Sun 5/31 @ 7PM
Since the museum’s closing back in March, the Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage has ramped up its blog content, sharing stories such as those in a recent post about three Jewish-American immigrant stories.
Written by Dahlia Fisher, Courtney Krieger and Lindsay Miller, the post spotlights three Jewish-American activists with Cleveland connections whose stories can be found in the Maltz’s permanent exhibit, An American Story. They were part of a wave of more than two million Eastern European Jews who came to the U.S. in the late 1800s and early 1900s, settling in urban areas such as New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Chicago and Cleveland. My own family arrived in New York from Belarus around 1880 and by the early 1890s, had settled in Chicago.
In the early part of the 20th century, Cleveland’s explosive growth was fueled by immigrant communities such as these: at one point a third of Cleveland’s population was immigrants or first-generation Americans. (Don’t let anyone, not even the president, tell you that immigrants have a negative impact on the country!)
These immigrants included Rose Pastor (pictured), a Jewish immigrant from Poland, who supported her family rolling cigars in a Flats loft at the age of 11. Self-educated, she moved to New York where she married a wealthy socialist named James Phelps Stokes. Dubbed “the Cinderella of the Sweatshops,” Pastor used her new position to advocate for workers.
In addition to Pastor, the post highlights Rabbi Isador Kalisch, another immigrant from Poland who helped found Cleveland’s Tifereth Israel and was involved with the early Reform Jewish movement in the mid 1800s and its commitment to social justice; and Hadassah founder Henrietta Szold, whose family came to the U.S. from Hungary in 1859. It also provides links to learn more about these pioneering immigrants.
On Sunday May 31, the museum will explore today’s immigration climate in a Zoom Panel Discussion that’s free to attend. Speakers Ilana Horowitz Ratner, founder and adviser of the Cuyahoga County Immigration Legal Services Fund; Crystal Massey, Volunteer Coordinator of the Immigration Justice Campaign at the American Immigration Council; Beth Werlin, executive director of the American Immigration Council; and nationally noted Cleveland immigration lawyer David Leopold, will look at the discussion surrounding immigration today including immigration limits, family separation and the detaining of children in unsafe conditions.
Register to attend here.
Beachwood, OH 44122