It was Rav Luzer Mendel who designed the distinctive Yerushalmi levush of white and gold caftans which have since been adopted by many groups and produced by a tiny specialized group of tailors; Bostoner chassidim wear them on Yom Kippur and at the Sedorim. “When I went to the tailor my wife pointed out she didn’t think the pieces hung just right on me ” Rabbi Horowitz says. “He told her ‘They aren’t made to fit perfectly. They’re designed al pi kabbalah.’ ”

But we digress; he returns to his tales of Old Jerusalem and the Bidermans. Rav Pinchas Dovid Horowitz a yasom was raised by his mother’s brother Rav Duvid Tvi Shloima Biderman Lelover Rebbe of Yerushalayim. Around 1907 his uncle suggested he go to America. “America?” he responded. Later he’d recount “If my uncle — who was my rebbe and like a father to me — would have asked me to jump off a roof I wouldn’t have hesitated. But to America? I was afraid to go!”

But when a tzaddik decrees things have a way of coming to pass. Rav Pinchas Dovid was summoned to a din Torah in Russia to represent Jerusalem in a dispute over who should be the Nasi of the Galitzianer settlement. “In those times cities in Europe would finance settlements and kollelim in the Holy Land ” Rabbi Horowitz explains. “You still have places like Batei Ungarin and Batei Varsha named for the sponsoring places.”

But shortly after Pinchas Dovid arrived World War I broke out. “My great-grandfather decided to run back to Eretz Yisrael literally on foot ” Rabbi Horowitz says. “He sometimes ran through actual active battlefields.” Several times he barely escaped with his life like when he was caught carrying forbidden foreign currency. He was pushed against a wall and told to raise his hands while they searched him; fortunately he had hidden the money in his closed fists.

He made his way as far as Greece, which had been neutral in the conflict. But just as he arrived, Greece threw its lot in with the Allies and Pinchas Dovid had the unfortunate luck to bear an Austrian passport. He was staying with the Chacham Bashi, the chief Sephardi rav who knew his uncle Rav Duvid’l. The chacham urged, “Leave immediately! You’re in mortal danger!”

The Chacham Bashi quickly procured the papers of a Jew who had recently died, and told Pinchas Dovid to run to the port and get on the first ship out, no matter the destination. The ship he boarded, it turned out, was bound for America — for Boston, where his wife would later join him, with their young son Moshe. (Their second son, Levi Yitzchak, was born in Boston; he would later become the Bostoner Rebbe while Moshe served as Bostoner Rebbe in Brooklyn.)

Bostoner chassidus thus became the first chassidic dynasty on American soil. But Rabbi Horowitz’s grandparents on his mother’s side were also pre-war chassidic immigrants of Yerushalmi origins. His grandfather, Rav Elazar Adler, descended from Lelov, arrived in America in 1938 and became the Zvhiller Rebbe of Los Angeles. His wife, Rabbi Horowitz’s maternal grandmother, was the granddaughter of Rav Shloimke of Zvhil and only child of Rav Gedalia Moshe of Zvhil, whose kever in Jerusalem is now frequented on Mondays and Thursdays by people seeking yeshuos.

With starvation rampant in the Holy Land and Europe during the war, Rabbi Horowitz’s maternal grandfather came to the US, traveling west from town to town looking for somewhere to settle. Rav Elazar, a gregarious man with a sense of humor, used to joke, “Thank heaven for the Pacific Ocean — it prevented me from wandering any further.” Rebbetzin Adler and her young daughter Miriam joined him in Los Angeles in 1944. “Imagine the culture shock for my seven-year-old mother, going from life in the home of Reb Shloimke in Yerushalayim to attending LA public schools.” Rabbi Horowitz comments. (Miriam was later sent to New York to attend Rabbi Uri Shraga Hellman’s Bais Yaakov in Williamsburg.)

Both sides of Rabbi Horowitz’s family therefore arrived in the US before the postwar influx of chassidim, traveling frequently to reach Jews in underserved areas, dispensing chizuk, brachah, fatherly warmth, and counsel. Reb Elazar traveled to his friends and followers, many of them Zvhiller landsleit, in San Francisco and other towns and cities across the US. Rav Pinchas  Dovid led tishen for his chassidim up and down the Eastern seaboard in cities like Bangor, Maine, and Providence, Rhode Island. Meeting many of these people and hearing their stories left Rabbi Horowitz with the awareness that there was much heimish Jewish life in America outside the centers of Yiddishkeit, even before the mass immigrations at the turn of the 20th century.

