The Jewish Legacy in Northeastern Pennsylvania
The Jewish communities of Northeastern Pennsylvania had come, like so many others to the Coal Region, in waves. They arrived from the German states in the middle of the 19th century, from Poland in its closing decades, and from Russia and Ukraine in the early years of the 20th.
They came for economic opportunity, certainly – the anthracite coal fields were hungry for labor, and the towns rising around the collieries needed merchants, businessmen, and tradespeople. But most often, they were also fleeing something: discrimination, threats, and pogroms carried out by their neighbors and frequently with the blessing of their own governments in Europe.
The Jews who built synagogues in Wilkes-Barre, Pittston, and Hazleton crossed the Atlantic Ocean seeking to get away from exactly the kind of state-sponsored violence that was about to reappear, in a more methodical, modern, and sinister form, in the heart of Europe in the 1930s.
That new threat grew out of Germany, a country that had been crushed by its loss in the First World War. Humiliated by the Treaty of Versailles, saddled with reparations it could not pay, and battered by an economy that collapsed into global depression at the end of the 1920s, the country proved fertile ground for a man who always offered someone to blame. Adolf Hitler scapegoated Germany's Jews for all of it – the defeat, the humiliation, and the economic ruin. By the time he was sworn in as Chancellor in January 1933, the Jewish people of the Wyoming Valley had every reason, drawn from their own family histories, to understand precisely where that kind of scapegoating led.
They did not wait long to say so.
On the evening of July 1, 1933 – just five months into the Hitler government – several hundred people crowded into the auditorium of the Young Men's Hebrew Association in Wilkes-Barre. They had come to hear Alexander Kahn, a New York attorney, explain what was actually happening to the Jews of Germany and what could be done about it.
Presiding over the meeting was J. K. Weitzenkorn, president of the United Jewish Alliance of Luzerne County. On the speaker’s platform beside him sat not only Jewish leaders but Christian clergymen as well: Monsignor J. J. Curran, Reverend F. L. Flinchbaugh, Reverend H. F. Randolph, Rabbi Louis Levitsky, Rabbi I. M. Davidson, and others. The attendance of those clergymen was itself a statement. What was unfolding in Germany, the meeting made plain, was not a Jewish problem alone.
Kahn had been sent to make the case for the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, the organization he described as the first to send money to Jews in Germany, and whose present aim, he told the audience, was to get them “out of that country while the gates are still open and establish them elsewhere.”
It was also, it bears remembering, the bleakest year of the Great Depression. The anthracite industry – already in a decade-long decline – continued to shed thousands of jobs as the 1930s continued. Men who had worked the same mine for 20 years were lining up at relief offices. The community these people had built together was under serious strain. And yet, in the same season they were worrying about their own economic survival, the Jews of Luzerne County were organizing mass meetings, penning newspaper columns, and sending money to strangers across the Atlantic.
South of the Wyoming Valley in Hazleton, Rabbi Benjamin N. Goldberg of Congregation Agudas Israel had been putting the crisis in sharper terms than most American public figures were willing to use at the time. Writing in the Plain Speaker in April 1933, he laid out the situation without diplomatic softening.
He shared reports that German Jews were being barred from professions, expelled from public life, subjected to violence that the Nazis in government facilitated. Goldberg argued that his community should give money, as American Jews had an obligation to speak clearly and to resist the instinct toward a quietism that would accomplish nothing. He pointed to German Jews themselves in their efforts to fight back: “It is the power of a free press, of an enlightened public opinion that will ultimately win their fight against unspeakable reaction and oppression.”
A Hazleton neighbor named Jacob I. Meyers had his own, more vivid way of putting it. Writing to the Plain Speaker on June 2, 1933, Meyers reached for an analogy his Coal Region readers would immediately grasp.
The Nazi government, he wrote, was “the kind of government that we in this country might have had if the worst elements of the Ku Klux Klan and the Chicago underworld had combined forces and won an election.” He was careful to separate the regime from the German people: “Most Germans are decent and humane and equal victims with German Jews of a spirit which began in Germany with the Hohenzollerns, and has become intensified and brutalized in the Hitlerites.”
That September, the High Holy Days brought an even more direct appeal. Rabbi Jonah B. Wise, serving as national chairman of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee's $2 million German relief fund, sent a Rosh Hashanah message to Hazleton’s local JDC members – Calvin Leichtman and Louis Roman – that the Plain Speaker published in full. “We have the problem of the German Jew who is ruthlessly and wantonly condemned to a position of despair,” Wise wrote. “We must strain every effort to assist him in his plight that he may have what freedom can be obtained for his future.”
The Joint Distribution Committee, he explained, was in close contact with Jewish leaders inside Germany who had assumed responsibility for maintaining communal life, assisting individuals, and protecting the young and the weak. What he needed from communities like those in Luzerne County was money. “It is incumbent on every Jew before the New Year begins, if he has not done so already, to pay his share toward the ransom of his fellow-Jews,” he wrote.
By January 1934, the conversation in the Wyoming Valley had shifted from whether to act to what, exactly, could be done. At Temple Israel in Wilkes-Barre, Dr. Ethan Colton of the International Y.M.C.A. addressed a large audience on conditions in Germany and the plight of the Jews.
Palestine, a British-controlled territory at the time, was overcrowded he told them. The United States and other countries would have to offer a haven. Two months later, in March, Dr. Israel Goldstein – rabbi of the oldest Jewish congregation in America, introduced to the Temple Israel congregation by Rabbi Louis Levitsky – delivered a lecture on the German Jews now arriving in this country, reminding his audience that the Wyoming Valley itself was home to descendants of German Jewish families that had fled persecution in the 1840s and firmly established themselves far from the fatherland. This should be repeated on a larger scale, he argued, as the danger in Germany grew worse.
What followed in the years after – growing campaigns to raise money, mass rallies, the coordinated fundraising drives that eventually stretched from Hazleton to Scranton to Honesdale – was built on the arguments first made in 1933 and 1934, when the worst was still unimaginable.
What began in the early 1930s only deepened as the years passed. Across the Coal Region, the relief campaigns grew larger and more urgent through the decade and into the war years, filling auditoriums with testimony about the refugees streaming out of Nazi-occupied Europe. The fundraising that flowed from Luzerne and Lackawanna counties helped sustain the Joint Distribution Committee, which became a lifeline for hundreds of thousands of European Jews living under occupation and for the survivors who outlasted it, in the years after 1945.
But one of the clearest voices had come earliest. In the spring of 1933, the West Side Women’s Club of Luzerne County invited Rabbi Louis Levitsky of Temple Israel to speak, asking him to talk about Hitler. He offered them commentary that reads today like prophecy.
“Hitler is not a Jewish problem,” Levitsky told the gathered women. “Hitler is a world problem. The attack on the Jews is a danger signal to the rest of the world that a new and active menace to the world's peace has arisen. The Jews of Germany will live through it. The question is: Will Western Civilization live through it?”
It would take much of the world another six years to begin really asking that question. In the Jewish communities of Pennsylvania's Coal Region, they had been asking it from the start.
