Jerry Nathans is the last guardian of Paterson’s Jewish past. President of the Jewish Historical Society of North Jersey, Nathans, who lives in Wayne, has spent close to 30

years amassing artifacts and tracking down information about the silk city’s Jewish history, as well as that of neighboring communities.

At its height, the society was an integral part of a thriving, multi-faceted Jewish world, with a board of directors and a dues-paying membership of 70. It sponsored lectures, exhibits, and other events throughout the year.

But hard times befell the organization these past 10 years and Nathans is alone now, the caretaker of 150 years of history, packed into 300 boxes.

He closed his family’s West Paterson store, Nathans Framing Gallery, earlier this year, using it for storage, and is turning his attention to revitalizing the society.

In addition to the remaining stock, the store houses paintings, banners, and boxes filled with photographs and documents, detailing events from synagogue groundbreakings to synagogue closings, as well as everything in between.

 

But years of inactivity and no building to call its own have made the Historical Society’s task more than difficult. Nathans, who turns 80 May 13, was born and raised in Paterson and remembers when it had a thriving Jewish

community, in stark contrast to the city’s dwindling Jewish population today.

The Paterson of his youth is "a bygone era," Nathans said, preserved only within the disintegrating newspaper clippings and dust-covered boxes of the Jewish Historical Society of North Jersey.

Recovering history

At one time, Paterson was home to Jewish philanthropists such as its former mayor, Nathan Barnert, for whom Barnert Hospital and Barnert Temple are named. The Paterson Hebrew Free Loan Association provided interest-free loans to members of the Paterson and Passaic Jewish communities for 106 years before expanding to Bergen County last year. Temple Emanuel, a Conservative shul that moved to Franklin Lakes two years ago, was founded in Paterson in 1906, and drew as many as 2,000 people for High Holy Day services in a city whose Jewish population now hovers around 1,000.

"It’s gone from a thriving Jewish community to absolutely nothing," Nathans said.

In the wake of exiting Patersonians, the YM-YWHA moved from Paterson to Wayne in 1976. (Its Schneider branch continued to be minimally open for a few years after the move.)

In 1978, a woman came to the North Jersey Y looking for information about her husband’s grandfather, a rabbi who had lived in Paterson during the previous century. The librarian, Sylvia Firschein, realized that even though the Y had originated in Paterson, she didn’t know how to help this woman because nothing had been preserved. Firschein put out a call for tales of the city’s past. In response, Jerry Nathans and Reeva Isaacs began interviewing people around Paterson, trying to learn as much as they could about its once-thriving Jewish population.

In 1979, as he and Isaacs transcribed tapes from almost 100 interviews, the pair realized there was so much more out there to recover. Thus began the Jewish Historical Society.

"We realized that Paterson history was being lost," Nathans said. They wrote to the Jewish Community News asking its readers for any memorabilia and records of Jewish Paterson. As the responses came in, the society came about.

"As we were collecting, we realized we needed an organization, rather than two people just collecting," Nathans said. "We started pushing it."

In May 1986, the as-yet unincorporated society self-published "Our Paterson Jewish History," with details dating back to the 1800s. A second edition, with photographs, was published in 1987. Both runs, each about 500 copies, sold out.

The society filed for incorporation on June 15, 1989. In its heyday, during the ’90s, the society put out at least two newsletters a year, and hosted lectures on topics such as the public image of the American Jewish woman, Jewish farming in New Jersey, and the relationship between genealogy and history. It also hosted exhibits at the Fair Lawn library, the Paterson Museum, and Yavneh Academy, which had originated in Paterson.

The collection was housed at the Y in Wayne but soon ran out of space. Nathans stored some of it at his framing store, but most of it sits in a locked classroom at William Paterson University in Wayne, unsorted and closed off from the public eye.

Before the Jewish Federation of North Jersey in Wayne merged with the UJA of Bergen County & North Hudson (to become UJA Federation of Northern New Jersey), it had planned a $2 million extension to the YM-YWHA in Wayne, part of which was to become the new home of the Historical Society. But after the merger, the expansion never materialized.

In 2002, Martin Greenberg, then executive director of the JFNJ, arranged for the society to move most of its collection to WPU. Nathans completed the move in March 2004, but since then, the boxes have remained mostly unpacked in Frederick Raubinger Hall on WPU’s campus.

Kept at a constant temperature in the low 70s, the room holds dozens of boxes of photographs, original copies of the first issues of The Jewish Standard and Jewish Community News, Torah covers from shuls that have long since closed, and other memorabilia collected over the years but rarely removed from cardboard prisons.

During the late ’80s, the society hired an archivist to begin sorting through the growing collection. Unfortunately, she died six months later with little accomplished. In the late ’90s, the society hired a Rutgers student as an intern, but she did not stay long.

In one box is a manuscript for an unpublished 15,000-page autobiography of Rabbi Abraham Shindling, who spent 10 years in Paterson before heading to Cincinnati for rabbinical school.

