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By Root 8003 0

jobs. Housewives purchased fish, milk, tin, and bits of cloth from the omnipresent pushcarts. It required almost no capital to rent a cart, stock it at the Canal Street wholesalers, and make the rounds. Soon these peripatetic retailers settled down themselves. Hester Street, nestled between Grand and Canal, became the unofficial peddlers’ concourse, jam-packed from end to end, patronized by immigrants familiar with European street markets. Soon Grand, Orchard, and Rivington had become open-air bazaars as well. Sex too was for sale here, and by the 1890s Jewish prostitutes worked Allen, Houston, and Delancey streets.

Some peddlers rose to become shopkeepers and served as grocers, bakers, and kosher butchers to the burgeoning community and the wider metropolis. By 1888 perhaps half the city’s four thousand meat retailers and three hundred meat wholesalers were Jewish. At a time when other eastern cities had come to depend on midwestern abattoirs, New York’s demand for kosher meat sustained the metropolis as an important slaughtering center, and one firm, Schwartzchild and Sulzberger, emerged as a meatpacking giant. By 1890, a mere decade after mass settlement got underway, there were forty-three bakeries, fifty-eight bookshops, and 112 candy stores belonging to East European Jews. The latter dispensed seltzer, a less expensive version of soda water. It was tremendously popular among the generally nonalcoholically inclined Jews, prized as a complement to rich kosher diets (belchwasser, it was often called), and when mixed with chocolate syrup and milk, it got magically transformed into an “egg cream,” neither of which it contained.

E. Idell Zeisloft, who published this photograph of Hester Street in The New Metropolis (1899), described it as “the wonderful market of the Ghetto. See it on Thursday afternoon and evening and Friday morning, when all the housewives are making their purchases for the Shabbas . . . a most picturesque spectacle.” (General Research. The New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations)

Orthodox Jews tried to resurrect the shtetl’s religious life. They founded synagogues in profusion. Many were little more than storefronts or tenement rooms. Others were housed in recycled Protestant churches or German-Jewish synagogues. An exalted few were custom built: in 1886, the Herter brothers produced a glorious Moorish-Gothic-Romanesque temple at 14 Eldridge Street for the Polish Congregation Khal Adas Jeshurun. It was the first to be raised by Eastern European Jews on the Lower East Side.

With the synagogues came talmudai torah (religious schools), chedarim (Bible and Hebrew classes for young boys), and mikvehs (ritual baths). Key shtetl figures resurfaced as well: shohets (ritual slaughterers), mohels (circumcisors), and hazzan (cantors). Newspapers devoted to traditional ways flowered: the Yidishe Gazetn (1874), Yidishe Tseitung (1870), Yidisher Tageblatt (1890s). So did chavarot (mutual benefit societies) and landsmanshaftn (self-help groups organized on hometown lines, of which Bialystoker Center was the first). These organizations—housed in attics, basements, and storefronts—provided financial aid, funeral and cemetery benefits, loans, and communal centers.

Re-creating the Old World in the New proved difficult. Leaders were scarce: few Orthodox rabbis emigrated, and indigent scholars were forced to work. Followers were even harder to come by. Many luftmenschen immigrants had already been drawn to secularism in Europe. Now, in New York, many abandoned the old customs in a drive to become “regeleh Yankees”: men stopped daily prayers, shed skullcaps, trimmed or shaved beards and sidelocks, and donned Prince Alberts, starched collars, and neckties. Young men were attracted to secular educational institutions, and a small trickle of East European Jews managed to join the several dozen German-Jewish boys who entered City College each year, at a time when the average class numbered fifty. Bernard Baruch graduated in 1889, and in the following years New York Jews developed a close attachment