Author: Julia Gergely

Jewish New York was once defined by pushcarts and peddlers; immigrants arriving through Ellis Island; densely packed kosher restaurants; lively Yiddish theater and daily newspapers in Yiddish and Ladino. Those days are long gone—but that period is just some of the Jewish history captured in documents and ephemera collected and carefully cataloged by the Dorot Jewish Division at the New York Public Library. Their collection includes the very first edition, in 1897, of the Yiddish daily newspaper Der Forverts, matchbooks from Jewish businesses like Schapiro’s Kosher Wines, scripts of plays from the Yiddish writer Sholem Asch and photographs of the…