In 1950, Vineland largely retained its rural, small-town character as a community of 30,000 nearly a century after its founding.
Farms and factories still mingled on its perfectly straight street grid. The descendants of Vineland’s original Italian immigrant settlers worked in garment, glassmaking, and food processing plants or grew vegetables and fruits on family-owned farms.
Grain silos towering over all the other buildings in town hinted at how another branch of agriculture—poultry farming—had come to dominate the city’s topography and the community’s identity. Vineland High School even nicknamed its sports teams the “Poultry Clan.”
Many of the local hatcheries and chicken feed mills were owned by Jewish businessmen, who catered to the community’s numerous Jewish farmers. Visitors might have noticed other signs of an outsized Jewish presence for a rural community Vineland’s size.
By 1950, Vineland had three synagogues and just as many Zionist groups plus a half-hour-long local radio show every Sunday morning called the Voice of Israel. Here, kosher butchers and delis, which had disappeared from much of rural America, shared the main commercial district with midcentury mainstays like an F.W. Woolworth five-and-dime store and a Pontiac car dealership.
On weekends, you could smell the bagels, pumpernickel rye, and onion rolls for sale at Freedman’s Bakery on Plum Street half a block away. Southern New Jersey had long been a magnet for Jewish immigrants from Europe seeking a better life. Idealistic young Russians arrived first in the 1880s. They built collective farming colonies amid the nearby wilderness of scrub oak and stunted pines.
In the late 1930s and early 1940s came some of the few escapees from Nazi Germany. These middle-aged lawyers and doctors were reduced to repurposing cotton feed bags as curtains, skirts, and bedspreads. Another group of refugees started to arrive in large numbers after World War II ended in 1945 as part of a broader settlement of Jewish displaced persons on American farms.
Thousands of Jewish refugees who came to the United States in the first decade after the war wound up on farms at a time when most American Jews had begun moving from city to suburb. More displaced persons settled on farms in and around Vineland than anywhere else. These survivors of what later became known as the Holocaust found an unlikely refuge and gateway to new lives in America on local poultry farms.
The new immigrants, mostly from Eastern Europe, were known as Grine (pronounced Grin-eh), a play on the Yiddish word for greenhorn. Rumors of easy money or the promise of a quieter, more independent life lured the sons and daughters of shopkeepers and entrepreneurs. The chickens didn’t care if they spoke Yiddish, and the Jewish charities helping them didn’t care that few had ever farmed before.
Grine here could take comfort in all the familiar Jewish cultural and religious institutions more typical in New York City while enjoying an idyllic rural life. Perhaps only in 1950s Vineland could a Jewish day school share the same stretch of rural road as a horse show. The survivors’ children grew up on ten-acre farms rather than walk-up apartments, exploring neighborhood sand washes and streams rather than playing stickball in alleys.
These novice farmers helped make New Jersey a poultry powerhouse that ranked in the top ten nationally in total egg production in the 1950s and supplied nearly one in five eggs to the New York City market. The survivors’ role in boosting the poultry industry remained largely unknown beyond south Jersey. ν
Excerpt is from Speaking Yiddish to Chickens, by Seth Stern. It is available for sale at Vineland Historical and Antiquarian Society, with proceeds benefitting the Society.
