Parting curtains on the past as society prepares theater tribute

by Robert Wiener
NJJN Staff Writer

Nearly forgotten memories of the vibrant Yiddish theater in New Jersey are coming alive almost daily at the Jewish Historical Society of MetroWest.

Preparing for an exhibition this winter on Newark’s famed Elving’s Metropolitan Yiddish Theater, staff and volunteers have also been planning a Nov. 12 gala tribute to the music and drama of the era and assembling period memorabilia.

Some of the artifacts were unearthed by Roger Oliver of Denville, who was a friend of theater owner Bernard Elving’s grandson, David Elving Schwartz.

After Schwartz died in 1997, Oliver became executor of his will.

This week Oliver revealed the contents of a box full of theatrical props that were kept in a storage locker the Schwartz family had kept in Netcong.

With a pleasantly surprised Linda Forgosh, the society’s curator and outreach director, at his side, Oliver took the lid off a cardboard box outside the historical society’s office on the Aidekman campus in Whippany, then gingerly opened the individually wrapped items on loan to the exhibit.

A treasure trove of objects emerged one by one, including a vintage telephone, a monocle, a police officer’s badge and billy club, an Art Deco-era woman’s compact, a klaxon horn from a French taxicab, a wooden tap for a beer keg, and an Irish shelaleigh.

And more: a homemade tambourine crafted from a cardboard box and flattened soda bottle caps, two beaded purses of a style favored by trendsetting “flappers” of the Jazz Age, and a Roosevelt for President button.

“I’m not sure which Roosevelt,” said Oliver. “Teddy ran for the last time in 1918.”

Forgosh was deeply impressed.

“Every day you get up, you never know what surprises are going to come your way,” she told Oliver. “This is special, and that you’ve held onto it and treated it with such respect is a wonderful thing. Wow!”

Oliver, a special education consultant who has had a love for the theater since high school, is not Jewish. But, he said, “Yiddish theater resonates very strongly with me. You go back in Christian theater to the medieval morality plays that warned the young people off of inherent dangers. Yiddish theater was very much the same as that, with ‘Here you are in America. It’s very different from what the shtetl was and you need to watch out.’ It was a way to help Jewish young people assimilate into America and still maintain their traditions and their roots and their cultures.”

Some of those traditions will come alive again Sunday, Nov. 12, at the Leon & Toby Cooperman JCC, Ross Family Campus, in West Orange.

There, on stage at the JCC’s Maurice Levin Theater, the JHS will present “One More Night at Elving’s Metropolitan Yiddish Theater.”

“It is for anybody who wants a little bit of Yiddishkeit,” said Forgosh. “Yiddish melodies are probably more popular than you think. They still have a certain kind of appeal.”

The 2:30 p.m. performance, complete with a live orchestra, a dozen skits performed by Jewish day school students, and a master of ceremonies with a penchant for Yiddish music, will kick off a three-month exhibit on the theater.

Hear the pain and joy

Between 1922 and 1944, Elving’s attracted theatergoers to its home on Montgomery Street in what was Newark’s predominantly Jewish Third Ward.

It was a place where gangsters and people in government, the working class and the wealthy, would gather under one roof to be amused, moved, and entertained by stories — some melodramatic, some comic — of an immigrant generation struggling with a new society so different from the European shtetls and cities of their birth.

The actors in this one-time revival will be students from the Nathan Bohrer-Abraham Kaufman Hebrew Academy of Morris County in Randolph, the Joseph Kushner Hebrew Academy in Livingston, and the Solomon Schechter Day School of Essex and Union in West Orange.

“We are trying to teach youngsters with a cultural tradition, a little bit of flavor, and this exhibit lends itself to a performance featuring youngsters in the community. It is a whole total experience and something they will never forget,” said Forgosh.

They will be accompanied by members of JCC MetroWest’s Metropolitan Orchestra and introduced by Charlie Bernhaut, a Newark native who can still “remember the era” when Elving’s was a fixture in his neighborhood.

To Bernhaut, Yiddish songs are “Jewish soul music.” He learned to love them when he began collecting old Victrolas and 78-rpm records.

Many of the items in his collection are recordings of Yiddish and cantorial music, which he has broadcast since the 1970s on radio stations in East Orange and South Orange.

Bernhaut now boasts having 15,000 albums of Jewish music in his private collection, and despite his love for and familiarity with the mameloshn, he promises to make his on-stage remarks in English.

“I speak broken Yiddish, but I don’t want to insult the crowd,” he said.

The musical numbers, of course, will be sung in Yiddish. But, Bernhaut said, non-Yiddish-speakers need not worry: Little will be lost, even without translation.

“I find even if you don’t understand the words, each area of Jewish music — whether it is a song about love or a song about the Holocaust — you can hear the pain, you can hear joy. Yiddish expresses it in a certain way that isn’t captured in English. I think it is very unique.”

Alan Gerberg, director of special projects at United Jewish Communities of MetroWest NJ, whose background includes years of backstage experience with ballet and opera companies, will be the stage manager for the Nov. 12 performance, working alongside Jim Raposa, the Levin Theater’s technical director.

Although his own musical tastes run toward jazz, Gerberg said he has “heard Yiddish music all my life. I appreciate the music for what it is and the history of it.”