This Lecture was presented June 1, 2002 by Dr. Adam Ferziger at the opening of Orah Buck’s Brighton Beach Bound exhibition at Bar Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel

Dr. Adam S. Ferziger
Vice Chair, Graduate Program in Contemporary Jewry
Bar-Ilan University
ferziger@mail.biu.ac.il

Let us begin by establishing my Brooklyn credentials.

About 37 and a half years ago I was born in Maimonides Hospital, Brooklyn. About four years ago I had the honor of organizing a conference in this institution, Bar Ilan University, that celebrated – from an intellectual, academic perspective – 100 years since the incorporation of Brooklyn into New York City. And last November, for the first time in 18 years, I spent an entire Shabbat with my grandmother in Borough Park, Brooklyn.

So Brooklyn is home. Not my permanent home – which is here in Israel – but I feel very connected to Brooklyn. It is, therefore, an honor to speak to this audience as we partake in a celebration of Brooklyn through the wonderful photographic exhibit of Mrs. Orah Buck.

In his seminal study of Ultra-Orthodox Jewry, Defenders of the Faith, American sociologist Samuel Heilman described how little exposure he had to this type of Jewish life while growing up in a prominent New England Jewish community. “For years I nourished a desire, a compulsion, psychoanalists might suggest, somehow to witness the past and to experience the world destroyed before my birth, but from which I knew I came from. But Brookline (Massachusetts) was not Brooklyn.”
Indeed, for many Jews, particularly today, the name Brooklyn conjures up images of the great hasidic courts: Lubavitch of Eastern Parkway in Crown Heights, the Satmar of Williamsburg, and my own landsman, the Bobov of Borough Park. Alternatively we may have been privy to the emergence of Modern Orthodoxy in Brooklyn, either through personal connections to the Young Israel movement, or possibly through the romantic tales of interwar angst by authors like the late Chaim Potok.

Yet Brooklyn Jewry is, and always has been, much more. Established by the Dutch colonialists in the 17th century, only in 1898 was Brooklyn incorporated into the city of New York. By then, the completion of the Brooklyn Bridge, and the subsequent extension of the New York subway system had begun to transform Brooklyn from a geographically undesirable outpost and beach resort area to prime New York City real estate.

Brooklyn became, among others, the main area for the so-called “second settlement” of Jews who had upon arrival gravitated to the immigrant slums of Manhattan's Lower East Side. By 1923, Brooklyn’s 740,000 Jews outnumbered those living on the Island of Manhattan and already amounted to the largest Jewish community in the world. To illustrate, in 1939 there were 350,000 Jews living in the city of Warsaw, then the largest Jewish community in Europe. When the Nazi’s established a ghetto in 1940 another 150,000 Jews were brought there. That’s half a million. The Brooklyn Jewish community, it turns out, was already 50% larger than Warsaw at its most crowded period.

Brighton Beach
Brighton Beach was one of the neighbourhoods that began to prosper during the interwar period. Located along the shore, it continued to serve as a haven for city dwellers seeking to cool off during the stifling New York summers. But it also became the permanent residence for many Jews. Even in the interwar period, however, Brighton Beach was not known as a bastion of religiosity. There were, of course, synagogues and some Orthodox Jews. But the majority were not observant. Indeed, the atmosphere, while very much that of a Jewish immigrant society, produced a rather Americanized ethnic Judaism.

To offer, once again, a statistical perspective, interwar Brighton Beach’s 60-62% Jewish population far exceeded the 30-45% that we find in other famous Jewish communities like Flathbush and Borough Park. As such, we are really talking about a center or maybe we should say a significant cross-section of Brooklyn Jewry.
But who were the Jews who lived and established themselves in Brighton Beach? Well, for the most part what characterized them was being part of the “working class”. There were many state-sponsored projects which were put up there, and Jews flocked to Brighton Beach’s relatively inexpensive housing. The predominantly non-observant, working class Jews who moved there, actually developed, as I already suggested, an Americanized Jewish culture. Instead of religion, it expressed itself in the Yiddish language, and the now famous Nathan’s hot dogs and knishes as well as bagels, bialys and other Jewish “gourmet” items. The food wasn’t necessarily kosher, but it was very Jewish. Just to illustrate how much Brooklyn has changed, today (2002) there is a glatt kosher Nathan’s in Flatbush and even one in Jerusalem.
Brighton Beach was also a haven for Jewish politics, particularly radical politics. Many Jewish immigrants with Russian roots – some of whom had been severely damaged financially by the Great Depression in 1929 – were attracted to labor unions and to socialist and communist ideologies. As one elderly veteran recently reminisced, “A generation emerged that was rooted in a tradition of secular Yiddishkeit, radical politics, cheese blintzes and cold borsht.”

