH CHRONICLE
How a titvak' Village
Was Planted in Vermont
and regenerated Jewish life in
C... large towns.
And to Burlington Jewry, a
Lithuanian-Jewish village which
flourished in America, where the
peace of the Sabbath was Vt in
the very streets of "Jew Vil-
By PHILIP RUBIN
VERMONT AT the turn of the century was quite different from
V the rest of the United States. Almost entirely agricultural with
barely a hint of industrialization, our little New England state was
a generation behind the other')
sections of the country in its
mont generally, helped in this
mode of life.
regard.
It was a quiet, unhurried life,
• • •
undisturbed by the noise of fac-
MEDIEVAL SPIRIT
tory motors, unaffected by booms
THE SPECIFICALLY Jewish
and depressions, isolated from
America generally by a topog- life of the Burlington of those
raphy, an economy and a harsh days wak, if anything, even more
winter climate that made for the saturated with poetry than was
retention of old Yankee customs the non-Jewish because it was
and habits which other places more medieval. There was a
were even then beginning to dis- simple, yet deep, faith in the
God of our ancestors and the
card.
Into such a setting there had traditional ways of their people,
1IFF. AM.
come during the late eighties a there was that feeling for the DR. ALPHONSE HENING-
group of Jews from a couple of unsolved mystery of life that al- BURG, secretary, department of
small illages in the province of ways sets the imagination to welfare of New York City, has
Kovno, Lithuania. They were work, the feeling that the pre- joined the faculty of Yeshiva
the ordinary humble Jews of Industrial ages possessed in University's school of educa-
small-town eastern Europe, poor abundance.
tion and community adminis-
And so the Magiddim who
and most of them not very
tration. Dr. Heningburg is a
would
often
come
to
town
and
learned in things Jewish (some
leading Negro educator.
warm
up
a
bitterly
cold
Sabbath
of the women were completely
by
their
pictures
of
the
horrors
illiterate), but all of them ani-
mated by a strong passion for of hell, delivered in a sing-song lage," where the Sabbath Cho-
fashion.
lent was cooked overnight in the
preserving that Jewish life and
The awe that would permeate baker's oven, where at a wedding
those Jewish values they had
the community on the eve of people would dance in the street,
cherished in the Old World.
• • •
Yom Kippur when the women's where children spoke Yiddish as
gallery in Shul would be bathed freely and easily as in the old
LIVE BY PEDDLING
in tears, or the weeks-long pre- country and played all the tra-
ALL OF THEM commenced to
ditional holiday games, was some-
earn their living in the way parations for the great holiday thing for even New York's East
of
Pesach,
or
the
respect
shown
normal for Jewish immigrants to
Side to look up to in wonder.
America in those days—by ped- to the Roy upon whose entry into
• • •
the
Synagogue
everyone
would
dling. Most of them had al-
VESTIGES REMAIN
rise,
or
even
the
quarrels
and
ready had some peddling ex-
BURLINGTON JEWERY today
perience in the nearby Adiron- the women's petty gossip—all
has, together with all Vermont,
dacks region of up-state New stemmed from an honest religi-
finally joined the United States.
York, but it was only when they osity which couldn't help but
How this is changing its charact-
strongly
affect
the
life
of
an
crossed Lake Champlain and dis-
er
need not detain us here, for
imaginative
lad
during,
his
most
covered Burlington, Vermont's
largest town, that they decided to important ye a r s of spiritual as it is getting more American-
ized and shedding its east-Euro-
concentrate their homes in one growth.
What helped make our Bur- pean culture it is becoming just
place and form a Jewish com-
lington Jewish community so dif- an average small American Jew-
munity in that area.
ferent, so much more
ish community whose Jewish fu-
My mother tells me that when sciously Jewish than other /uncon-
Amer- ture is uncertain.
she came to Burlington from ican Jewish communities,
\ even
However, even as late as the
Europe in the early nineties, a
few years before I was born, the at that time, was, I believe, our thirties, Ludwig Lewisohn, the
closeness to nature and our isola- noted author who then lived in
50 Jewish families in the town
tion from big-city influences.
Burlington, found, as he has told
were like one family — there
We were peddlers, our Bur-
existed a neighborliness, an in- lington Jews, but peddlers among me, vestiges of east-European
Jewish life in Burlington that
timacy, a passion for mutual aid
the farmers. Like the Jews of
that was extraordinary.
small east-European towns we
The quarrels — over Rabbis,
were not entirely divorced from
over the supervision of Kash-
ROSH HASHONAH
the soil. Not only would we
ruth, over the Synagogues (we
stay overnight on farms, and
GREETINGS
had three of them for a long
sometimes all week, coming home
a
time)—were to start later when
Mr. and Mrs.
only for the Sabbath, but in
the Jewish community had grown
town, too, we kept cows, chick-
to Audi an extent that its popu-
harry Friedberg
ens and vegetable gardens.
lation had tripled.
