Tours recapture long-lost Old South Portland

By AMY R KAUFMAN

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“They mowed it down,” “they cut it to ribbons,” in the words of Polina Olsen, but she won’t let Old South Portland die. The spirit of the once-thriving Jewish neighborhood is instantly rekindled by the anecdotes she recounts on her walking tours.

The author of three books on Old South Portland, Olsen loves it when someone in the group tells her a story she didn’t know.
On the July 14 tour, three former denizens of Old South Portland engaged in spirited reminiscence—Max Zugman, 87; Leonard Burda, of the same generation; and Isaac Tevet, who lived in South Portland as a boy.
Tevet remembered going to the kosher butcher to buy chickens for his mother.

“The butcher came out and killed them,” he said.

The aroma of Mosher’s bagels lingered in the air as Olsen related that she had spoken with Mosher’s daughter, who said “she never had bagels like them, even in New York.” Mosher “went to his grave with his secret for the bagels,” said Olsen.

According to Olsen, Portland voted to create the South Auditorium Urban Renewal District in 1958, and bulldozers demolished 54 blocks of the immigrant community.

“It was considered blight, but the residents didn’t feel that way,” she said.

By 1920 about 6,000 Jews lived in South Portland, most of them Eastern European immigrants. They made up about one-third of the neighborhood’s population. Many had fled pogroms; another “common reason for immigration was avoiding conscription into the czar’s army,” said Olsen.
About 800 New York Jews came to South Portland when the trustees of billionaire Baron de Hirsch, “concerned about an anti-Semitic backlash,” established the Industrial Removal Office, whose “charter was to get Jews out of New York slums.”

The organization offered loans to buy horses and wagons, and these Jews earned their living in Portland as “junk peddlers,” she said.

The little neighborhood was literally teeming with organizations and institutions. There were seven synagogues, several kosher bakeries, an orphanage for Jewish children, a boarding house, Failing School and other schools, an old-age home, and dozens of others.

Perhaps the most vital institution was Neighborhood House, founded by the National Council for Jewish Women. Many of today’s Portlanders attended its Hebrew school on the top floor. Some went to school while their parents attended Americanization classes, said Olsen. She said Neighborhood House provided meals for immigrants “to teach them sociability and table manners.”

At the end of the tour Olsen held up a photo of Korsun’s Kosher Deli, which she said is her “favorite picture of all time.” Scrawled on the deli window is this message: “The only slums we have in Portland is the garbage in City Hall, the courts and the Portland Development Commission.”

New York-born Olsen, whose grandparents came from Eastern Europe, said she became interested in South Portland when she moved to adjacent John’s Landing. She obtained some of her oral history from Gussie Reinhardt (of blessed memory).

“We can thank Gussie because she led a committee for four years that prevented them from mowing down the rest (of the neighborhood),” she said.

The unity and warmth of this Jewish enclave defies description. It is best expressed when people’s faces light up as they remember the grocers, the tailors, the rabbis’ nicknames, the teachers, the loan society that never divulged who needed a loan.
According to the 1915 minutes of Neighborhood House, “Our doors have never been closed night or day to man, woman or child, nor to the stranger within our gates.”

Olsen said she began giving the tours after publishing her second book, “The Immigrants’ Children: Jewish and Italian Memories of Old South Portland” (2006). Her first book was “A Walking Tour of Historic Jewish Portland,” and she published “The Downtown Jews: A Walking Tour Through Portland’s Early Business District” this year.

Olsen donates the proceeds of the tours to the Jewish Federation of Greater Portland.

“It makes sense. A walking tour of historic Jewish Portland should benefit the whole community, and contributing to the JFGP is the best way,” she said. “And, because of the tour, I can make a much larger donation.”

Olsen’s books are available at Annie Bloom’s, Powell’s and Everything Jewish. They are also available in local libraries.

The walking tours are scheduled “a few times a year during nice weather,” said Olsen, and are announced in the Jewish Review. For more information, visit http://home.comcast.net/~smart_talk_publications or e-mail smart_talk_publications@comcast.net.