Recounting Religion in Brooklyn
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Scholars, archivists, musicologists, and historians convened Sunday at the Kane Street Synagogue in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, to examine the history of the Jewish community in the borough. Rep. Major Owens and Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz attended the discussion.
John Manbeck, a Brooklyn borough historian from 1993 to 2002, opened the program with a historical overview of religion in Brooklyn.
Brooklyn College professor of education Stephen Brumberg then handed out a chart that showed how quickly the population of the city of Brooklyn had grown over time. It had only 2,378 people in 1810 but more than doubled every 10 years through 1860, when it had a population of 266,661.
Mr. Brumberg also compared a Christian Sunday school catechism published around 1830 to a Hebrew Sunday school catechism published in 1854. Other than the absence of references to Christ and the concept of original sin, the Jewish catechism was remarkably similar to its Christian counterpart.
The Brooklyn borough historian since 2002, Ronald Schweiger, told the history of Temple Beth Emeth v’Ohr Progressive Shaari Zedek of Flatbush. In 1908, he said, a woman named Hannah Hirsch wanted to provide an education for her children. She invited neighbors to a meeting and they began the first Reform religious school in Flatbush, meeting at a French bakery on Cortelyou Road at East 16th Street. That group formed a congregation in 1911, and it grew until the 1960s, when an exodus of Reform Jews from Brooklyn began. Many, he joked, went to a new suburb called “South Florida.”
On Sunday afternoon, the director of history ministry services at Plymouth Church of the Pilgrims, Lois Rosebrooks participated in a panel on religious history in Brooklyn. She told of some of the notable people who had spoken at the church, including Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Booker T. Washington, Clara Barton, and Martin Luther King Jr.
Ms. Rosebrooks recently came across an unusual find. Among the financial records of the church was an issue of Harper’s Bazaar containing an obituary for Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose brother, Henry Ward Beecher, led the church at its inception in 1847.
Other speakers on the panel were photographer Ann Walker Gaffney, who is the historian of Grace Church in Brooklyn Heights, and Patrick Mc-Namara, the assistant archivist of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn.
A final panel – seemingly unrelated to religion, but helpful all the same – discussed the use of archives.
The manager of digital services for the Brooklyn Public Library, Susan Benz, joined the division chief of the Brooklyn Collection at the Brooklyn Public Library, Judith Walsh, in talking about resources at the Brooklyn Public Library, including its project to make the Brooklyn Daily Eagle accessible as a searchable full-text online database covering the years 1841 through 1902.
The vice president for collections at the Brooklyn Historical Society, Marilyn Pettit, discussed her organization’s holdings. She gave an example of a handwritten reminiscence about a “strange character” who appeared in Williamsburg around 1852 who carried an earthenware bowl on his head filled with honeycomb. The man would walk the streets crying, “Honey in the comb!” and when he found a customer, he would put down the giant dish and later place it back on his head and resume.
The panel was organized by Carol Levin, who edits the synagogue’s online historical journal, which can be viewed at www.kanestreet.org/historical_journal.html.
