Eyewitness to

the Holocaust and World War II

Voices & Stories of an Era

Antisemitism

Bess Winograd
Antisemitism & the Jewish Experience in Rochester, Pennsylvania

After her marriage to Emil, Bess Winograd moved to Rochester, Pennsylvania to help run the family movie business, which included the well known Oriental Theater built by her husband’s father. Eventually, the Winograds would own four theaters (the Colonial, Home, Majestic, and Family).

During the early 1930s, the Rochester Jewish community was small, having only one shul (synagogue), so they had to rely on religious support from outside the community, such as the Agudath Achim congregation in Beaver Falls or from Pittsburgh. As one of the few Jewish families in Rochester, Bess and her family often felt anti-Semitism from townsfolk who, in her words, didn’t know anything about Jews except for the bigotry they learned from their families, the community, or the churches.

Shortly after her move to Rochester, Bess witnessed a Ku Klux Klan rally where a cross was burned on the lawn of the Beaver County Courthouse.

Interview

This select clip from an oral history interview reveals Bess’ concern for her family’s safety because of anti-Jewish attitudes and bigotry in Rochester and Beaver County. However, Bess ultimately concludes that she has mixed feelings about living in Rochester. The town provided a good opportunity to make a living, and it was overall a good place to live.

National Council of Jewish Women
You said seven years after your marriage and you went into the theater business into Rochester (Pennsylvania). You owned the theater there. How much of the Jewish community was there in Rochester when you got there?

Bess Winograd

Very little. There were no shuls so we built some two years after we got there, because there were just one or two in each little community. Rochester, proper, had maybe twelve [congregants] and that was a large group. I realized very early that if I was going to raise Jewish children, I’d have to work very hard at it, because we were surrounded by anti-Semites, by Ku Kluxers, by Jew haters. It was very easy for people to hate the Jews because they didn’t know them.

All they heard was what they had heard from their parents, and whatever . . . churches . . . So we had an uphill battle, always. My daughter never had a Jewish child in the twelve years she was in Rochester [schools]. She was alone then. My son, I think he had two or three children in his classes when he came here. I spent 27 years across from the Catholic church, just catty-corner from the church. And all my children saw were people going to church, this constant stream. The shul only opened up for holidays or for yahrzeit, or something special, otherwise it was closed. We couldn’t afford a Rabbi, anyway, there were not enough people.

NCJW

You used to connect to services on the High Holidays?

Bess Winograd

Well they would bring somebody in to do that. And then there were a couple of men who knew how to conduct services. I happened to have a child who at the age of ten was begging for bar mitzvah, which is a little bit rare, and I heard people say you’re insane. What do you want to teach him a dead language for? It’s dead. Why can’t you recognize it. Well, we brought in a young man, a young rabbi from Beaver Falls, who was part of the community . . . . and he was bar mitzvahed. Little did I know that it was so deep in his heart that he would one day follow through on this. [Note: Bess’ son became a rabbi]

NCJW

In terms of the social life in the community. Did you Jewish families just socialize among each other and did you socialize with non-Jewish neighbors?

Bess Winograd

Well, initially thinking back fifty years ago I think we pretty much hung together. They really didn’t want any part of us. What really brought us together was the war, when our children went into the service and things began happening. When we went out . . . .

NCJW

That was WWII then?

Bess Winograd

WWII. People were calling and inquiring about my son in the service. I didn’t think to pay any attention. It was a difficult life. I didn’t say that I was in “24 hours a day” mother. I was a “30 hours a day” mother. I never stopped for a moment, because I couldn’t trust the people there. And now they found anti-Semitism in the [inaudible] one time and I was very upset. And I said we blamed Hitler for the message. Why, I can’t afford to die. I can’t trust you people with my children.

[Someone said to me] I want you to go see Dr. Sorenson. I said I knew him when he was a kid. And I’m no crazier than you are, and you know it. I just can’t trust you people with my children. I can’t even go, because you don’t care what happens to us. And I do. I’d say, it was a constant problem. And it was.

