• 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 '