Jewish Historical Society of MetroWest archivist Jill Hershorin completes the voluminous task of cataloging 63 boxes’ worth of artifacts from Oheb Shalom Congregation.
Photo by Linda Forgosh
August 21, 2008
As they gazed over 63 gray boxes in a climate-controlled storage room at the Jewish Historical Society of MetroWest, Linda Forgosh and Jill Hershorin had reason to be happy.
The boxes are filled with vintage photographs, documents, and artifacts that chronicle Oheb Shalom Congregation from its earliest days in mid-19th-century Newark to its current home in South Orange.
“It is such a complete record,” said Forgosh, JHS curator and outreach director. “It is all there and it has been preserved.” Besides appreciating the material’s intrinsic worth, she said, she views the acquisition as “instructional for other synagogues, as to what to hold onto and how to preserve your history.”
For many years, the invaluable collection of Judaica was stashed away in the basement of the South Orange home of David Schechner, a past president of the congregation. In a sense, it was a family heirloom.
“My great-grandfather, Isaac Schwarz, was the first rabbi at Oheb Shalom,” he explained. Schwarz passed its records down, and they continued to go from generation to generation.
The Conservative synagogue was founded in 1860, after a breakaway from Schwarz’s earlier pulpit at Congregation B’nai Jeshurun. “When B’nai Jeshurun voted to go Reform, he wasn’t retained as rabbi. So he and 50 families left and founded Oheb Shalom,” Schechner said.
Linda Forgosh, curator and outreach director at the Jewish Historical Society of MetroWest displays a vintage photograph and vinyl records from the Oheb Shalom Congregation archives.
Photo by Robert Wiener
A small, yellowed pamphlet from Oheb Shalom’s first year is the earliest piece in the collection. It is the congregation’s constitution, written in German — the native language of its first generation of congregants.
The cache of items was originally kept in the three-family house on Renner Avenue in Newark where Schechner grew up.
“When we moved to South Orange, my mother took everything. I ended up with all the papers,” he said. “I got interested in them. I was the president of the synagogue in 1959, and around 1961 they decided I should be the historian.”
In keeping with that position, he would bring photocopies of historic documents to every board meeting, making sure “they were things nobody had ever seen before.”
One of the more curious items is the handwritten minutes of the congregation’s general meeting of Jan. 6, 1901. The document lists the annual salaries of the rabbi and cantor, each of whom received $1,500. The sexton received $500 that year, the organist $250, and $500 was earmarked for the members of the choir.
The early-20th-century congregation treasurer estimated the synagogue’s “probable income for 1901” would be $4,987.75 and its “probable expenditures” would be $4,772.35.
Hershorin, the JHS archivist, who just finished a three-month assignment of cataloging the massive donation, said, “I really got to learn more about the history of not only the community but the specific institution. It is fascinating to see how long this synagogue has been in existence and the activities its members participated in.”
Schechner said the collection probably holds treasures for longtime Oheb Shalom members and for those whose forebears were members. “If the rabbi wrote you a letter in 1944, it is in your family file. If you want to know, you can find out the date of your father’s bar mitzva.”
To Forgosh, it represents the story “not only of Oheb Shalom but of Jewish life as it once was” at a time when, according to the 1916 census, there were 35,000 Jews — and 635 pushcarts — in Newark.
Parts of the archives will be on display at the Greater Newark Conservancy, which now occupies the building on Prince Street that was Oheb Shalom’s first home.
Forgosh said JHS staff is working to provide an on-line itemized inventory of the collection at the JHS website through a computer program called PastPerfect.
Now that the bulky, brimming boxes are gone from his basement, Schechner said, he misses them. “But I am getting old, and I wanted to make sure the collection didn’t fall into disrepair.”
To Forgosh, the donation of the Oheb Shalom archives was an appropriate and welcome gift to the JHS, a beneficiary agency of UJC MetroWest NJ, which is now celebrating its 18th anniversary.
“This is a clarion call to other synagogues with long histories whose papers are not in our archives,” she said. “Part of our work is to remind the synagogue community and others with private collections that we are here. This is a way to tell the community: ‘You can have this history at your fingertips.’”
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