From the Shtetl to the Suburbs

When Young Harry Goldstein arrived in the United States from Russia in 1880, the family story goes, the first thing he did was to ask ``Which way is Long Island?''

After being pointed in the right direction, he set off on foot in search of his great-uncle Andrew Simon Levi, who was earning a living as an itinerant peddler on the East End. Goldstein made it as far as Hampton Bays, where he finally met people who knew his great-uncle.

``People said to him if he would wait, Levi would catch up to him,'' says Goldstein's grandson, Lloyd Gerard of Eastport. Goldstein waited, and sure enough, Levi arrived in Hampton Bays on his rounds, and one can only imagine what he must have looked like to his newly arrived kinsman, a suitcase in each hand and a 200-pound pack on his back. He was a traveling dry goods store - carrying needles, thread, ribbons, shoelaces and anything else the families of farmers and fishermen might need.

Jews had been on Long Island since Colonial times. One of the earliest was Aaron Isaacs, a merchant and part-owner of a wharf in Sag Harbor and the grandfather of John Howard Payne, who wrote the words to ``Home, Sweet Home.''

But Levi the peddler heralded a more substantial Jewish presence on Long Island, a wave of Eastern European Jews who began arriving in numbers in the late 19th Century. It was only with these immigrants that Jewish communities began to grow and congregations were founded.

Not all the newcomers were peddlers, of course. Many more were drawn to Long Island by the promise of jobs at factories that sprang up as part of the Industrial Revolution - a watch case company in Sag Harbor, a rubber plant in Setauket, a lace mill in Patchogue, and shirt and cigar factories in Bellport. Factory owners in need of cheap labor would hire immigrants right off their boats, sending them directly to their new jobs by boat or train. One published account tells of Sag Harbor residents watching a boatload of Jewish immigrants arriving at the dock and shouting, ``Jerusalem is coming! Jerusalem is here!''

Others became shopkeepers, serving not only the growing Jewish population but the larger community as well. The early peddlers like Levi were the trailblazers - with little command of English, they ventured on foot into rural communities that had never before seen Jews. They sold everything from nails to bedsheets to people whose work allowed them only infrequent trips to the nearest village for supplies.

``Peddling was an incredibly demanding occupation. The pack itself has been described as enormous; it could have weighed close to 200 pounds,'' wrote the late Helene Gerard, wife of Andrew Simon Levi's great-great-great nephew, Lloyd Gerard of Eastport, in her study, ``Yankees in Yarmulkes: Small-Town Jewish Life in Eastern Long Island,'' which was published in 1986 in the American Jewish Archives.

It could take hours for the peddler to unpack his wares for a farmer or bayman's wife, allow her time to choose her purchases and repack. ``Then the peddler would stand the pack against a wall, back up to it, crouch down to fit his arms through the straps, pick it up and walk off to his next stop,'' Gerard wrote.

Their rounds would keep some peddlers away from home for a week at a time. They would return just before the Sabbath, remove their backpacks, observe a day of rest and set off again.

Besides Levi, there was Isaac Golden, who walked from Jamaica to Setauket each week, stopping in Breslau (later Lindenhurst) ``for a last hot kosher meal'' before heading east; Nathan Goldstein, who was caught by the Blizzard of '88 while peddling in Eastport, and Bernard Singer, who arrived in Hicksville from Lithuania in 1896 but moved to Glen Cove a few years later after encountering anti-Semitism. Singer peddled sewing supplies, needles, thread, ``whatever he could carry, and then, after a while, he bought a horse and wagon,'' his grandson, Burton Singer, recalled a few years ago. In 1901, Bernard Singer opened a store on School Street, where ``he paid $8 a month rent, with an electric light bulb, and he had two rooms in the back,'' his grandson said. That became Singer's Department Store, which closed recently after operating for almost a century.

Levi never opened a shop, but his great-nephew, Harry Goldstein, did in 1885 in Eastport. Goldstein sold ``anything the local citizens needed,'' said Lloyd Gerard, 67. ``They would come in and order a brown suit and Harry would go out and order it for them. It didn't matter if it was double-breasted or single-breasted, whether it fit or even if it didn't fit.''

Unlike Eastport, which never had enough Jewish families to support a congregation, Breslau, which Helene Gerard referred to as a ``kosher oasis'' for the early peddlers, had a large enough community to form one of the first Jewish congregations on Long Island. Ten men gathered on Nov. 23, 1874, and established Neta Scarschea, or planting roots. They purchased cemetery land from the Breslau Cemetery Association.

But it was left to a later generation to set up a congregation that would endure and grow. Another group of Jewish men met on Oct. 26, 1913, to start the Lindenhurst Hebrew Congregation, and, after holding services in homes, dedicated the village's first synagogue on Aug. 29, 1915. ``The entire village joined with those of the Jewish faith in observing this joyous event,'' wrote village historian Evelyn Mentz Ellis.

In Sag Harbor, the lure for the 40 to 50 immigrants whose arrival evoked the cry ``Jerusalem is coming!'' probably was a watch case factory opened by Joseph Fahys in the 1880s. The group consisted of Russian and Hungarian Jews who refused to worship together or even to socialize.

In 1883, the Russians founded the Jewish Association of United Brethren of Sag Harbor. Seven years later, they paid $50 for land for a cemetery. The Hungarian Jews formed their own cemetery association and bought land adjacent to the United Brethren cemetery. A few years later, Nissan Meyerson, a member of the Brethren, paid $350 for the land on which the congregation's synagogue was built and where it still stands. They called it Temple Mishcan Israel, and held their first service in 1898. Hungarian Jews held their own High Holy Day services at the Engravers Hall. The two congregations merged in 1920 and renamed the synagogue Adas Israel.

A similar story unfolded in Setauket, where Jewish immigrants arrived by train in the late 1800s to work at the L.B. Smith Rubber Co. In 1893, Congregation Agudath Achim was formed after meeting informally for three years. A synagogue was dedicated in 1896.

After the rubber company burned down in 1898, the Jewish population began declining and the synagogue closed. Not until 1946 was there an appreciable return of Jewish families. The synagogue was reopened in 1946 and renamed the North Shore Jewish Center.

Another early Jewish settlement came together on the North Shore of what is now Nassau County in the industrial city of Glen Cove, where Congregation Tifereth Israel was established in 1897. Hotel owner Benjamin Cohen was its founding president. The first services were held in the home of Isaac and Esther Bessel, who ran a horse farm. The Torah they used is known today as the Bessel Torah and is still used at Saturday services.

Other early congregations in Nassau included the Nassau County Hebrew Association, later Temple B'Nai Sholom, in Rockville Centre in 1906; Congregation Beth Israel in Hempstead, 1908; Temple Israel of Lawrence, founded in Far Rockaway in 1908 and relocated to Lawrence in 1930; and Shaaray Tefila in Lawrence, 1909.