Three Centuries of Compassion: Jewish Care for the Elderly and the Infirm in Amsterdam

This article aims to shed light on two principle subjects relating to language and culture in the Jewish community in Palestine before the rise of Zionism. First, it attempts to describe and to deepen our understanding of the Yiddish of the Ashkenazi community spoken in Historical Palestine in the 18th and 19th centuries. This dialect of Yiddish, referred to in this article as ‘Palestinian Yiddish’, was permeated with Arabic influences. Secondly, and in conjunction with addressing this dialect, the article explores various facets of the knowledge of Arabic among the Ashkenazi community in the country. In this respect, it highlights that the increased knowledge of Arabic in the Ashkenazi community indicates not only acquaintance with the language itself, but also encompasses broader insights about the relations between the Ashkenazi community and the Arab-Palestinian people which challenges the traditional research on the topic. Based on socio-linguistic analysis, as well as inslights from language contact and language and society, this article claims that the language parameter can highlight the social and political routes in which the Ashkenazi Palestinian community was paving, including those of acclimation, integration and being part of the general hegemonic Arab culture. As I argue, this is not unconnected to Zionism’s strenuous recoil from both of these languages—Yiddish and Arabic. ‘Palestinian Yiddish’ and ‘Ashkenazi Arabic’, therefore, jointly reveal a period as it once was and is no more: language skills and social relations that posed a threat to separatist practices that were to be pushed forward by the Zionist movement.

Charities begin to appear in Jewish community records in the early modern period. The first extant mention of a hevra kadisha dates from 1564 in Prague. Records of similar bodies appear in subsequent years in other Ashkenazi communities in Europe; by the end of the eighteenth century there was scarcely any community that did not have a hevra. Hevras operated with relative independence within the community; yet they remained subordinate to the parnassim. Hevras of Jewish women appear only rarely in the records. The pinkassim reveal something of the workings of community charity, although they provide few comprehensive facts or details. Since care for needy Jews was a central concern for Jewish communities in the period, this pervasive and urgent subject could not be recorded in the central registers of the communities.Keywords: Ashkenazi communities; charities; early modern period; hevras; Jewish community; parnassim; pinkassim

The Jewish community in the Netherlands has existed since the seventeenth century. There have always been two communities: the larger, Ashkenazi community, and the smaller, Sephardic community. In the ab­sence of any scientific census or survey, the number of Jews in the Netherlands is, at the moment, estimated at about 25,000. Of these, about 11,000 are considered official members of the Ashkenazi com­munity, distributed among 42 local com­munities throughout the country. The three big cities in the western part of our country—Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and the Hague—account for 82% of all Ash­kenazi community members. The Sephardic community has fewer than 1,000 mem­bers, and just one congregation, in Am­sterdam. The membership of the liberal Jewish community (the so-called Pro­gressive Movement)—which is enumer­ ated separately—is about 3,000, in six congregations. Again, Amsterdam, Rotter dam, and the Hague account for 80% of its members. At least half of all residents of Jewish origin in Holland are not affiliated with the organized Jewish community.

In the Name of the Community: Populism, Ethnicity, and Politics among the Jews of Argentina under Perón, 1946–1955

