In the wake of the pogroms flam­ing across Rus­sia in the late 1890s, many Jews sought refuge in the Unit­ed States. South­ern New Jer­sey — Atlantic, Cape May, Cum­ber­land, Glouces­ter, and Salem coun­ties — became home to sev­er­al flour­ish­ing Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ties. The Sev­en­ty Shuls is tes­ta­ment to their rich and var­ied heritage.

In the ear­ly 1880s, Am Olam, a move­ment advo­cat­ing a return to the soil, emerged in Odessa and encour­aged the build­ing of agri­cul­tur­al set­tle­ments in the dias­po­ra. Most of the many attempts to estab­lish rur­al com­mu­ni­ties end­ed in fail­ure, but in south­ern New Jer­sey they took hold. The Hebrew Emi­grant Aid Soci­ety, a short-lived group found­ed in New York, and oth­er phil­an­thropic orga­ni­za­tions pur­chased land in Salem Coun­ty, an area of scrub brush. Soon, bar­racks and then homes were built. The nascent com­mu­ni­ty wel­comed forty-three Russ­ian fam­i­lies in May 1882, expand­ing to 125 with­in two months. Sup­port­ed by skilled work­ers, the new­com­ers cleared the land and plant­ed their first crops in time for the spring har­vest. The Alliance Colony, named for the Paris-based phil­an­thropy that helped fund it, is the begin­ning of the sto­ry Josh Cut­ler so lov­ing­ly tells.

Cut­ler has served as an admin­is­tra­tor in sev­er­al Jew­ish orga­ni­za­tions and is pur­su­ing a PhD in Holo­caust stud­ies. To do research for this book, he trav­eled from one end of South Jer­sey to the oth­er, doc­u­ment­ing the com­mu­ni­ties and the sev­en­ty syn­a­gogues that served them. Many were estab­lished by the new­com­ers in their East Euro­pean tra­di­tion. Unlike the ear­li­er Jew­ish set­tlers in the area, who were large­ly from Ger­many and Aus­tria, the new set­tlers, most­ly from Rus­sia, were Yid­dish speak­ers steeped in a broad array of Yid­dish cus­toms and tra­di­tions. The shuls served as com­mu­ni­ty cen­ters and schools and bul­warks of Yid­dish culture. 

In his pref­ace, Cut­ler lays the foun­da­tion for the evo­lu­tion and the unfor­tu­nate devo­lu­tion of this thriv­ing Yid­dishkeit cen­ter. By the begin­ning of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry and with the sec­ond gen­er­a­tion of immi­grants, life in the con­tem­po­rary Unit­ed States influ­enced these com­mu­ni­ties, as it has for so many oth­er waves of immi­grants. The arrival of post-Holo­caust immi­grants breathed a lit­tle new life into the East Euro­pean com­mu­ni­ties, but these immi­grants pre­ferred found­ing their own shuls to join­ing estab­lished ones. Grad­u­al­ly Yid­dish cul­ture gave way to main­stream Jew­ish life. A few of the ear­ly shuls are now muse­ums; in some cas­es their arks and rit­u­al objects have been incor­po­rat­ed into active syn­a­gogues, hon­or­ing the mem­o­ry of the ear­ly shuls. 

A large-for­mat vol­ume rich­ly illus­trat­ed with col­or pho­tographs and archival mate­r­i­al, The Sev­en­ty Shuls doc­u­ments the his­to­ry of each syn­a­gogue, from its estab­lish­ment through its many changes over the past 150 years. These rich sto­ries evoke the spir­it that built the Alliance Com­mu­ni­ty and the dis­tinc­tive move­ment it rep­re­sent­ed, a unique piece of South Jer­sey and Amer­i­can Jew­ish history.

Sev­en­ty Shuls strikes a per­son­al note for this review­er. My hus­band came from Vineland, and he was deeply attached to the Jew­ish his­to­ry of the area. On vis­its to his par­ents we passed through many of the towns Cut­ler doc­u­ments and spent time in the Pine Bar­rens and on the Atlantic City boardwalk.