By Zachary Dembo
In my previous post I answered part of the question of why Jews are in Birmingham with “Because we could.” Rights provided to the newly arrived Jewish immigrants by the federal government allowed them to traverse the United States without legal restrictions. From there these Jewish immigrants were able to set up shops, homes, and congregations wherever they pleased or, in the very worst of circumstances, wherever their neighbors would have them. All of this deviated greatly from their disposition in Europe, and the change had a profound impact on the actions and attitudes of our ancestors.
In upcoming installments of this series I will provide an overview of the five notable waves of Jewish immigration to Birmingham: the Germans, Russians, Sephardic Rhodians, Displaced Persons (Holocaust survivors), and Soviet/Russian Jews. For each of these waves we will examine some of the push- and pull-factors that led them to leave Europe, including the endemic persecution by antisemitic monarchs and dictators that fed more than a thousand massacres targeting Jews, better known as pogroms, between 1820 and 1946. I will also provide a narrative of how these individuals physically got to the “Magic City” as well as the trials and tribulations they experienced on the way.
Finally, as a therapist I can’t help but try and give y’all insight into the psychology and disposition of our ancestors before, during, and after the migration. Hopefully all this information will give you some deeper perspective into why there are Jews in Alabama and maybe even a little more about your own family’s story.
Something’s missing…
Before we get started with discussing the German Jewish wave, we need to talk about what is missing from these narratives and why. While most of what I mentioned above is readily available in the memoirs and biographies of Birminghamians and/or history books about the disposition of Jews in Europe, the specific narrative of how Jewish immigrants got from their homes to the ports and onto the ships and then to new lands is often left out of immigration recollections. When looking at our local history, the Jews of Birmingham are no exception.
In reading the available accounts and speaking with some of the descendants of these first settlers and important figures, I found almost nothing about this part of the journey. For example, the 22 biographies in the brilliant Knesseth Israel: Over 123 Years of Orthodoxy include only a single sentence written about the trip to America. The Sokol biographies have a total of three lines. It’s as if Jewish figures like Samuel Ullman, Issaac Hochstadter, the Loveman brothers, Louis Pizitz, Pinkus Jaffe, and the Sokol clan just teleported from their European homes to the Americas shoreline.
As a therapist I found this very interesting. Secrets, omissions, and selective memory are often extremely important to understanding a client’s behavior. This same concept can be applied to the examination of people from the past. In fact, too much information about the past has been lost by people who have chosen not to record it. “Choose” is the key word here because this phenomenon is most commonly seen in the aftermath of traumatic events like wars, natural disasters, and genocides. The cause of this behavior differs from person to person and culture to culture, but in general humans have a tendency to avoid things that remind them of a traumatic experience. Even in the wake of events as world-altering as the migration of millions of people, there is always a risk that few will want — or even be able — to record their experiences.
Purposeful avoidance?
It is more than likely that many who made the trip chose to do their best to forget about it. The preserved records, accounts, and documents related to this leg of the journey do not equivocate. For the vast majority of our ancestors, this was no mundane experience but one full of peril and quite often deadly.
While most of the information used to cover this part of the journey had to be drawn from folk who settled elsewhere, I did find one source from a local Jewish immigrant. Hidden among the reference books and religious texts in the enclosed section of the LJCC’s Carl Hess Memorial Library was the leather-bound memoir of Albert Perling. Published by his family around 1974, it provides a detailed and personal account of Perling’s remarkable yet common experience as an immigrant to Birmingham. Not only does this account provide us with painful details of his travels, but in the forward he provides us with some insight as to why he didn’t write down his experiences until on his sick bed four years before his passing in 1961:
“Memories that long ceased to torture — [find their] way again into the brain — life-like images of places not seen in half a century — yet hard to recollect what your back yard looked like fifteen years ago. I tried to piece together the periods of my youth — how I got here and why. Regrets about what I should have done and rejoicing in what did happen.”
Albert Perling
It must be understood that these men and women — our ancestors — came to America not as immigrants but as refugees. Perling mentions torture because for many it was. He wrote of regrets because those also were earned in excess. The tales we were told in our youth of immigrants risking it all to see America and its streets paved with gold was just schmaltz. Economic hardships didn’t propel them across the world — endemic and unbearable antisemitism did. Most importantly, our ancestors did not leave Europe as much as flee it.
As we examine their journey we must remember that ultimately what we can know about these early immigrants will never be the full story. Tragedies will be forgotten and traumas will go unrecorded. Peaceful memories of village life are more likely to be shared than what the cossack did to our great grandparents or the pogroms that tore them from their bucolic surroundings.
So as you read the following posts and/or are lucky enough to have records of your own family’s migration to Birmingham, try to pay attention to what is missing. More often than not, there’s a story hiding within what is left unsaid.
Sources
- Bonfield, Barbara Goldstein. Knesseth Israel: Over 123 Years of Orthodoxy in Birmingham, Alabama, 1889-2012. Congregation Knesseth Israel, 2012.
- Sokol, Malcolm, et al. Sokol Family Record: Second Edition. Birmingham Sokol Committee, 1995.
- Elovitz, Mark H. A Century of Jewish Life in Dixie. University of Alabama Press, 27 Mar. 2003.
- Howe, Irving. World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made. New York, Open Road Media, 2017.
- Rabin, Shari. Jews on the Frontier. NYU Press, 12 Dec. 2017.
- Perling, Albert. Reminiscence of an Immigrant. Self-Published, 1974?
- “Pogroms.” Jewishvirtuallibrary.org, 2019, www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/pogroms-2.
About the author
Zachary Dembo is a Licensed Professional Counselor and Southern Jewish history nerd from Baltimore, Maryland — the Birthplace of the Star-Spangled-Banner. His first of many visits to Birmingham began in 2008 and he became a resident in 2019. He is married to Lauren Axelroth, a third-generation Birminghamian.