After the October Revolution of 1917, the creation of the state healthcare and medical education system in the country played a decisive role in the organization of emergency medical services (EMS) in Moscow on the basis of the former Sheremetev Hospital which later became a large multidisciplinary medical institution — N.V. Sklifosovsky Institute of Emergency Medicine (since 1943 — N.V. Sklifosovsky Research Institute for Emergency Medicine), — and the city EMS station as a part of it.In the pre-war period, the working out of the main principles for the EMS provision was critically important for the development of the services. It became possible to solve scientific and methodological problems related to the training of specialists. The Institute grew into a large institution, research in the field of emergency medicine was carried out at the world level. This contributed to the organization of a network of EMS institutions in the country during 1926–1935.The years of the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945 enriched the practice of providing emergency medical care, including during mass patient admission.In the post-war years (1946–1970s), the Institute became the leading institution on the problems of EMS in the country. Corresponding divisions were created within the Institute, and on its basis — “Emergency Medicine” scientific and practical association, research and organizational structures of the USSR Ministry of Health, the RSFSR Ministry of Health and the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences. Thanks to this, outstanding results were achieved in the EMS organization: the specialty of “emergency medicine physician” was introduced; emergency hospitals were created in a number of the country’s regions; government programs for EMS provision were successfully implemented; а large number of regulatory documents were prepared to facilitate the further EMS development.N.V. Sklifosovsky Research Institute for Emergency Medicine was among the main initiators of the disaster medicine service, which made it possible to fundamentally solve its organizational and technical problems. Thus, a significant contribution was made to the foundation of this service in Moscow and around the country.At the current stage (from 1992 to the present), EMS improvement has been continued, many developments turned out to be relevant for this services in the Russian Federation. In particular, the created structure of the Institute’s admission and intensive care unit remained the flagship among emergency care institutions in the country for about 20 years. The state program “Improving medical care for road accident victims” was successfully implemented. The Institute’s departments are being actively specialized, making it possible to obtain fundamentally new scientific and practical results for widespread implementation.Since 2011, “Scientific achievements in the field of emergency medical care in the Russian Federation” - collections of research works - have been published annually. The information presented in them can be used throughout the country.The experience in treatment for the novel coronavirus infection COVID-19 allowed the Institute to begin a new page in the history of emergency medical services.The recent opening of an emergency inpatient complex at the Institute contributed to optimizing the work of the hospital’s resuscitation and intensive care units and expanding their treatment and diagnostic capabilities.For more than 10 years, the public and consolidating activities of the scientific and practical society of emergency medicine specialists have been effective. Its work primarily concerns the organization and conduct of scientific and practical events, especially congresses of emergency medicine physicians, as well as the publication of Sklifosovsky Journal Emergency Medical Care, which has unifying significance for a large number of Russian specialists in the field of EMS. The decisions made at the congresses and conferences became the basis for expanding the introduction of advanced medical technologies in the Russian regions, as well as for carrying out important structural reforms in EMS institutions.One of the main achievements of the N.V. Sklifosovsky Research Institute for Emergency Medicine is the creation of the state EMS as a separate branch of healthcare in the country. Over the 100 years of the Institute’s activity, the foundations of its theory and practice have been developed, moreover, a contribution of world significance was made to the EMS development, thereby strengthening the scientific foundation for the activities of the Institute for many years to come.

Jewish tradition from antiquity to the present has been ambivalent about the Bible, despite its obviously foundational role. One reason for this surprising phenomenon is the extent to which the Talmud usurped the Bible's place, particularly (though not only) within the Ashkenazi community. Another is the importance accorded the Hebrew Bible within Christianity; even modern biblical scholarship has absorbed some Christian views, albeit in secular guise. As a result, Jews have sometimes been suspicious of those who study the Bible. Nowadays, biblical studies is frequently considered outside of Jewish studies; earlier practitioners were suspected of heresy. The growing interest in the Bible that has taken place within the Jewish community over the last two centuries is the result of both Christian influence and an effort to reclaim what was becoming a lost element of the Jewish heritage.