It was this semi-rural life, to-
and Family
Btit even then, despite all our gether with the other influences
differences, we Burlington Jews
I've mentioned—the isolation, the
Mr. and Mrs.
retained a feeling of close neigh-
Old Yankee and the French a
b o r I i n es s, of Landsmanshaft,
Canadian examples — that pre-
Paul Friedberg
something we have to this very served our eastern Jewish cul-
day, something which probably
tural pattern. For in Europe, too,
and Family
no other Jewish community in
the United States has ever pos- the Klain-Shtedtl constantly fed (7
c
a=al
sessed, at least to such an ex-
tent.
GREETINGS . .
• • •
'BACKWARD' AREA
.DURING THE EARLY years of
this century, and almost up to
1940 when good roads brought
14841 MEYERS ROAD
VE. 8-0441
the automobile belatedly into
Vermont, we were a Lithuanian
Jewish village that happened to
ROSH HASHONAH GREETINGS
be stranded in Vermont, which
was only superficially affected by
American ways, that basically
Manufacturing Furriers
lived — and maintained for a
whole generation — its east-
206 E. GRAND RIVER AVE.
Hurd Clark
European Jewish pattern of life.
Lou Gendler
The "backward"—if you wish
to call it so—rural setting of
Vermont made it possible for us
GREETINGS .. .
of maintain this Litvishe Klain-
Shtecitel, and perhaps, too, the
example of nearby French Can-
ada and the presence of a large,
pious Catholic French population
12133 LINWOOD
in Burlington and northern Ver-
Negro Educator
..
1
Conveyor Engineering Co.
MERCHANTS FUR COMPANY
FLASHENBERG DELICATESSEN
ROSH HASHONAH
GREETINGS
REEBER
Furniture Co.
3353 MICHIGAN AVE.
TA. 5-5070
•
Thursday, September 22, 1949
he had found nowhere else-in his
travels throughout the length and
breadth of the United Sates.
And only the other day, Dr.
T r u d e Weiss-Rosmairin, who
came to Burlington for a lec-
ture, mentioned to me that she
had found a healthier Jewish
spirit there than in other towns
of similar size she had visited,
The Burlington of a genera-
tion ago contributed to Ameri-
can Jewry—believe it or not—a
New York Yiddish journalist and
a Hebrew teacher for Israel! If
that Burlington with its vigorous
Jewish life can never again be
recaptured, I think we should at
least take to heart the lesson It
teacheS those of us who would
like to see Jewish life in America
based on less shallow founda-
tions than it is today.
Even were that lesson followed,
we could not, of course, recreate
Lithuanian or Polish Ukrainian
Jetvish villages in America, but
we might create a more human
physical setting in which a
tl.oroughly Americanized Juda-
ism, too, would have a chance of
survival.
Anyway, when an orthodox
Rabbi, or a Meshulach, or a
Maggid would come from New
York or Boston to Burlington
during the early 1900's he would
be amazed at the bit of Europe
he would find there among the
Jews.
The Burlington Jewish com-
munity which I remember as a
child and as a youth was unique
not in its Orthodoxy—even then
Sabbath observance was begin-
ning to be violated—but rather
in the cultural pattern of the
east-European Jewish small town.
Let me illustrate:
Courteous Service Always
FRANK ROUTH, Prop.
1715 MICHIGAN AVE.
WO. 4-7763
NEW YEAR'S
GREETINGS
DUN ITZ
MANAGEMENT
CO.
1210 David Stott Building
WO 2-3574
■•■••■••■■•••■••
ROSH HASHONAH
GREETINGS
POLLAK
PRINTING CO.
ACME PACKING
AND
AL POLLAK
SUPPLY CO., Inc.
2420 Grand River
325 W. Jefferson Ave.
WO. 3-0895
4
WO. 2-9680.
i•■•■■ •••••••••• ■••■••■•■■ ••••
THE LADIES OF
Yeshivath Beth Yehudah
Extend to its members and friends best wishes fur
Happl, and Prosperous New Year
MRS. PEARL ROTTENBERG ,President
■■•■•44■•■•••• ■■••■•■
••••
• ■ •••• ■••■•■•■•••
a
••
BEST WISHES FOR A HAPPY NEW YEAR
BOSTON PAPER CO.
1941 W. Fort Street
TA. 5-1970
Greetings
POSNER BAKING CO.
WHOLESALE AND RETAIL DELIVERY
3142 Fenkell
UN. 4-9739
Rosh Hashonah Greetings
Metropolitan Motion
gicture Co.
Fisher Building - MAdison 4266
My Best Wishes to All My Friends
and Best Wishes to All
WO. 1-5630
Frank's
Staditi in Service
GREETINGS .
New Year's Greetings
1317 LAFAYETTE BLDG.
Season's Greetings
1 1,-
AS ALWAYS • . •
SAUL KATZ
CONSTRUCTION CO.
My first Hebrew teacher—and
I started studying Hebrew a
year before I entered public
school—was the old-time Meta-
med. There were such Melam-
dim all over the United States
at that time. But where exceit
in Burlington was the Melamed
known all over "Jew Village"
(that's how our little ghetto in
the northern part of the town
was called) by the diminutive of
Shinunele and his wife, not by
her own name, but as Shim-.
meliche.
Winters Slid Service
AAA Service
18118 WYOMING at Curtis
UNiversity 1-5681 '