Jewish Review reaches its golden year

By PAUL HAIST

article created on: 2009-01-01T00:00:00

This new secular year of 2009 marks the golden anniversary of the founding of the Jewish Review.

We can’t say yet exactly when in 1959 that Vol. 1, No. 1 of this paper appeared.

We do not have a copy of that paper, but would dearly love to have or see one.

Perhaps one of our readers knows what month and what day the paper first appeared. Perhaps they played a role in the paper’s creation or remember its first appearance. Better yet, perhaps they even have a copy of that paper and will share it with us.

Throughout this anniversary year we will, when space permits, reflect on the Jewish Review’s past by reprinting articles from that past. We have papers in storage that go back as far as about the early 1970s.

This month, I will have been a part of this paper for 17 years, longer than I worked for any other newspaper.

With the indispensable assistance of City Editor Deborah Moon and the several talented people who have filled other roles at the paper or contributed stories, and, of course, the consistent wisdom and cooperation of our publisher, the Jewish Federation of Greater Portland, I think the paper has grown considerably and become stronger.

Although, I must say, having looked over the papers that were produced by those who preceded me here and the staff I work with, this little newspaper has been cared for by a number of editors whose work I admire very much and who clearly cared very much about what they did.

There are plans afoot for a celebratory event later in the year. I am told that, in light of the economic situation, it may be scaled back from what I understood began with modest plans, even before we understood the gravity of the economic situation.

I have been working with others in the community to coordinate our anniversary with the 50th anniversary of the passing of Swiss-American-Jewish composer Ernest Bloch, who did much of his finest work in Agate Beach and who died in Portland in 1959.

The economy may impinge on some of the Bloch plans as well.

Whatever happens, this half-century milestone will not go unobserved.

I hope very much that some of you will be able to share something of the paper’s past with the rest of us.

Again, finding Vol. 1,
No. 1 would be the creme de la creme.