Reviewed by: Jews in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Charity, Community and Religion, 1830–1880 by Alysa Levene Lindsay Katzir (bio) Jews in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Charity, Community and Religion, 1830–1880, by Alysa Levene; pp. vi + 248. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020, $108.00, $35.95 paper, $28.76 ebook. Scholarly interest in the Jews of Victorian Britain has been steadily increasing in recent decades. Since the 1970s historians such as Geoffrey Alderman, David Feldman, Todd M. Endelman, and Vivian D. Lipman, among several others, have been telling remarkable and invaluable tales of Victorian Britain’s Sephardi and Ashkenazi communities. Their research has largely focused on patterns of assimilation and acculturation, especially among the upper classes, and has mostly centered on Victorian London, which is understandable given that London has always been home to the majority of Britain’s Jews. But Alysa Levene’s recent monograph, Jews in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Charity, Community and Religion, 1830–1880, makes a compelling case for the centrality of provincial Jews to Anglo-Jewish history. [End Page 700] Jews in Nineteenth-Century Britain expands upon studies like Bill Williams’s The Making of Manchester Jewry, 1740–1875 (1976), Nikos Kokosalakis’s Ethnic Identity and Religion: Tradition and Change in Liverpool Jewry (1982), and Ben Braber’s Jews in Glasgow, 1879– 1939 (2007) by looking at seven different industrial cities, making it the first monograph to research provincial Jewry so expansively. It is a socioeconomic history of the Jews of industrial Britain, and thus it revolves around the Jewish populations of Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, Sheffield, Leeds, Glasgow, and Hull. In it, Levene examines maps, statistics, census data, and communal records to understand social, geographical, and transpatial notions of community among provincial Jews. In particular, Levene uses the 1851 Religious Census, a survey of all identifiable houses of worship, including Nonconformist, Catholic, and Jewish, to assess communal bonds in a period of rapid migration and assimilation. In this evaluation of provincial Jewish communities, Levene challenges a prevailing view of industrialism: that it severed cherished family ties and replaced them with mere communities of circumstance. Her research centers on evidence of postindustrial kinship, including household arrangements, residence patterns, employment histories, and religious practices, rather than the endeavors of official communal leadership. While previous scholarship has especially focused on the histories of communal leadership, those facts were less relevant to the daily lives of average provincial Jews. Levene makes several other suggestions for further research, including a renewed focus on the mid-nineteenth century, as opposed to limiting inquiry to the early and late nineteenth centuries, both of which have received much more attention from scholars. Jews in Nineteenth-Century Britain explores the mid-century as a period of growth in industrial towns and the Anglo-Jewish population, generally, as well as a time of meticulous recordkeeping by these communities. Those records remain largely unstudied. Levene makes extensive use of the Anglo-Jewish Database (AJDB), a digital archive based upon the 1851 census that also includes information on the Jews of Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. Calling the AJDB an underutilized resource, Levene encourages other scholars to make use of its data, an invaluable resource for Anglo-Jewish studies. In order to draw conclusions about communities that may have included gentiles living among Jews, Levene works from the same broad definition of Jewishness as the AJDB, defining a Jew as “anyone who was, or may be assumed to have been, Jewish by either birth, conversion or cultural affiliation, whether or not they retained that identity later in life” (14). Levene’s definition is especially appropriate to the mid-century, which saw an increase in intermarriages. Jews in Nineteenth-Century Britain is divided into two parts. Chapters 2 through 4 focus on households, residence patterns, and finances. Chapter 2 deals with the household and family structures of provincial Jews. In it, Levene uses tables to share data, showing statistics such as numbers of Jewish households in each city, kinds of households (that is, the composition of families), and the presence of lodgers. In addition to data sets, Levene also provides anecdotal evidence of specific families. Levene concludes that Jewish kinship ties extended beyond financial convenience and instead revolved around feelings of...

This chapter asks what being Jewish may mean in contemporary Finland by examining interviews of members of the Jewish congregations, collected in 2019 to 2020 in the research project Minhag Finland. The chapter first offers a brief assessment of the history of the Jewish community in Finland from its origins until present day, followed by a review of previous research on Nordic Jewish identities. Jewish identities in Finland are observed from three topical perspectives: how the informants negotiate their membership in an Orthodox Jewish congregation while living in a secularized society; how the elusive concept of “Finnishness” (national identity) interplays with just as elusive “Jewishness” (ethnic/religious identity); and, finally, the informants’ confrontations with antisemitism and racism in Finland. The chapter shows that during the last 30 years the Finnish Jewish community has evolved from a homogenous Ashkenazi (East European Jewish) community into a multicultural community. The community embraces many elements of “Finnishness” (national symbols and narratives), while the “difference” inherent to their Jewishness is not forgotten or suppressed. The chapter also shows how differently the mechanisms of antisemitism and racism in Finland influence the members of this diverse community.

Invited commentary

During World War I the Young Women’s Christian Association established hostess houses at American military camps and employed women as hostesses. The houses were newly constructed, large, and durable buildings, some of which were designed by women architects. They mediated public and private space and helped control interactions between soldiers and their female friends and relatives. As shelters in which the soldiers could buffer the military and find personal comfort, and as places for women to gain experience in managing complex and relatively large institutions, the hostess houses were a significant facet of the home front in World War I.

