Jewish Big Sisters: The Problem of a Great City and How the Big Sisters Are Trying to Meet It.
Jewish Women And Philanthropy:
Organizing The Jewish “Big Sisters”
[Philanthropy]. Jewish Big Sisters: The Problem of a Great City and How the Big Sisters Are Trying to Meet It. [New York: Jewish Big Sisters], 1916.
8vo.; gray printed wrappers, stapled.
First edition of this pamphlet advertising the work of the New York City based “Jewish Big Sisters” program. The pamphlet has two ambitions: to explain the program and to rally volunteers to the cause. Jewish women have a time-honored history of spear-heading philanthropic endeavors. In her landmark book The Jewish Woman Nahida Remy devotes an entire chapter to this phenomenon; UJE also attempts to account for the notable participation of Jews in charity projects:
It was the practice in Jewish communities, from time immemorial, for the best and most prominent persons to interest themselves in community affairs and charitable activities. Josephus states that, in the first century, when Palestine was stricken with a famine, Queen Helena of Adiabene sent shiploads of food to the foremost men of Jerusalem so that they might distribute it among the people...Here, then, is an explanation for the interesting phenomenon of some of the most prominent Jews in the United States devoting themselves so wholeheartedly to philanthropy.” (Vol. 6, pp. 124-6)
This pamphlet fills in a small part of that larger history. The Jewish Big Sisters was founded in 1913 “on the insistence of the judges that some Jewish Committee be established to care for the Jewish girl delinquents passing through the Children’s Court” (p. 9). By 1916 the organization’s mission had broadened to include prevention, targeting the daughters of immigrants—a population identified as particularly susceptible to the lures of corrupted American teenaged ways. “There is a gap here between the parents educated in Europe and the children brought up in America,” reason the Big Sisters, half-springing to the defense of their younger sisters. “The daughters educated in this country have absorbed the spirit of new-world independence which is so foreign to old-world habits that their parents cannot understand it and wrongly take it for waywardness” (p. 2).
The pamphlet’s authors offer a compromise measure: as an antidote to the fracturing of Jewish families along generational lines, the Big Sisters are advised to “go into the home as a friend,” to perform the ultimate of miracles—”the Big Sister can make intelligible to the Little Sister her mother’s point of view and rekindle in the girl faith in her mother’s judgment” (p. 4).
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