I never gave up fighting. I never trusted them. I lived among them. We earned our living from them. They came with great big smiles. And I couldn’t ever trust them.

When I first came to Rochester my sister came down [from Pittsburgh] . . . . we saw a Ku Klux Klan demonstration, in action, and I was petrified. I was frightened. My God where have I come with my children? And I felt then that I can never trust the people that I was among. It was probably the last demonstration in the valley and I saw a cross being burned on the Beaver County Courthouse lawn. And I never got over it. I never forgot it. However, there are fine people there who didn’t . . . they tended to look the other way. And I couldn’t understand because I had lived in the city.

NCJW

You mean Jewish people?

Bess Winograd

Jewish people who didn’t even pay attention to them. [They said] “Oh, so what?” Well that “so what” attitude is fine if it isn’t anything important. And maybe if you were born in the community you can live with it because it’s always been this way. But I grew up in the city . . . but I was always on the alert. I don’t think I ever trusted the people that I lived among.

NCJW

What was the main industry? What [employed] most people in the Valley . . .

Bess Winograd

Well, Rochester was a railroad town. And the Olive Works, the Olive Stove Works, was a very big thing. The Fry Glass Works. This is Fry Glass right here [taps on glass]. Fry Glass at the time was a very big thing. And all of this has disappeared, the railroad has disappeared, and the glass works, Olive works, Fry Glass has disappeared. This stuff was sent all over the world from Rochester, Pa.

I have very mixed feelings about my life there. It was a beautiful, rich life because I could make it there. Because I refused to be destroyed by what was around me. I wouldn’t let them affect me the way they hoped they could.

Antisemitism of the Pre-War Years

KKK in Beaver County

The scope of Klan activity throughout mainstream America during the 1920s was widespread, and the Klan’s activism was felt from Washington DC to Beaver County. The Klan helped shaped the Immigration Act of 1924, reducing Jewish immigration and nearly stopping Asian immigration completely. It influenced eugenics-minded laws in thirty states that permitted forced sterilization disproportionately among African American women and other minorities. The Klan successfully created a national movement forcing school boards to remove textbooks that speak unfavorably about our nation’s Founders. Moreover, the Klan was instrumental in reshaping our notion of patriotism.

We contend that since the 1920s (an era known as the Klan’s second coming), we still carry with us a certain heritage of ideals, beliefs, and attitudes that continue to frame social, economic, and political issues. As historian Peter Amann writes in Vigilante Fascism, “Even though the collapse of the second Ku Klux Klan by the mid-1920s undoubtedly left organized nativism in one of its periodic troughs, there is no reason to suppose that the attitudes and resentments on which the Klan had fed had suddenly vanished.”

In Beaver County history, references to the Klan are hard to find outside of the 1920s. Locally, formally chartered Klaverns in Ellwood, Rochester (“Junction City Klan”), Ambridge, Beaver, Ohioville (“Midland Klan”), Sewickley, and East Liverpool (“Columbiana County Klan”) went out of business, so to speak. But the 1930s—and beyond—substantiates Peter Amann’s claim that the Klan’s world view and ideology (e.g., attitudes toward patriotism, law and order, vigilantism, as well as grievances toward race, immigration, and organized labor) didn’t suddenly vanish. In some respects, the Klan never left Beaver County.

~From “Carrying Our History Forward: The Klan’s Living Legacy.” Public History Matters – Critical Essays and Thoughts on Local History.

Local Courts Recognize KKK as Hate Group

Knights of Ku Klux Klan, Inc. v. Strayer

In Ku Klux Klan v. John F. Strayer et al., the KKK brought suit against banished klansmen John F. Strayer, Dr. Chas S. Hunter, Dr Charles F. Oyer, Van A. Barrickman and William C Davis in the United States District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania. The KKK asserted that the defendants were no longer entitled to use the Klan’s name, privileges, rights or regalia.

