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Landsmanschaftn
Contents
Landsmanschaftn > Congregational Sons of Telsh
- Rogarshevskys' Benevolent Association
Landsmanschaftn
Landsmanshaftn, associations of immigrants
from the same hometown, became the most popular form of organization
among Eastern European Jewish immigrants to the U.S. in the late
19th and early 20th centuries. Organized variously as independent
mutual aid societies, religious congregations, and fraternal lodges,
landsmanshaftn provided their members with valuable material benefits
and served as arenas for formal and informal social interaction.
Estimates of the number of landmanshaftn in New York range from
1,000 to 10,000. Surveys in the 1910s and 1930s calculated the number
between 2,000 and 3,000.
The members of a landsmanshaft were drawn nearly exclusively from
landsman, or the former residents of the same shtetl (village),
or group of shtetlach (villages). Their chief aim consisted
of maintaining the traditional and comfortable social relations
of the Old World. The organization was a "home away from home"
and it maintained the bonds between new immigrants and those they
had left behind in the shtetl or village. These societies helped
new immigrants retain ties with the past but, also, to learn the
ways of the New World.
Landsleit, the plural of landsman, typically belonged to
the same synagogue, engaged in similar vocations, became partners
in business, lived in the same neighborhood, and intermarried within
the group. A landsmanshaft had its own patriarchal leaders, its
lodges and mutual aid associations, and its celebrations and festivities.
These community ties were only partially apparent to the outside
world.
New arrivals on the Lower East Side would almost immediately visit
the landsmanshaft to help order the chaos of immigrant life. Rooted
in a centuries-old tradition of community, the fraternal organization
drew on that tradition provided a startling range of services: from
medical care to unemployment insurance, from shiva benefits to wedding
gifts.
The majority of fraternal organizations had around 150 members or
less. They were loose-knit associations whose formal structures
(constitutions, bylaws, officers and so forth) belied a friendly
informality. The organization provided death benefits, and it hired
a doctor, often an immigrant just out of medical school, who for
a small retainer, would treat members at reduced rates. The cost
of an illness included loss of wages as well as doctor bills. Nearly
all societies offered a "sick benefit" to make up for
this potentially devastating deprivation of income. The standard
sick benefit consisted of five dollars weekly, about half the average
wage of a poor garment worker, for six to thirteen weeks a year.
Four general categories may be distinguished among the landsmanshaftn.
Although the lines drawn between them were not fixed there was considerable
variation within each camp. Before 1900 religious congregations
and fraternal lodges predominated. Secular mutual aid societies
became more popular after about 1900, as did ideologically committed
societies made up of immigrants who had been revolutionaries in
Russia. Still, the older more religious societies continued to attract
members, while absorbing a sizeable amount of secular American customs.
Names of organizations often denoted both the age and the social
aspirations of the organizations' founders. Religious landsmanshaftn
usually included a Hebrew phrase of the sort often used in the synagogue
titles, followed by the word ancshe, mearning "people of,"
followed by the name of the members' hometown. After 1900 English
names, often including the words "young men's" or "progressive"
(or both), signaled members' desire to be part of the modern world
and of American society. For the most part, to be "progressive"
simply meant having a vague sort of forward-looking attitude and
an up-to-date way of doing business. Sometimes the term denoted
a sense of social liberalism or political radicalism. Other societies
preferred to keep their names more neutral. For instance, the Satanover
Benevolent Society chose a wording which leave their society's orientation
open and perhaps allowed a broader range of landleit to feel comfortable
about joining.
In the New World, many landsmanshaftn began as adjuncts of the small
Orthodox synagogues that were springing up on the Lower East Side.
Although, just as quickly as they were formed, many of these synagogues
split off and formed their own fraternal organizations to carry
on benevolent and society activities. The vast majority of the more
than 400 synagogues on the Lower East Side in 1917 functioned not
so much as houses of worship but more as associations for providing
burial plots and charity.
The most important function of the landsmanshaft was the maintenance
of funeral practices. The first thing that the organization would
do after being formed was to purchase cemetery plots. Having a proper
Jewish burial was paramount for Jewish immigrants. According to
the historian Irving Howe, "the necessities of life might force
a Jew to spend his days among strangers, but even if no longer Orthodox,
he wanted to spend eternity among Jews."
Typically, landsmanshaftn were an amalgam of many voluntary associations,
known as chevras. The landsmanshaft's chevra kaddisha, or burial
society, (literally "holy society") actually took care
of providing a physician, the preparation for the body to be buried,
a cemetery plot, and a minyan or daily worship during Shiva. The
family presumably was too prostrated with grief to occupy themselves
with everyday affairs of living.
Burial within the community cemetery was one of the strongest tools
of the fraternal organization's control and the threat of denial
of burial rights was one of the strongest communal sanctions. The
two functions of landsmanshaftn were the provision of cemetery grounds
and a chevra kaddisha for its members. Today Jewish and non-Jewish
funeral directors provide the services once monopolized by the burial
society.
In 1917 and 1918, according to the Kehillah Directory, 2/3 of the
more than one thousand fraternal orders that reported data to the
Directory had been formed since 1900. The typical mutual aid society
had an average of 143 members, dues of $6 per year, and provided
sick benefits and a cemetery plot. They usually elected their officers
every two years. Typically the organization met twice a month.
The landsmanshaft principle is in no way peculiar to Jewish
immigrants. In fact, it is one of the most common forms of immigrant
organization throughout the world. When large numbers of Jewish
immigrants arrived in the U.S., they encountered a country in which
voluntary associations played a critical role. Associations were
particularly popular among African Americans and German Americans.
More strongly than any other organizational form, the fraternal
order influenced American culture at the time when the influx of
Eastern European Jews began. Modeled after the Masons and the Odd
Fellows, hundreds of secret societies proliferated during the "golden
age" of fraternity between the Civil War and the turn of the
century. According to historian Daniel Soyer, ironically, immigrants
regularly patterned their organizations after those most prevalent
in American society. In striking ways, Jewish landsmanshaftn reflected
the influence of the surrounding culture more clearly than they
mirrored Jewish communal traditions in Eastern Europe.
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