Tales that Tugged the Heart

Rabbi Horowitz attended mesivta in Denver, and was sent at age 18 to Torah Vodaath in Brooklyn. That was followed by four years of study in Lakewood, where he was a ben bayis in the home of Rav Shneur Kotler. “My father considered himself a talmid of Rav Aharon Kotler. Rav Aharon was close to my grandfather, and got him involved in Agudath Israel,” he says. “My grandfather was the first stop for many rabbis arriving in the US after the war — Rav Michoel Ber Weissmandl, Rav Elya Meir Bloch. He was also close to Rav Moshe Feinstein.”

In 1981 Rabbi Horowitz married Chansie Weinberger, daughter of the Turka Rav of Kew Gardens. Reb Yaakov had been serving alongside his father at the Bostoner Bais Medrash of Boro Park when he was approached in 1982 to establish the Bostoner Bais Medrash and Chassidic Center of Nassau County. With his father’s blessing, he accepted, while simultaneously pursuing a career in kashrus at the OU that he had begun several years earlier. He began by supervising national brands like Nestle Beverages and Smuckers preserves, and went on to become one of the creators of the OU’s Ingredients Approval Registry, detailing the kosher status of ingredients used by the 8,000-plus facilities in the 80 countries under OU supervision.

For almost 25 years Rabbi Horowitz served as the OU’s rav hamachshir for matzah and all other productions at the Manischewitz factory, with a staff of 16 mashgichim; he authored the OU’s official matzah baking manual.

During his travels for kashrus, Rabbi Horowitz sought traces of Jews who had tried to remain Torah-true in the early days of this country. “I’d end up staying with families in places like Fargo, North Dakota, and often I heard stories that pulled at my heartstrings,” he says. “So many people had been moser nefesh for Torah in America, yet no one was saving their artifacts and stories from oblivion.” For example, he was told the story of a man from a pious home in Prussia who came to New Mexico and opened a general store. With no shochet nearby, the man abstained from all meat, but as time passed he wearied of a vegetarian diet and wrote to his father requesting to be sent a shechitah knife to try to shecht chickens on his own. “He was pretty sure his father would say no,” Rabbi Horowitz recounts.

“Time passed with no response. One day he thought maybe he’d just go try and kill a chicken himself. When he went out he was attacked by robbers; later that day a letter came from his father, remonstrating, ‘Did I raise you to do aveiros? You’re not a shochet, you wouldn’t know how to do it! It’s wrong — don’t even try!’

“After that the man didn’t eat meat again for the rest of his life,” Rabbi Horowitz says. “He was perhaps one of many.”

As he began researching, Rabbi Horowitz found that kashrus was a pressing concern for Jews in the New World from the very beginning — after all, a Jew needs to eat. He managed to track down the first American hechsher certificates, issued when businessmen Aaron Lopez, Jacob Rodriguez, and Michael Gratz began shipping kosher meat from Newport to the West Indies in 1766 (the first American license to practice shechitah was recorded in 1782 in Lancaster, PA). When the Constitution was later ratified in 1789, Jewish celebrants in the streets refreshed themselves at tables laden with kosher victuals.

Rabbi Horowitz’s pursuit of American Jewish stories led to the amassing of an increasingly large collection of information and artifacts.  In 1998, he decided to formalize his efforts into an organization he called the American Jewish Legacy, a nonprofit that would be dedicated to preserving the history of Jewish life in the US. “There are many fine American Jewish Historical archives, museums, and libraries across the country that do great work, and are run by wonderful professionals,” he says, “but the majority of them are not focused on the history of practicing religious Judaism — keeping Shabbos, kashrus, etc.”

Early on, he reached out to historical archives across the country, and sought the guidance of professional historians like Dr. Shneur (Sid) Leiman, a professor at Brooklyn College and Yeshiva University. “Rabbi Horowitz doesn’t make a move without consulting experts,” Dr. Leiman told Mishpacha. “We’ve worked on many projects together over the past 15 years or so, and he brings to it a love of a part of Jewish history that’s been neglected by others.”

