Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [884]
For all this, the Jewish old guard was torn between its class aspirations and its religious loyalties and increasingly began to respond to the combined pull of compassion, kinship, and zedakah, the charity required of every observant Jew. Emma Lazarus was the daughter of Moses Lazarus, a wealthy Sephardic New York sugar manufacturer and a founding member of the Knickerbocker Club. She was stung to read a piece in the Century magazine that bordered on blaming the victims of the 1881 riots for their own misfortunes, and she wrote a tart rebuttal. When those raising funds for the Statue of Liberty read it, they invited Lazarus to contribute a poem. In December 1883 she read her “New Colossus” at the National Academy of Design, a verse that reformulated the monument’s meaning from spreading enlightenment to embracing immigrants. Unlike the forbiddingly masculine Colossus of Rhodes, Lazarus wrote, America’s monument was a welcoming woman with “mild eyes”—a “Mother of Exiles”—who stood at “our sea-washed, sunset gates,” our “golden door,” lifting a lamp to beckon the “homeless” and the “tempest-tost”—whom she also characterized as the “wretched refuse” of Europe’s “teeming shore.”
Convinced that without some direct intervention on their part, that the city’s ambivalent acceptance of “wretched refuse” might not long continue, and that they themselves would be irretrievably associated with the newcomers, New York’s wealthy German Jews, for all their misgivings, shouldered responsibility for their impoverished and outlandish coreligionists. Jacob Schiff, B’nai B’rith, the Baron de Hirsch Fund, and the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (among others) underwrote the Hebrew Emigrant Aid Society’s establishment of temporary shelters at Greenpoint and set up another barracks encampment on Ward’s Island, in the grounds of the old lunatic asylum. A fledgling United Hebrew Charities extended direct aid to settlers, reaching one in ten. In 1892 the newly established Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society stationed a representative on Ellis Island to mediate with immigration officials and hand out advice bulletins to newcomers.
Traditionally, zedakah was blind. Donors did not know the identity of recipients and vice versa. This precluded using charity to influence or control beneficiaries. But influence was precisely what German-Jewish givers wanted—as did their counterparts in Protestant charities like the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor or the Children’s Aid Society. The immigrants “must be Americanized in spite of themselves,” one uptowner wrote in the Jewish Messenger, “in the mode to be prescribed by their friends and benefactors.”
In June 1889 a group including Jacob Schiff, Isaac Seligman, and Isidor Straus began to raise funds for a Hebrew Educational Alliance. It was conceived, in the consolidating spirit of the day, as a merger of the Hebrew Free School Association, the Young Men’s Hebrew Association (which Oscar Straus had helped found in 1874 as a counterpoint to the Christian organization), and the Aguilar Free Library (founded for new arrivals in 1886, with the goal of “uplifting the mental and moral tone of a class that woefully lacks refining influences”).
The organizers quickly deleted “Hebrew” from the Educational Alliance, which opened its five-story yellow brick building at Jefferson Street and East Broadway in 1891. They did, however, sponsor Hebrew classes for boys and girls, lest parents send them to a cheder (religious school), “where the general surroundings,