Youngstown Jewry's response to Nazism and the refugee crisis

Abstract

Claurence J. Strouss's convening a meeting on 21 August 1935 at the Tod House in Youngstown (Ohio) ushered in a new organizational era for the city's disparate Jewish communities. Strouss - president and general manager of the local Strouss-Hirshberg Company - embodied the social advancements and successful assimilation over the past century of the city's earliest German Jewish immigrant families. The drastic influx of eastern European Jewish immigrants to Youngstown from 1880 to 1924 transformed the city's demographics, and altered specifically the German Jewish community's cultural, religious, and political traditions. Severe reversals in American immigration policy following World War I reduced the once-constant flow of new immigrant laborers to the burgeoning industrial city of Youngstown. National and international Jewish organizations' innumerable demands for monetary assistance - in response to immigration restrictions, an economic depression, and the development of totalitarian governments in Europe - placed excessive burdens on Youngstown's fractured Jewish communities. The twenty-six men and women who met at the Tod House responded to these demands by creating a central Jewish organization aimed at merging local, national, and overseas appeals into a single united effort. The Jewish Federation of Youngstown's annual fundraising campaigns from 1935 to 1941 marked Youngstown Jewry's first unified response to the evils of Nazism and the subsequent refugee crisis. The following essay will chronicle the development of Jewish communities throughout Youngstown and detail how external pressures following World War I transformed the city's diverse Jewish communities into a unified organizational body.