Rabbi Horowitz began sharing his findings early on. The following year, in 1999, he contributed a series of columns to the Jewish Press with titles such as “Hoopskirts and Huppas,” focusing on religious Jewish families of the South, as well as articles about Rabbi Papermaster of North Dakota, early religious families of Los Angeles, and others.

Getting the Word Out

The American Jewish Legacy got its first big break in 2003, when Rabbi Horowitz was invited to create an exhibit at that year’s Kosherfest, held at New York’s Javits Center. 2003 marked the 350th anniversary of the arrival of the first 23 Jews in New York in 1654 and founding of Congregation Shearith Israel. With the aid of his daughter and co-curator Suri, he produced an impressive 19-panel display entitled “From the Mountains to the Prairies.” The New York Times took note, remarking that the juxtaposition of the exhibit with Kosherfest “conveyed a remarkable evolution from a sometimes primitive struggle for traditional Jews to observe ancient dietary laws to a modern industry with $170 billion in sales.”

The exhibit was later taken on the road, displayed in places as diverse as Los Angeles, Portland, and Columbus, Ohio; some of the materials were later used in the PBS series, “The Jewish Americans.” As Rabbi Horowitz went around the country speaking, people from his audiences sometimes came forward with historical artifacts of their own to offer, like the man in Eugene, Oregon who approached him to offer 19th-century Rosh Hashanah cards from Silver City, New Mexico. Rabbi Horowitz’s collection of letters, holiday cards, religious objects, photographs, and newspaper articles expanded rapidly.

In 2007, Rabbi Horowitz combined the two interests that dominated his waking hours — matzah and American Jewish history — by arranging for the AJL to team up with Manischewitz to print “Jewish History Panels” on over one million boxes of Pesach matzah. These panels featured letters and images of Jews celebrating Pesach from Revolutionary times through the Civil War through World War II. The AJL also created an American Jewish Legacy Haggadah, which was sponsored and distributed free by Shop Rite in 220 stores in six states. It has an old-fashioned etching on the cover depicting Rabbi Yaakov Yosef’s Lower East Side matzah bakery, and is filled with sidebars detailing aspects of the early American Jewish experience culled from AJL archives. Inside, one finds matzah ads from the Gold Rush, and 19th century newspaper announcements warning that meat sold as kosher in Detroit is in fact not kosher. One discovers that Congregation Shearith Israel, the oldest synagogue on the US mainland, maintained a matzah oven during the 1700s for its congregants, had a system for distributing matzah to the poor, and was the only place matzos could be purchased in New York until the early 1800s.

AJL archives also include letters describing making Pesach on the prairies of Sioux City, Iowa, and letters about Seders conducted by Civil War soldiers both Yankee and Confederate, using whatever food they could obtain or forage. One soldier, J.A. Joel, stationed in West Virginia in 1866, was able to requisition matzah from Cincinnati and forage chicken, eggs, and cider. “Horseradish or parsley we could not obtain, but in lieu we found a weed, whose bitterness, I apprehend, exceeded anything our forefathers ‘enjoyed,’ ” he wrote home. He couldn’t get charoses either, so he and his companion put a brick on the Seder table, and simply looked at it to remember the hard labor of the Jews in Egypt.

Despite the hardships, some Jews managed to carve out traditional Jewish lives for themselves, sometimes aided by courageous rabbis. In the early 1890s Rabbi Benjamin Papermaster was sent by Rav Isaac Elchanan Spector to serve as rabbi, shochet, mohel, and melamed for the Jews of Minnesota and North Dakota. Jews flocked to him to shecht their meat, and he established a Talmud Torah in Grand Forks.

An oral history taken from Sylvia Kremen Rosenberg, published by the Minnesota Historical Society, gives a moving description of a Jewish homesteading family’s Shabbos, circa 1900, in North Dakota. “My mother places a beautiful embroidered shawl over her head and lights the Sabbath candles, softly chanting the prayer. Father fills the wine glasses for the older family members around the table and recites the Kiddush prayer.” She describes a table filled with challah, gefilte fish, chicken soup, chicken, tzimmes, and pie, and says, “There is love of G-d and thankfulness for His blessings, and for the privilege of living in the Land of Freedom, America.”

