Carolina Beach Hotels | "Glimmers of Jewish Glory Days in Baltimore"

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I grew up on stories about the glory days of Jewish Baltimore, when, in my father’s telling, Jews were really Jews. He told stories about walking to shul, or synagogue, with his father and uncles, seeing men and women in their Shabbat finery promenading after services, and sitting in awe as the great Viennese-trained cantor, Abba Yosef Weisgal, cried out to the heavens under the soaring ceiling of Congregation Chizuk Amuno in Reservoir Hill, the Baltimore neighborhood that my forebears called home.

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But by the time my siblings and I came along in the late ’50s and early ’60s, all that was gone. The elegant “in town” neighborhood of my father’s childhood memories had long since decayed, and attending High Holy Days services at Chizuk Amuno was an exercise in watching an urban congregation on life support as the Jewish community relocated to the suburbs.

Happily, Jewish Baltimore is on the rebound, and not just in the suburbs. On a cold day in February when I went in search of the settings of my father’s stories, I landed in a place where perseverance, preservation and memory have conspired to keep that vanished world available.

Turns out that I’m hardly alone. The Jewish Museum of Maryland welcomes some 7,000 schoolchildren yearly, not to mention thousands of curious adults. Situated between the historic Lloyd Street Synagogue and its slightly more junior former rival, B’nai Israel, the entire complex is a tribute to what once was. The surrounding East Baltimore neighborhood itself was not only the first stopping-off place for German Jewish immigrants, but was also, from as early as the 1830s to about 1920, a teeming immigrant enclave, known to its own citizens as Jewtown. What Orchard Street was to the Lower East Side, Lombard Street was to Jewish East Baltimore: blocks so crowded with people hawking everything from dry goods to produce to poultry that merely navigating them required a dollop of chutzpah. The street was lined with storefront cheders (Jewish elementary schools, usually for boys), Talmud Torahs (religious schools), overcrowded tenements, outhouses and gutters running with the blood of recently slaughtered animals for the kosher market. The place was home not only to Jewish immigrants, but also to Italians and African Americans. Washing was a luxury, Yiddish was the language of haggling and a stretch of Lombard Street was known as Corned Beef Row.

Corned Beef Row has dwindled to a mere two delis, Weiss and Attman’s. Attman’s, which opened in 1915, is still owned by the Attman family, and still serves enormous old-fashioned corned beef sandwiches with Russian dressing and a side of slaw, as well as everything else fattening, salty and delicious. Though the place is no longer kosher, the walls themselves proclaim its kosher yesteryears, with framed photographs of generations of Baltimore’s Jewish machers (big shots). Well past lunchtime, it was packed.

The real story, however, isn’t in the matzo ball soup, but in the museum, which, in recreated rooms, taped conversations, street scenes, pushcart displays and photographs, tells the story of a century of life in the neighborhood that was originally called Jonestown after the nearby Jones Falls, and is still, in some quarters, referred to as Jewtown. Particularly stirring for me were the re-creations and photos of garment makers, first in sweatshops, and later in factories, because it was in just such places that my great-great-grandparents, whose portraits now hang in my dining room, got their start — eventually moving out of the immigrant neighborhood, ending up in far more luxurious Eutaw Place in north Baltimore, “designed after the Champs-Élysées,” according to one description. It was their generation of upwardly mobile German-Jewish community members who eventually founded the Jewish Educational Alliance, night schools that helped primarily Russian immigrants assimilate, and the Young Men’s Hebrew Association, “the Y.” Their stories are recounted here, as well as the stories of succeeding waves of immigrants.