New Jersey Jewish News
Middlesex County Feature
Jewish history buffs mine Rutgers libraries special collection
If you want to examine a Metuchen synagogue’s religious school records from 1984 or find out what the annual dues were at a Union City synagogue in 1946, there is one place to go: the Rutgers University Libraries special collections departments.
Housed in the depths of the Alexander Library on the College Avenue campus in New Brunswick, the special collection includes board meeting minutes, correspondence, financial records, and other materials donated to the library by individuals and Jewish organizations.
Most of the records are from synagogues but other Jewish institutions — such as the Jewish Counseling and Service Agency, a precursor to the Jewish Family Service of MetroWest — are also represented in a collection that goes as far back as the mid-19th century. Several of the synagogues whose documents are part of the collection have long since closed or merged with other houses of worship.
“We’d been collecting things on New Jersey history for years, and [the Jewish community] was a neglected source,” said Ronald Becker, head of the RU Libraries special collections department. “In 1985-86, I began seeking out Jewish history. I traveled all over the state, collecting resources and teaching synagogues what to save and how to do it — like using acid-free paper. Now we’re working on collecting [material from] the newer ethnic groups in New Jersey.”
Becker said he spoke to synagogue board members about how important their records are when it comes to local history. School and committee records may seem mundane but they are the stuff of history.
“They tell you what the communities were doing,” Becker said. “It’s what real people do. One hundred years from now, a document tells someone what the people in the community were thinking about, what was important to them.”
For example, 60-year-old financial records from Congregation Beth Jacob in Union City show that during that same year, the synagogue donated $200 to the Yeshiva of Hudson County— and also sent a donation of $1.95 to a yeshiva in Jerusalem. The annual budget for the synagogue at the time was roughly $7,000, with a little more than $3,000 going toward salaries. By 1949, the $3 annual dues were recorded in a hardbound ledger with one family per page.
Some of the synagogues are represented by copies of documents only, like Congregation B’nai Jeshurun in Newark (which has since moved to Short Hills). The original materials are housed at American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati.
Most of those who have come to look through the records have been tracing their genealogy, Becker said. Many people know of local Jewish historical societies such as the Jewish Historical Society of MetroWest in Whippany or the Jewish Historical Society of Central New Jersey in New Brunswick but are unaware of the records available at Rutgers.
Others have been students doing research for college papers, like Shlomo Singer of Passaic. Now a Seton Hall University Law School student, he did research in 2003 when he was an undergraduate at Rutgers.
“My research paper for a history class was on social service agencies during the Great Depression,” Singer said. “I looked up case files of the Jewish Counseling and Service Agency. I looked at the numbers of the cases they helped.”
When he chose his research paper topic, Singer said, he asked around, and history professors pointed him toward the special collections department. Its main offices are at Alexander Library but it also uses archive space in the building attic and another facility off-site.
“The archive room in the basement is very nice, and a lot of people don’t know it’s there — I’d encourage people to use it,” Singer said.
Regardless of the reason for using the archival materials, it helps to be able to read Yiddish, the language of most of the early records.
The archival material, housed in temperature- and moisture-controlled acid-free environments, also includes records from several of New Jersey’s “utopian societies” which included heavy Jewish populations.
The utopian groups, many of which were formed in the early 20th century, were alternative communities espousing nontraditional lifestyles.
They include the Roosevelt, the Free Acres, the Modern School at Stelton, and Farmingdale communities. Free Acres was a cooperative single-tax community and Farmingdale was a cooperative agricultural community. According to a guide to the Roosevelt community written by Fernanda Perrone, archivist and director of the special collections department, as part of a “Utopian Communities Project” program, Roosevelt began its existence as a New Deal community of Jewish settlers supported by economic cooperatives in the form of farm operations, a factory, and retail shops. Perrone also wrote a guide to the Modern School collection, which was connected to the anarchist community near Stelton and provided an alternative education encouraging students’ creativity and self-reliance.
“The utopian communities’ material gets the most use,” Becker said. “We have oral histories, pictures, archives.”
The Farmingdale collection even includes copies of some of the records of the community kept by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Many of the utopian communities were started by people connected to the socialist and communist parties.
A little known component of the archive is its Jewish Welfare Board collection — which includes records of the group’s efforts to find relatives of 800 Holocaust survivors stranded in Europe after World War II who believed they had relatives in Essex County.
“People want to put their stuff somewhere; they don’t want to see it forgotten,” Becker said. “Some choose us because we already have so many collections. They trust we’ll take care of it correctly.”
The earliest records of organized Jewish communities, in Newark and Paterson, date to the late 1840s.
“The first real community records you have are from synagogues,” Becker explained. “There were Jews living in New Jersey long before that, but you didn’t have community organizations for that period. As a community it’s a late arriving community.”
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