Disciplines

Jewish Studies

Abstract

Summarizer: Sophia Maier

Helen Katz was born to Holocaust survivor parents in the Bronx. The family originally lived in the South Bronx until Katz was one year old, when they moved to the Olinville section of the Bronx. They lived there until Katz was in her 20s, when they moved to Pelham Parkway. Each time, they moved because the neighborhood was deteriorating.

Katz describes the Olinville neighborhood as predominantly Italian, although her own family was Orthodox. Despite the differences, she remembers playing with the Italian Catholic school girls. They attended a Lubavitcher shul, and Katz attend a yeshiva for her education. She and her friends would walk to the Bronx Zoo and the Botanical Gardens, particularly on holidays. Katz tells of stores she and her family frequented on Burke Avenue, Allerton Avenue, and Pelham Parkway, including a florist, kosher food stores and delis, and clothing stores. Her family was kosher, and they typically ate her mother’s homemade traditional Ashkenazi fare. Her mother was a homemaker, and her father owned a headwear store on the Lower East Side, which allowed the family to rise out of the poverty they initially faced coming to this country after the war.

Katz credits Beth Jacob yeshiva with providing her a great secular and religious education, and says it was even more rigorous than Lehman College, which she attended after. The yeshiva was “open minded,” allowing both boys and girls in the school — though they were in separate classes — and encouraging the girls to go to college. Originally, Katz attended the school with other children of Holocaust survivors, but as she got older more children with American born parents started attending, causing the language of translation from Hebrew to shift from Yiddish to English.

Katz left the Bronx when she was 30, first moving to Borough Park, Brooklyn to live with a friend. After a few years, she married and moved to Queens, where she has lived the rest of her life. Katz decided to leave the Bronx because it was time to get out on her own. Nonetheless, she has very pleasant memories of her childhood there, which she says was like an “out of town” experience, being so isolated from socioeconomic difference.

Keywords: Holocaust, South Bronx, Olinville, Pelham Parkway, Florida, Orthodox, Lubavitch, Beth Jacob Yeshiva, Bais Yaakov Yeshiva, kosher, food, education, Lehman College, Brooklyn, Queens, Yiddish

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