The case presented evidence of nefarious KKK activities in Western Pennsylvania and Beaver County. According to the National Archives,

“Through various testimonies, the judge had found that the Ku Klux Klan had been responsible for numerous horrific crimes in western Pennsylvania. Some of their crimes included the kidnapping of a three-year-old child who was never found in Beaver County. Also, the court found, “On the 6th day of July, 1923, under the direct orders of Sam D. Rich, Grand Dragon of the state of Pennsylvania, a band of seven or more men were sent into Beaver county to punish a negro. Pursuant to this unlawful purpose, they stopped the victim on the tracks of a railroad, thrust revolvers against the body of the negro, bound and gagged him, and threw him face downward in an automobile, the occupants of the machine sitting with their feet upon him. They then took him to Patterson Heights, a suburb of Beaver Falls, and, although earnestly protesting his innocence, tied a rope around his neck and threw it over the limb of a tree and swung him from the ground. After being thus suspended for a time, they then let him down, obtained a confession through these circumstances of duress and punishment, and, after kicking him in the stomach and otherwise abusing him, left him and returned to Pittsburgh.”

District Judge Thomson states his opinion of the KKK in Western Pennsylvania:

“In addition to this, bands known as “Knight Riders,” or the “black-robed gang,” armed, equipped, and masked, are formed and operated here and there throughout the country, both organizations being used at times as instruments of terror, oppression, and violence, and being thus a continuing menace to the public peace and destructive of the public order. The evidence in this case established conclusively gross violations of the law committed by the plaintiff within the Western district of Pennsylvania . . .
“In view of all the facts disclosed by the evidence, the plaintiff corporation, stigmatized as it is by its unlawful acts and conduct, could hardly hope for judicial assistance in a court of the United States, which is highly commissioned to extend to all litigants before it, without distinction of race, creed, color, or condition, those high guarantees of liberty and equality vouchsafed by the Constitution of the United States. A court whose duty it is to recognize and uphold religious freedom as the first fruits of our civilization, to secure to every accused the right to full knowledge of the accusation against him, and a fair and impartial trial of the issue before a jury of his peers; a court which fully recognizes that this is a government of law, and not of men, and that no man shall be deprived of his life, his liberty, or his property without due process of law.
“This unlawful organization, so destructive of the rights and liberties of the people, has come in vain asking this court of equity for injunctive or other relief. They come with filthy hands and can get no assistance here.”
THOMSON, District Judge. Knights of Ku Klux Klan, Inc. v. Strayer, 26 F.2d 727, (W.D. Pa. 1928)

Check It Out: Pennsylvania’s Dark History of Hate

[Excerpt] At its brief height in the mid-1920s, the Klan had perhaps 250,000 members in Pennsylvania, perhaps a quarter of whom lived in the counties surrounding Pittsburgh. We have detailed records of that membership, and we see how the Klan organized the white Protestant population of whole communities and industries. The city in the nation with the highest proportion of Klan members was Altoona. Actually, these were not Klansmen but “Klanspersons,” the movement taking a pioneering line in gender-neutral terminology. That may sound like a whimsical trivia note, but it actually highlights the movement’s broad appeal to Protestant women, and its use of ideologies of sexual purity and white womanhood.

Modern readers might be amazed to see the Klan so firmly rooted so far from its Southern roots, but at this point, the sect had firmly moved its heart to the North and the Midwest, where its chief—but not exclusive—raison d’être was anti-Catholicism. That in fact goes far to explain the Klan’s sharp decline after 1924, when a draconian Immigration Act satisfied the Klan’s core demand for a steep reduction in Catholic migrants.
But the Klan had other grievances, which were conveniently summarized by the popular tag explaining the group’s name in terms of its bogeymen—“Kike, Koon, and Kath’lic.” The Klan’s anti-Semitism, which was always important to its ideology and propaganda, become central in the 1930s, largely in response to the New Deal and Franklin Roosevelt—or in the propagandist language of the time, of President Rosenfeld and his Jew Deal.