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KVELLING
100 years of culture

BY SETH GITELL

A century after its founding by immigrant Jewish socialists from Eastern Europe, the Workmen’s Circle — known in Yiddish as the Arbeter Ring — is reaching out to a new generation of American Jews.

At one time the Workmen’s Circle had branches throughout the Boston area, including Chelsea, East Boston, and Dorchester. The group has had a rich past: it broke with the Communists at the time of the Russian Revolution and quarreled with the governments of both Stalin’s Russia and Hitler’s Germany, recalls Gus Tyler, who has been a member since the 1920s. It was known for perpetuating Yiddish, the tongue of Eastern European Jews, and serving as a mutual-aid society for immigrants. But a vibrant future seemed unlikely when its last area school closed in the 1970s. Many of its members, veterans of the trade-union movement, had died off. Its emphasis on socialist and secular values appeared hopelessly dated.

These days, though, Jewish cultural and religious institutions are attracting renewed interest, even as studies find that Jews marry non-Jews at a rate greater than 50 percent. And the Workmen’s Circle, too, has made a bit of a comeback: the group will mark its 100th anniversary with a cultural festival and concert in Newton, which will feature klezmer music, a re-creation of an immigrant Jewish neighborhood, and traditional deli fare.

Lisa Gallatin, the group’s Boston district director, says that secular High Holiday services that drew a mere 50 people eight years ago now attract more than 10 times that number. (Because the group’s founders were militant secularists who shunned all trappings of religion, they might have seen some irony in the idea of a “secular High Holiday,” says Gallatin, but the current generation does not feel this way.) The group, headquartered on Beacon Street in Brookline, is now looking to purchase a larger building — its first move in almost 40 years. Almost 100 students attend the group’s Sunday school, which combines secular Jewish culture and history with progressive values. Last year, the students — weaned on tales of labor activism and the fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York — picketed Niketown to protest the sneaker manufacturer’s use of sweatshop labor.

“What you have now is highly assimilated Jews who are yearning for some connection to some rich, vibrant Jewish culture and don’t find it in some sterile suburban synagogue,” says Gallatin.

Jonathan Sarna, a Brandeis University professor, says the group has not been particularly successful at stemming assimilation in this country. “In a long-term view, Jewish secularism turned out not to have a staying power that its founders imagined,” says Sarna. “It’s not an idea that was easily passed on from one to the next. Many of those trained in Workmen’s Circle schools either became religious or intermarried.”

But Gallatin, a long-time labor activist who discovered the Workmen’s Circle relatively recently, disagrees. “This was the place that I found my Jewish home,” she says. “With the union connection, the social-justice connection, this is the right place for me and my family.”

The Workmen’s Circle cultural festival and concert, “From the Lower East Side to Blue Hill Avenue,” will take place April 29 at Temple Reyim, 1860 Washington Street, Newton, from 2 to 5 p.m. Admission is $15, or $5 for children under 13. Call (617) 566-6281.

Issue Date: April 26 - May 3, 2001