The unexpected outcomes of medical research: serendipity and the Australia antigenBlumberg BS, Alter HJ, Visnich S. A new antigen in leukemia sera [J Am Med Assoc 1965;191:541–546

This article is based on a community study conducted between the years 1979–1984 for a PhD. thesis and focuses on the immigration of Oriental Jews to Australia. The major arguments put forward are: (a) That the ‘White Australia Policy’ explicitly and openly excluded non‐whites from entry into Australia before, during and well after World War II. Among these were Sephardim who originated in Asian countries, who did not qualify because they could not demonstrate that they were ‘75 per cent of European origin and upbringing’, (b) The relationship of strain between the local Jewish Ashkenazi (Jews originated in Europe) community, who acculturated to the Anglo‐Celtic culture so much that they in several ways represented the ‘white Australians’, and their brethren the Sephardim, to whom the Jewish organisation, the Australian Jewish Welfare Society (AJWS) refused help. This article offers some explanations for the refusal of the Jewish Organization to help Sephardim to enter Australia.

Reviewed by: Louis Bamberger: Department Store Innovator and Philanthropist by Linda B. Forgosh Mark Krasovic (bio) Louis Bamberger: Department Store Innovator and Philanthropist. By Linda B. Forgosh. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2016. xv + 258 pp. When employees of his ever-expanding department store in Newark served abroad in World War I, Louis Bamberger printed their letters to him in his house organ, Counter Currents, and sent them Christmas care packages and copies of the magazine. Three members of the American Expeditionary Force wrote to thank him for his support of the war effort and for making them feel as though they were still members of the Bamberger family, though thousands of miles away. “Things like these which you—and by this we include the firm and our store also—have done,” they wrote, “make us realize so much more why our store stands first among them all—why we feel proud to be a part of it” (64). The doughboys’ easy blending of commitments to their country and their employer, the person of that employer and the larger institution he built speaks to both the challenges and the promise of writing his biography. As Linda Forgosh explains very early on in her engaging, [End Page 407] accomplished Louis Bamberger: Department Store Innovator and Philanthropist, “he left no business records, kept no diaries, remained a bachelor, and kept his private life and rationales for his business decisions to himself” (2). To build a narrative of his life, Forgosh thus weaves together Bamberger’s press appearances, some scant correspondence, the memories of more than 200 people who worked or shopped at his store, and especially Counter Currents . What emerges is a remarkable portrait of a person without a readily discernible center, someone seen reflected in the institutions he built and other people’s thinking about him rather than in a direct gaze at the man himself. And the promise of a Bamberger biography, one that Forgosh embraces and articulates amidst the enjoyable swirl of detail she has gathered is that in Bamberger—or, rather, around him—we can discern the contours of a thoroughly modern American consumer society, where a rich subject can be constructed out of his publicly circulating products rather than evidence of his essential thoughts and beliefs, his interior being. Bamberger came from a family of dry goods merchants and shopkeepers, German Jews who settled in Baltimore and had built a prosperous business empire by the 1870s. Forgosh embeds this family story in a longer history of American consumption, which, in turn, she interweaves with a longer history of Jewish merchant life, beginning with the itinerant peddlers who, often in the span of a single lifetime, developed their businesses into emporia of mass urban consumption. In 1892, Bamberger, along with two partners (one married to Louis’s remarkable sister Carrie, who certainly deserves a biography of her own) opened a small store on Market Street in Newark, the shelves stocked with merchandise purchased at a steep discount from a bankrupt firm. From there, Bamberger steadily expanded his store until it occupied an entire city block. It grew with its host city’s population, of course, but Forgosh is more interested in how the store shaped that public rather than vice versa. For Bamberger’s, she demonstrates, became a civic institution, a place where people met “under the clock,” window-shopped, imagined a life together, and after perhaps purchasing a home returned to furnish it. The store powerfully shaped the tastes of wide swathes of Newarkers, employed thousands, and pioneered merchant practices that we now take for granted (liberal refund policies, charge accounts, worker training, even the Thanksgiving Day Parade, which Macy’s allegedly stole from Newark, to name but a few). The story of the store’s expansion takes up about half the book, until Bamberger—in a move that is as surprising to the reader as it must have been to Newarkers—sells it to the Straus brothers, for reasons that Forgosh can only (convincingly) guess at, since Bamberger never discussed them beyond saying he got a good deal. [End Page 408] The remaining pages follow Bamberger’s career as the “merchant-prince-as-public-benefactor,” and...

