Jews Never Landed on Plymouth Rock

On a humid September Wednesday this year, I was on a New York City subway car hurtling toward the Lower East Side. The air-conditioned car was delightful, unlike the stuffy subway car in which I used to travel to school 50 years previously. It seemed as if many of those trains were identical to the original subway cars that traversed the line in 1905, one year after the Interborough Rapid Transit Company commenced its initial run. Today’s ride was so comfortable that I dozed off.

I found myself-walking the streets of the Lower East Side. But all was different. The people were speaking Yiddish and Italian, not English or Chinese. The streets were filled with people, wearing early 20th century garb, pushcarts and horse dung punctuating the street. As I turned the corner onto Orchard Street I saw my refection in a window. I was dressed just as they were dressed.

My mindset was 2005, but the surroundings said 1905. I was in the neighborhood in which my immigrant grandparents lived after arriving from Europe. I do not know how that happened, but it did.

Sure it was the neighborhood and the tenement that I wanted to see. But it was the faade of 97 Orchard Street approaching middle age in its 42nd year not its 142nd year at that site. I wanted to visit the Lower East Side Tenement Museum at 97 Orchard Street. But instead of a building bordered by automobiles parked on both sides of the street, I saw wall-to wall humanity trying to escape the hot and putrid conditions inside their miniscule apartments.

Years later, the city would force owners to improve conditions for their tenants. More than 200.000 people (mostly immigrants) lived in tenements located in the square mile surrounding Orchard Street.

In my head I knew that for many years, until it was converted into a museum, the five-story 97 Orchard Street tenement had been a blighted-decayed shell of history. But in 1998, concluding that the museum was the best site in the United States from which to interpret the urban, working class immigrant experience, President Clinton and the U.S. Congress designated the site as a National Historic Area affiliated with the National Park Service. And 97 Orchard Street was also been designated a National Historic landmark and featured property of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

Like other early tenements, the building contained 20 three-room units with no heating, lighting and for many years, indoor plumbing or running water. And during its history, it housed as many as 7,000 immigrants from 20 foreign lands.

In 1867, New York City started to enact legislation to improve tenement conditions. Those regulations prompted the landlord of 97 Orchard Street to install gas lines; running water and interior flush toilets. By the early 1900s, he had also transformed the building’s entryway, dressing it up with tile floors, burlap wall coverings, pressed metal ceilings and oil paintings.

The laws also called for increased air and light in the apartments. Landlords blanched at this provision, but eventually complied by cutting windows in the walls that connected rooms in the apartments.

Suddenly, it was July 13, 1918. Newsboys hawked their wares, shouting the news of the Great War. It was just four years after my father, Louis Swerdlow, was born on nearby Eldridge Street, and just a few months before my grandmother, Fannie, would die during the Spanish Flu pandemic.

I’m about to visit the Orthodox Jewish Rogarshevsky family from Telz, Lithuania. They moved into the 325-square-foot apartment at 97 Orchard Street in 1910. The father, Abraham, and mother, Fannie, lived in that tiny three-room apartment along with their five children and orphaned niece.

I silently enter the apartment as the family sits Shiva, mourning Abraham’s death from tuberculosis on the previous evening at 11. Because the Sabbath started on Friday evening only minimal funeral arrangements could be made. (Shiva is the Jewish rite of mourning.)

Because the Sabbath is considered a day of rest, Abraham’s body could not be moved and Sabbath candles were not permitted to be placed near him. The body was not touched until 20 minutes after death. And after his death a window was opened so that Abraham’s soul could escape. The window was immediately shut so that the soul could not return.

Fannie continued to live in her second floor apartment until 1941 even though there were just a few other tenants in the building when it closed in 1935. She then moved into an area housing project.

And when the Rogarshevsky apartment reopened as part of the Tenement Museum, visitors were invited to make a Shiva call. Visitors learn about many of the rite’s aspects, such as the seudat havra-ah, the traditional mourning meal of eggs, lentils, roll, and other round foods representing the circle of life.

Abraham’s death was not the only tragedy that the Rogarshevsky family would endure. Visitors to the museum will learn what happened to Fannie and her family after 1918. The Rogarshevsky family showed great strength despite the obstacles and the poor conditions they faced and, as is true of all of the families represented at the museum, their story serves as an example to all of us.

Visitors also learn about the significance of the landsmanshaftn, associations of immigrants from the same hometown, as well as the practice of medicine during the early 20th century.

David Jacobson, consultant to the project and the Executive Director of United Hebrew Community of New York (the largest Jewish burial organization in the United States) stated, When someone died on the Lower East Side, the whole neighborhood came to a halt. When the body of the deceased was carried out of the building, the shops closed down and everyone came out onto the street to pay their respects and to follow the funeral procession.

Wash Gjebre, a 1935 immigrant, who lived with his parents at 97 Orchard Street, observed, in a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article dated May 1, 2005, that rumors had circulated in Europe that the streets of New York were paved with gold. When I got there I found out three things: First the streets weren’t paved with gold. Second, they weren’t paved at all. Third, I was expected to pave them.

The East Side Tenement Museum Visitor center is located at 108 Orchard Street (at Orchard and Broome). Additional information is available by phone at 212-431-0233 or via e-mail at testm@tenement.org. Its website can be found at by clicking here