During the summer of 2018, the Cornell University Library, with vital assistance from the Friends of Cornell Jewish Studies, acquired a critically important collection of pinkesim, or ledger books. These detail membership and communal activity for Jewish immigrant societies in the landsmanshaft tradition and for venerable synagogues established in New York’s Lower East Side and elsewhere on the Atlantic seaboard. The 318 ledgers are primary sources of information for research focusing on the Jewish immigrant experience from before 1900 to about 1940. They document the history of communities transplanted from Central and Eastern Europe along with the acculturation of individuals who adopted America and bequeathed it to their descendants. The ledgers will reside in the vault of the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections in Kroch Library.
These pinkesim reflect the metamorphosis of New York’s Lower East Side and other predominantly Jewish neighborhoods, offering insights into Jewish organizational, religious, and community life in America. Financial records in these ledgers record individual contributions, community expenditures, and free loans. Extensive texts of meeting minutes give witness to the use of Yiddish, and sometimes German and English, to record administrative and social aspects of community life. Many ledgers contain pages filled with well-formed script, now difficult to read without training, in the fluent Yiddish that was the primary language of millions of Eastern European Jews until the Holocaust.
The pinkesim also complement the Cornell Library’s other collections deriving from the legacy of Central and Eastern European Jewish history and literature. These collections include a compilation of works produced in Hebrew, German, and Hungarian during the nineteenth-century Haskalah era, and the bilingual Catherwood Library archives of the Jewish immigrant Left, the latter being the focus of a digitization project directed by Dr. Elissa Sampson (https://digital.library.cornell.edu/collections/iwo-jpfo).
Following initial cleaning and examination of the pinkesim, the Cornell Library will catalogue the collection. An array of data from each ledger will facilitate research access via the Library’s online catalogue, and the Library’s Department of Preservation will stabilize the documents to make them accessible in the RMC reading room. Records for individual ledgers will start becoming available as early as the late fall of 2019.
For further information on the collection of pinkesim or on other Jewish Studies collecting initiatives in the Cornell Library, please contact Patrick J. Stevens (pjs3@cornell.edu).