As the British government effectively privatizes higher education in the arts, humanities and social sciences, this article tours the monuments that remain (and some that do not) of the last great era in state-funded training in art and design in the UK: the time between the Second World War and the absorption of art schools into polytechnics and universities when institutions intended to provide artisanal training became the autonomously regulated spaces where much of British popular culture was produced and disseminated. As recently as 1984, Simon Frith and Howard Horne could still write that in Britain ‘every small town has its art school.’ This is no longer the case; while in 1959 there were 180 dedicated art and design institutions in the UK, now there are only a dozen left. The rest of the buildings have been quietly forgotten, renovated as luxury apartments and social housing, adapted as annexes of other, larger institutions, abandoned to the elements, or demolished. Combining image and text, this article explores the abandoned and reused sites of British art schools as the ruined markers of a lost future of unregulated creative practice.

Lively Roots:How the Grand Rapids Public Library Found Its Footing in the Early Years Colleen Alles A few days before Christmas, on December 21, 2021, the Grand Rapids Public Library will celebrate a big birthday: its sesquicentennial—150 years of providing a library free to all. Few things can last a century and a half without being open to change. This public library, established in a city that, in the 1870s, was in some ways a rival to Detroit, survived in part due to the inclusion of one key idea: a willingness to grow—changing and adjusting its operations to fit whatever the community needed at the time, and in how it could best serve its patrons in the face of logistical constraints and realities.1 Founded in 1871, the Grand Rapids Public Library (GRPL) has been a beacon in a west Michigan city with its own rich history and place as the second largest city in the state. The idea for the GRPL began several years after the end of the Civil War, when members of the Grand Rapids Board of Education agreed to combine their book holdings with those of two other organizations—the Ladies Literary Association (known then as the Ladies Library Association) and the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA).2 A library committee hired the first librarian, Miss Frances Holcomb, at an annual salary of $500, and the library was born.3 The history of the GRPL involves a number of evolutions—everything from introducing the Dewey Decimal System and eschewing traditional card catalogs for online platforms, to streaming audiobooks directly to patrons' devices. Julie Tabberer, the current head of the GRPL History & Special Collections department, notes how "the things that [End Page 127] Click for larger view View full resolution An entry from the 1872-73 Grand Rapids city directory shows the first appearance of the Grand Rapids Public Library, humbly listed among residents and businesses in the "L" section. Source: J. D. Dillenback, ed., Godfrey's Annual City Directory of Grand Rapids, Mich, 1872-3 (Grand Rapids: Daily Eagle Steam Printing House, 1872), 157. we've provided access to have changed over the years, but [access is] a constant."4 The story of the GRPL as told through its branches makes it clear that above all—and despite many types of circumstances—the library has demonstrated a commitment to growing and changing along with its city. What began above a dry goods store downtown evolved into a large institution that serves thousands of patrons annually. The library piloted branches early in the twentieth century when the idea of branches was new. It embraced traveling branches and bookmobiles when budget concerns made operating hours tricky in the 1950s. Through two world wars, the Great Depression, pandemics, economic hardships, and tumultuous social change—hallmarks of the twentieth century—the GRPL opened new branches, closed branches when circumstances dictated, and, overall, ensured its citizens access to a free library, guaranteeing a legacy of inclusion that the city hopes will endure for years to come. Impermanent Spaces In the early years, the GRPL called several downtown spaces home, changing locations every few years. Those spots included a room above a dry goods store, space in the prominent Ledyard Building, and several rooms inside city hall. [End Page 128] Click for larger view View full resolution This was the first home of the Grand Rapids Public Library. The library was on the second floor of H. Leonard and Sons dry goods store, seen here as the second building from the left. Source: Collection 18, George E. Fitch Collection, box 3, folder 3, image 248, Grand Rapids Public Library History & Special Collections, Grand Rapids Public Library (hereafter GRPL). The population of Grand Rapids when the library opened its doors in 1871 was approximately 16,000. "Like other cities across the nation, Grand Rapids had a hodgepodge of libraries and book collections, but the system stood in unconnected pieces, awaiting the glue that would fit them together," noted former city historian Gordon L. Olson.5 Print books were, of course, in addition to being more precious than perhaps they are today, available via school libraries and through the Grand...