The Library Project

By Rachel Dworkin, archivist

 

Sometimes visitors ask me what it is I do all day. Each day is different, but I currently have an interesting project I’m working on. In addition to the over a million manuscript items and 14,000+ photographs in our archival collections, the Booth Library here at the Chemung County Historical Society also contains over 2,000 books. They include government publications, local history books, genealogies of area families, works by local authors, and scholarly works about topics related to our other collections. Right now, I am in the midst of a project to assess and update our holdings. It will be a multi-stage process. 

 

All of our books are cataloged on the Southern Tier Library System’s (STLS) StarCat catalog. In recent years, I’d built up a bit of a backlog of new books which needed to be added. In August, catalogers from STLS came to catalog the new books and add them to their on-line system. They assigned each book an item ID and a call number based on the Dewey Decimal System. Call number are assigned based on their topic: 000 is computer and information science; 100 is philosophy and psychology; 200 is religion; 300 is social science; 400 is language; 500 is sciences like physics, chemistry, and biology; 600 is technology; 700 is arts and recreation; 800 is literature; and 900 is history and geography. This system is used by libraries throughout the world. Each topic then subdivides so, for example, a history book on Chemung County would be 974.779 plus the first three letters of the author’s surname. Once the call number had been assigned I created a label for each book.

 

The next step is shelving which involved quite a lot of shifting. I started at the very top in the 000 section, adding the new books and dusting as I went. I’m also weeding as I go. Shelf space in our library is at a premium and I want to make sure that every book we have is relevant to our mission and up-to-date in terms of scholarship. Our mission is to document and share the history of the Chemung Valley. We don’t need a history of Albany County or a list of the heads of households in the 1790 census for Connecticut. The Steele Memorial Library has agreed to take any discards, so I am putting together a box for them. Once I’ve selected which books to pull from the shelves, I’ll contact STLS so that they can transfer the catalog records to Steele when I bring them the books.

Once all of that is done, I’ll be bringing back the folks from STLS to do a shelf read. They’ll go through each shelf to confirm that everything on the shelf is also in the catalog and add anything that isn’t. I hope to have this last bit completed sometime in the coming year. And now you know at least a little bit about what I do all day!

 

  

Jewish History

by Rachel Dworkin, Archivist

The Jewish holiday of Hanukkah is just wrapping up.  Like many Jewish holidays, Hanukkah celebrates perseverance in the face of religious oppression.  Similarly, the early Jewish settlement in the Chemung Valley is a story of survival and growth in the face of oppression.   The first Jews arrived in the area following a failed revolution in the German states in 1848.  The revolution was an attempt on the part of the merchant middle class and the poorer working classes to unite the various German-speaking states into one democratic county.   It was put down by the aristocratic powers and was followed by an anti-Semitic backlash.

Most of the Jews who fled to America arrived in New York and Philadelphia and spread out from there.  By the early 1850s, the Erie Railroad had connected Elmira with New York and so the Jews came.  The earliest settlers worked as peddlers.  Some of them, especially those with families, established homes in Elmira and from there traveled by foot to outlying villages and settlements selling jewelry and other fancy goods not available in general stores.  After they’d gained enough money, many would settle down with a shop in a favorite village or return to Elmira to open up a store.  Rosenbaum’s, for example, was opened in 1863 by former peddler Leham Rosenbaum. 

By the 1860s, after years of worship in private homes, the Jewish community pulled together enough funds to build a synagogue.  It was called B’Nai Israel and was located on High Street on Elmira’s eastside in the heart of the Jewish community.  Initially, there were only 31 families in the congregation, but it grew steadily throughout the 1860s & 70s.  

A second wave of Jewish settlers arrived in the 1880s and 90s, this time from Poland and Russia.  Throughout the 1880s, Eastern European Jews were plagued both by violent mob attacks and increasingly harsh anti-Semitic laws which restricted where they could live, what jobs they could have and how much education they could receive.  Between 1881 and 1920, over 2 million Jews fled Russia and Poland for the United States. 

While the members of this second wave who settled in Elmira moved into the same eastside neighborhood as the more established Jewish families, they didn’t blend seamlessly.  The members of B’Nai Israel practiced Reform Judaism while the newer immigrants were Orthodox.  This lead to the founding of a new Orthodox temple called Shomray Hadath in 1883.  By the next year there was a third temple known as the Sullivan Street Synagogue and Talmud Torah which eventually merged with Shomray Hadath after a fire destroyed their building in 1941.

Beginning in the 1930s, the Jewish community began to move west out of the old eastside neighborhood centered around John Street.  First B’Nail Israel in 1952 and then later Shomray Hadath moved out to West Water Street.  Due to dwindling populations, the two congregations have recently merged to form Kol Ami.