Jewish Immigrant Experience in America
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Gerald Sorin in his book Tradition Transformed states that the Jewish immigrant experience in America was such that while Jewish traditions from Europe were challenged by such things as American mobility, individualism, and secularism, the ultimate outcome was not the destruction of tradition but its transformation. Sorin is correct that these traditions have been transformed rather than destroyed. A purist might argue that traditions have to be maintained in a precise fashion or they are destroyed, but that would ignore the vitality that traditions gain through evolution so that they not only link the individual to the past and to a community but also bind together the community that exists in the here-and-now, allowing that community to address current issues and to give its members a grounding in their history at the same time. Some immigrant groups made changes more quickly than others. The Eastern European Jews changed the face of Judaism in America in a hurry: In 1881 only a tiny minority of the two hundred major synagogues in the United States were Orthodox. As early as 1890, after decade of mass immigration, the majority of synagogues adhered to the traditional service, and by 1910, 90 percent of more than two thousand synagogues called themselves Orthodox (129). While some might have seen this as the end of a way of life, in fact it was an affirmation of faith: Jewish piety never fully dissipated, but in individualistic America it did soften, and many Jews, eve
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ere also moving into an increasingly, Jewish, less German orbit. This is partly reflected in the fact that by 1880, Jewish organizations one kind or another existed in 90 percent of the 160 communities with one hundred or more Jews (27).
This group created distinctly Jewish institutions with greater visibility, and by doing so they were saying something both to their new land and to other Jews in the same situation:
In creating their visibly Jewish institutions, the Germans were demonstrating that Jews did more than pray differently from other Americans, that they were not merely religious Jews or just "Americans of Hebrew persuasion." The B'Nai B'rith and the Young Men's Hebrew Association, for example, were not merely Jewish imitations of Christian Associations. In each organization there was significant Jewish content, including Hebrew classes and lectures on Jewish history (29).
Such efforts influenced other groups like the Hebrew Ladies Benevolent Society, which may have been influenced by the German American communities benevolent society and the societies of the Christian churches. It was "formed first and foremost as Jewish women's burial societies" and was based on "tsedakah--philanthropy and social justice or the sic
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Approximate Word count = 1354
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)
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