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> Decentralization of Jewish New York
> Bris Milah > Shiva - Mourning in the Jewish Tradition
Decentralization of Jewish New York
But the importance of the garment industry and
the Lower East Side to the Jewish community in New York began to
decline after 1900. Italians moved into the lower levels of the
garment industry around the turn of the century, pushing the Jews
up and/or out altogether. The industry itself began moving uptown
and to Brooklyn, and many Jews followed. As they left they took
their synagogues and some of their social institutions with them.
The Lower East Side's share of New York's Jews drooped 75 percent
in the 1890s to only 23 percent in 1916. While the area's Jewish
population grew in absolute terms for much of this period, even
this began to decline after 1910. Many of the new immigrants were
Sephardic Jews from the Middle East, who had as little in common
with Russian Jews as they had with German Jews.
World War I and the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, which set restrictive
quotas on immigration from Eastern Europe, hastened the drop in
the Lower East Side's population. The Jews who left the neighborhood
were no longer replaced by new arrivals and the area lost 40 percent
of its population between 1920 and 1930. But many Jews remained
and they still accounted for 39 percent of the neighborhood's population
as late as 1930. Even today the Jewish presence on the Lower East
Side remains significant, as anyone will quickly notice walking
down Orchard Street on a Saturday when businesses that are owned
by religious Jews are closed.
Thomas Kessner, The Golden Door: Italian and Jewish Immigrant
Mobility in New York City, 1880-1915 (New York, 1977); Moses
Rischin, The Promised Land: New York's Jews, 1870-1914 (Cambridge,
MA, 1962).
See also: Immigration;
Lower East Side; Garment
Industry.
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