Now, let us contrast briefly the early wave of Jewish immigration to Brighton Beach, with the more recent Russian speaking one of the 1970s onward which is portrayed in great detail through Orah Buck’s lovely photographic exhibit.

When the Jews of the former Soviet Union began to arrive in Brighton Beach in the 1970s, the veteran were very upset. They protested : “These are Jews? They don’t know anything about Judaism; they don’t go to shul; they keep their stores open on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur; they don’t even seem to have any connection to Jewish culture.”

For the elderly Jews who had striven to create a haven for Americanized Jewish ethnic culture, their Brighton Beach was turning into a “Little Odessa” – which it is called in many corners until today. Instead of by the Black Sea, Little Odessa sprung up along the Atlantic. York, England brought forth New York, Hampshire led to New Hampshire, and now there was Little Odessa. Over time, however, the veterans realized that while they may have changed the atmosphere of their little ocean side enclave, the influx of 40,000 Russian speaking Jewish immigrants from the 1970s had actually “saved” the Brighton Beach Jewish community from suffering the plight of so many other urban Jewish neighbourhoods of yesteryear.

East Flatbush and Brownsville are examples of Brooklyn neighbourhoods that, like Harlem and much of my native Bronx, once had thriving Jewish communities. Today, these places have become inner-city slums. That did not happen in Brighton Beach, although it did to a certain degree in Coney Island which is right next door. For various reasons the Russian immigrants settled in Little Odessa and they saved the neighbourhood.

I would like to conclude this discussion by touching on the Israeli connection to this exhibit. We are not in Brooklyn, nor even Brookline, but Brighton Beach-Brooklyn has arrived today at Bar Ilan. In that case, we cannot look at these fine pictures solely through the fine lenses of Orah Buck. We must also consider them through our own eyes as people who live here in Israel and have witnessed the miraculous aliyah of over one million immigrants from the former Soviet Union during the last decade.

This is particularly the case for me, as prior to embarking on a full-time academic career, I spent seven years as the director of the pre–academic program for new immigrants here at Bar Ilan University. In that capacity I have had the opportunity to get to know some of the finest representatives of the Russian speaking population here in Israel and I’ve visited neighbourhoods which are highly concentrated with Russian speaking immigrants. In fact, in my hometown of Kfar Sava, there are quite a few store fronts which today have Russian writing on them. These experiences influence my perception of the pictures in this exhibit and raise many questions for me, some that I will now throw back as a challenge to you, Mrs. Buck.

It is very striking to me that when I travel to Bat Yam by-the-sea, which is just south of Tel Aviv, I also see a highly concentrated population of Russian speaking immigrants just like in Brighton Beach. Yet when I look at the storefronts, I see signs in Russian, sometimes in Yiddish, but, of course, in Hebrew. By contrast, if we look around at all the pictures here of the Russian festival and the stores in Brooklyn, we see lots of Russian, lots of English, no Yiddish, and no Hebrew.

So here we have a fascinating microcosm of what happens to a Jewish community that goes through seventy years of Communist regime, only to ultimately emigrate en masse and find their new homes in the two main centers of late twentieth century Jewish life, Israel and North America. They settle into their new places of residence; but they are, of course, experiencing a process of acculturating into their new environments. Be it the Israeli one or the American one.

One would be tempted to assume that those Jews who came to Israel from the former Soviet Union maintained their Jewish identity, while those who went to Brighton Beach are in the process of losing it. It may come as a surprise, then, that one of the most interesting facts that I came across in my exploration of Brighton Beach is that the rate of intermarriage among Russian speaking Jewish immigrants in the US is much lower than the well-known 50% figure among the general population of US Jewry. What does this teach us about Jewish ethnicity? Processes of acculturation? The Israel-Diaspora divide? And for that matter, how long does it take for immigrant Jews to adopt the prevalent lifestyles and mores of those who preceding them?

I certainly don’t think that anyone knows all the answers, but maybe Orah Buck, with her penetrating eye, can help us gain some additional perspective. With this in mind, I want to suggest a possible theme for your next project. There is another exhibit that is meant to happen that can either be developed independently or as an extension of the current Brighton Beach one. Why not spend some time photographing the Russian speaking Jews of Israel? You could, for example, launch a comparative showing of Brighton Beach and Bat Yam. I think that such an exhibit could be extremely elucidating and stimulating for many people.