Historical society to celebrate golden age of Newark’s Yiddish theater

by Robert Wiener
NJJN Staff Writer
12.29.05

For more than two decades that spanned the Great Depression and World War II, Elving’s Metropolitan Theater was a landmark in the cultural life of Newark’s Jewish community.

The city’s only Yiddish-language theater presented a world of entertainment, ranging from slapstick comedy to serious drama.

Now, with the aid of a $10,000 grant from the New Jersey Historical Commission, the Jewish Historical Society of MetroWest NJ will try to recapture its essence and flavor in an exhibition called “Think Yiddish, Not British: One More Night at Elving’s Metropolitan Theater.”

The exhibit is not scheduled to open until November 2006, but Linda Forgosh, curator and outreach director of the JHS, is already searching for more artifacts and oral histories concerning the theater company that was based on Montgomery Street in Newark’s Third Ward between 1922 and 1944.

“We are recipients of a wonderful collection of props and photographs from Elving’s,” she said. “If you did not know where they were taken and could put no historical note or caption on them, they would still stand on their own. They are eye-riveting.”

But the curious curator wants more. She is hunting “for more people who can tell us a story or anecdote about the days when they attended Elving’s — somebody who might know any members of the Elving family, or anybody who might have saved a program, a ticket, or anything else that would give us another piece of the puzzle of what it was like to see a performance at Elving’s Metropolitan Theater.”

Forgosh said the theater stood a few blocks away from Prince Street, the Jewish section’s principal thoroughfare.

“For the most part, its audience members were first-generation immigrants, fluent in Yiddish and other European languages, and the performances they saw on stage often mirrored their own experiences with work, family life, love, and assimilation in their new country of America,” she said.

“Some of the residents of this community remember it fondly,” she told NJ Jewish News, and some remember as kids sneaking in to see productions. “They…recall that every time you slammed the door, the scenery would rattle.” In the hot summer months, before the advent of air conditioning, “exit doors would be left open to cool the overheated theater.”

It was a place where you could find the likes of Meyer Ellenstein, the city’s Jewish mayor. And mobster Abner “Longie” Zwillman, even if he did not himself attend, would purchase blocks of orchestra seats as a treat for less affluent Jews in the Third Ward.

The theater had 1,200 seats and had no problem holding performances on Friday evenings and Saturday matinees.

“Elving’s was one of a kind,” said Forgosh. “The owners, Bernard and Rose Elving, were a husband and wife who wrote the skits and starred in them. His brother, Israel Elving, handled the bookings and the box office as well as negotiations with the Hebrew and Yiddish Actors Union.”

The theater had a stock company of performers, and sometimes women played the roles of men.

Among those who appeared on its stage were world-renowned Cantor Moishe Oysher, actor-singers Aaron Lebedoff, Molly Picon, David Kessler, and Boris Tomashevsky — the grandfather of orchestra conductor Michael Tilson Thomas.

In addition to the photographs and artifacts that will be part of the exhibition, Forgosh is planning to produce “One More Night at Elving’s Metropolitan Theater,” a dozen skits or acts featuring young people and adults singing Yiddish melodies popular during the period before Elving’s went dark. The performance, to be held on the stage of the JCC in West Orange on a Sunday afternoon in November, will include students from area day schools, including the Joseph Kushner Hebrew Academy in Livingston and the Solomon Schechter Day School of Essex and Union in West Orange.

The program exhibit itself will be based at two venues, the Weil Atrium of the Alex Aidekman Family Jewish Community Campus in Whippany and the Leon & Toby Cooperman JCC, Ross Family Campus, in West Orange, before it becomes a traveling exhibit.

Anyone with old costumes, memorabilia, or memories of Elving’s Metropolitan Theater is asked to contact Forgosh at 973-929-2994.