"One day we would like to have it on the Internet so people can research the early years of Paterson," Nathans said. "We’re not looking necessarily to publish it, but it has a wealth of information about families in the Jewish community in the early 1900s."
Nathans recalled how the autobiography almost solved a case of family abandonment.

During the early ’90s, a woman approached the society looking for her birthparents. Nathans remembered reading a story in the autobiography that he thought mirrored the woman’s story and could be a clue to unlocking her past.

They tracked down the family mentioned in the manuscript and actually saw a resemblance between the family and the woman in question. But she died shortly after, and a DNA test proved that the family was in fact not related. Still, Nathans was happy with the idea that the society’s records could provide such clues to the past, even if it had been a dead end.

"We thought we had made the connection," Nathans said. "Everything sounded right. It was an extraordinary story."

One major problem Nathans has encountered is that people throw away treasures they don’t even know they have.

A display case at WPU holds almost 100 years worth of the Jewish Publication Society’s American Jewish Yearbooks. Nathans found them in a Dumpster outside the Paterson Museum.

"There’s so much we’ve lost, which is the frustrating part," he said. "People have just trashed [their Jewish collections] because they don’t know what to do with it."

One of Nathans’ favorite pieces is a kashering pail with a stone in it, used to kasher items for Passover during a time when most people could not afford to buy separate silverware and dishes. They would be put into the pail and covered with water. The stone would be heated until it glowed and then immersed in the pail, thereby kashering its contents.

He’s written many letters asking for contributions to the collection, with few responses. When the newsletter was published, it ran a section listing new acquisitions, and Nathans always sent a thank-you note to donors, but, he lamented, people no longer see the society as a resource for preservation.

"I’ve questioned people and usually I am two minutes too late," he said. "I spoke to somebody in Bayonne and, unfortunately, before I contacted them they cleaned out their attic and threw everything out."

A photographer in Paterson closed his business and put all of his negatives on the curb. They were gone before Nathans could get to them. Another photographer died and his wife didn’t know what to do with his negatives. But when Nathans called her, she told him that she had thrown them out because they were moldy.

"We could have washed them and preserved them," he said. "There’s a limit to how much I can hound people but I know there is a wealth of stuff out there."

Where are they now?

Tragedy struck the society and Nathans in 1999 when his wife, Rita, died. "Everything came to a halt with her passing," Nathans said.

He had been a driving force in the society, but withdrew to focus on his framing business. Reeva Isaacs, who had helped Nathans 20 years before with the interviews that started it all, had moved to Princeton. The other members of the board began dying off or moving away. The newsletter ceased production and the lectures stopped.

"Everything kind of declined," he said. "Our exposure, our lectures, our newsletter, a lot of our board had moved or passed on and were never replaced."

Nathans still has the list of the 70 dues-paying members, but there is no reason to collect dues at this time. The society also had been receiving donations from the JNFJ, until Nathans asked that the funding stop because of the society’s inactivity.

Finding a home

The space at William Paterson has become not much more than a large storage area instead of the center for historical research that Nathans envisioned.

Despite its academic setting, the university isn’t his ideal location for the society to display its collection or grow.

"Nobody has access up here," he said. "As much as I would like to start tomorrow or today [cataloguing the collection], it just doesn’t make sense to do it under these circumstances," he said.

Only Nathans has a key to the room, the parking is difficult, and he cannot be there all the time so the room remains locked and its treasures hidden. The university and Nathans had discussed the possibility of permanently housing the collection on campus but for the reasons above, Nathans wants it permanently housed somewhere else. Like all real estate truisms, the issue comes back to location.

"I don’t feel that [William Paterson is] the proper location for it, since most of the Jewish community is in Bergen County at this point," he said. He’d like the collection to be easily accessible to both Bergen and Passaic counties and in a Jewish environment.

The future

Nathans will turn 80 this month and with only one other member of the board of trustees left — a treasurer who monitors a bank account with only a small balance and little income — the future of the society and its collection is anything but certain.

To display the entire collection, Nathans said, 2,000 square feet would suffice. But first it must be moved to a larger space so it can be spread out and catalogued. He has had conversations with the Rosenbaum Yeshiva of North Jersey in River Edge, Yavneh Academy and the Frisch School in Paramus, and UJA-NNJ about taking space in one of their facilities, but none could spare the amount of space he needed.

When asked if he would resurrect the society’s board of directors to relieve the burden on his shoulders, Nathans said he does not see a point just yet.

"If we find space, hopefully, the collection will be moved. We will reorganize with a new board," he said. "But, unfortunately, we have no meeting place at the moment. Just to appoint a board that can’t do anything is a little ridiculous."

Paterson’s past depends on the society’s future.

"At least we’re preserving it," Nathans said of the collection. "That’s the important thing."

To contribute memorabilia to the Jewish Historical Society of North Jersey, call Nathans at (973) 785-9119.