You know you’re in for it when you’re still in New Jersey but you’re not on the map.
The highway gave way to smaller streets with curious names: Gershal Avenue turned onto Eppinger, then Rosenfeldt, Shiff Avenue, then Isaacs, and, as Norma, N.J., gave way to Alliance, gave way to Brotmanville, there was narrow Brotman Avenue, and standing just a little ways off, in a field turned parking lot, was an eponymous Brotman, and a family of Eppingers, Rosenfeldts, a Shiff and an Isaacs. The Brotmanville Shul had become Mt. Moriah Baptist. It was a hot Sunday. Black families headed to church. Both parties — us, the churchgoers — couldn’t help but stare.
On August 26, Alliance, Norma and Brotmanville, known as the Alliance Colony, celebrated its 125th anniversary. A festschrift published to mark the occasion described it as a yoval, or “jubilee” in Hebrew, of the type biblically declared every 50 years. “We cannot, however, afford to wait that long,” the stapled booklet reads, “as memories fade and familiar faces disappear.”
In May 1882, 43 families arrived in Alliance — refugees from Russia’s pogroms. They were resettled by France’s Alliance Israelite Universelle, an organization founded with the support of the Baron Maurice de Hirsch (Baron Moritz von Hirsch auf Gereuth, to be Germanically precise, born 1831), scion of a banking family with interests in sugar, copper and railway concessions scattered throughout Austro-Hungary. Alliance’s ideal was to transport the Ostjuden to western safety while also reeducating them, socially and practically: In southern New Jersey’s Pine Barrens, amid the scrub oaks and sandy soil, they became farmers, kibbutzniks attempting local socialism in the heart of a Puritan polis. As Palestine was then under Turkish rule, America seemed the golden land for these immigrants; and just as they once escaped Russia, they’d escape New York, where they first arrived, and the stifling clamor of the modern city.
The Alliance Colony consisted of a strip of cooperative farms located on the now polluted Maurice River, nearly five miles south of Vineland, N.J. The area is famous for its Vineland Kosher Poultry, which slaughtered chickens raised in neighborhood coops. My grandfather, the son of Jews from Kiev, became a chicken farmer in Alliance. My grandmother was of the latest generation to arrive, having been resettled in 1941 upon her escape from Nazi Germany. Here, America’s melting pot was necessarily a Jewish melting pot first: Jews from the Pale of Settlement instructed recently arrived yekkas, refined German Jews, in the basics of animal husbandry. My great-grandmother did her daily chores still wearing party dresses, her Köln pearls. My great-grandfather served as rabbi of the Alliance Shul, Tiferet Israel, for nearly 40 years. Standing across from the cemetery in which they’re buried, in the community’s Chevra Kadisha, now a museum, my father, wearing a nametag that said Barry, met another man, with a nametag that said Barry, too. They both had grown up here, but neither knew the other. The Barry that wasn’t my father was Barry Kricheff, father of Sarah Kricheff, who works at the Forward; she happens to be the editor of this article. Alliance is a creation myth for many, a Genesis in which “Let there be South Jersey” has become, generations on, “Let there be America” — and it was good. We talked for a while. The two Barrys even look alike.
That Sunday, a klezmer band klezed, and 300 people ate, drank and reminisced, telling tales of such local characters as Old Mister Levin, Spittin’ Sam Rothstein and the neighborhood spool peddler, known to my aunt Bea Metzman only as “Chaim in America.” A dance troupe performed in pasted-on beards; offstage they were indistinguishable from the area Mennonites, who wandered among the festivities amazed.
Henny Padawer, an Alliancer born in Germany, was happy but fretting: “The day was beautiful,” she said, “until a bee flew up my skirt.”
I hitched a ride with Mrs. Padawer back to Brooklyn. We got lost getting to the Turnpike. But as she told me stories about my grandparents, not even the traffic through Staten Island mattered.
Joshua Cohen is a literary critic for the Forward.
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It was wonderful to read this story about the "other" Jewish settlements in South Jersey. I am a "Woodbiner." Born and raised there and the former owner of what was the last Jewish-owned business in town. Unlike Alliance, Norma, Carmel and Rosenhayn, all "suburbs" of Vineland, at its founding, Woodbine (to the east in Cape May County) was the only AUTONOMOUS Jewish community in America. Alas, the Jewish populations of all these places have dwindled to near zero as generations like mine (my great grandparents were original settlers) have moved on the pursue the American dream in more richly Jewishly populated areas.
Correction: until 1918 Palestine was not under Turkish rule, but Ottoman rule, part of the Ottoman empire. BTW: Baron de Hirsch continued his charitable work in re-settlement of poor Jews by founding the Jewish Colonisation Assocation (which still exists), responsible for re-settling Jews in Argentina, upstate New York and elsewhere.
i did not have the chance to come to the 125 celebration....im sorry you never mentioned my grandmother....who was the first child born in norma,or alliance...her name is lena bayuk levin,,,and who is the levin you mention....william?my zadda....your article seems to leave out a lot of interesting info...the shul you refer too ,was supported by my uncle i.harry levin...for many years..he was the judge in the area...who helped reselted the jews from germany...i could go on and on but,i wont...annette levin silverman
For a very short time, 1959, we lived on Gershal Avenue in Norma. My parents have now found their final resting place in the Alliance Cemetery. The Holocaust survivors who had chicken farms were the last wave of immigrants to this area. I have met several people FROM Vineland and environs living in Bergen County and now have a friend here in Tucson, whose grandparents are also in the Alliance Cemetery.