Commercial Clout

Jews who had been limited to working as tailors and peddlers in Europe became the backbone of merchant activity as they moved west with the settlers. “General stores were called ‘Jew stores’ back then, even when they were owned by non-Jews,” Rabbi Horowitz says. “The department stores and later the entertainment industry in both the East and West were dominated by Jews.”

Before the Panama Canal was opened, it would take ships a long time to travel around South America to reach California, and customers would eagerly await their arrival on “Steamer Day” to obtain new goods. Yet when Steamer Day fell out on Yom Kippur, the docks in San Francisco remained firmly closed. The local newspaper, the Daily Alta, wrote admiringly that despite the Jews’ involvement in agriculture, mining and mercantile activities, they would cease all activity on their holy days to pray to their G-d. “That sort of press helped combat anti-Semitism, and also assimilation, since it made people proud to be Jewish,” Rabbi Horowitz says.

As manufacturers sought to cash in on the massive influx of Jewish immigrants at the turn of the 20th century, advertisers reached out to them in their native language. Rabbi Horowitz chuckles as he shows us a cartoon for Borden’s milk in Yiddish, with the painting of Elsie the Cow sitting under another painting of Elsie’s mother saying, “My Bubbe never dreamed of such milk!” Another Yiddish cartoon shows a Dutch Girl in a cap, from the eponymous cleaning product ‘Dutch Cleanser,’ arriving like Mr. Clean’s white tornado to rescue a Jewish balabusta overwhelmed by Pesach cleaning.  Yet another urges Jews to “Koife Aunt Jemima latkes, mit de Alta Baleibta plantation flavor!”

Even the American Express company published Yiddish-language ads before Yom Tov time, urging Jews to remember their family in the Old Country by cabling money. “Those ads ran not just in New York, but in cities like Raleigh and Durham, North Carolina, and Louisville, Kentucky,” Rabbi Horowitz says, adding that he has given Power Point presentations about these Yiddish ads to a number of venues including a George Washington University Foodways presentation at the Smithsonian Museum. An audio section of the AJL exhibit included ads from old-time Yiddish radio shows.

While most unaffiliated Jews today aren’t amenable to being proselytized by frum coreligionists, a presentation billed as a historical exhibit is often a way to sneak in a little kiruv through the back door. “Bostoner chassidus has always been involved in kiruv,” Rabbi Horowitz says, and is happy to report that his exhibits often stir a prick of conscience as non-observant Jews realize what their forefathers sacrificed in order to perpetuate their mesorah. He’s heard viewers makes comments like, “Look what those people did to keep kosher! Oh, wow — what’s my excuse? Maybe we should give it a try.” For the very uninformed, it’s an opportunity to discuss what’s involved in keeping kosher and celebrating holidays.

Rabbi Horowitz has recently retired from kashrus, and now looks forward to consecrating more time to the AJL: research, presentations, and of course fundraising. He’s determined to document as much as he can while it’s still available. “The older people won’t be here forever, and the archives could end up in the garbage,” he says. “We must remember and preserve, not only for the sake of these unsung heroes who built the foundations of Judaism in America, but to teach our children and combat assimilation.”

American History Seforim

For all that Rabbi Horowitz so eagerly shares, he didn’t emphasize what historian Dr. Sid Leiman considers his most significant contribution to American Jewish history: the AJL Publication Society, which has printed a number of significant books, most importantly a three-volume encyclopedic work entitled Chachmei Yisrael B’America. Dr. Leiman explains that a litvishe rabbi named Benzion Eisenstadt wrote a 19-volume work containing biographies of many important rabbanim, well-known Jews, and communal leaders in the US. These individual volumes were published from 1898–1941 and included photo sections containing many of the only photos of these individuals in existence.

American Jewish historians have long considered these books a valuable resource. Rabbi Horowitz undertook the task of consolidating these works into three volumes, with extensive computer enhancement of the photos, indexes of the biography entries in each volume by first and last name, clearer fonts, and repagination. He reprinted the photos alongside the biographies and added new ones. “This is one of the most important American Jewish historical publications of the last hundred years,” Dr. Leiman says. “Rabbi Horowitz and the AJL spent tens of thousands of dollars and more than ten years of work on it. It unlocks a tremendous amount of biographical material.”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha Issue 683)