Farmingdale Collection

The community of West Farms was one of several small communities in Howell Township, Monmouth County, New Jersey, where Jewish farmers settled early in the twentieth century. They called themselves the Farmingdale Jewish Community after the closest village where they shopped and banked. The community center they built was located in West Farms, but identified as the Farmingdale Jewish Community Center. (1) Although a few Jews had lived in New Jersey since colonial times, permanent communities did not begin to develop until the immigration of Jews from Germany after the 1848 revolutions. German Jewish communities developed in Asbury Park, Long Branch and other New Jersey towns. (2) It was not until after the pogroms and economic dislocations of the 1880s, however, that substantial numbers of Jews began to emigrate from Eastern Europe. For the multitude of Jews emigrating from Europe at the turn of the century, their American dream included a new option, that of owning land. In Eastern Europe, ninety five percent were forced to live within a circumscribed area known as the Pale. There, they were forbidden to own land and were limited to certain occupations: artisans, craftsmen, manual laborers, and petty merchants. (3) It has been estimated that 4 per cent of the remaining Jews lived in the more tolerant Galicia (part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) where a number of Jews actually did farm.

Most of the early 20th century Jewish immigrants settled in congested areas of major cities along the eastern seaboard of America. Fearing that the cities would not be able to absorb them, various organizations such as the Hebrew Emigration Aid Society and the Jewish Agricultural Society encouraged Jews to settle in rural areas. An unknown number left the cities for other parts of the country.

Several Jewish colonies, mostly cooperative farming enterprises, were founded in the trans-Mississippi West, but were not successful because of inhospitable climatic conditions and poor business planning. (4) More enduring were the colonies founded in the Vineland area of Cumberland County, New Jersey (Alliance, Brotmanville, Norma, Carmel and Rosenhayn) and Woodbine in Cape May County. (5) Although these colonies were also founded as experimental planned communities, they eventually evolved into settlements of individual farmers which were integrated into the larger Vineland Jewish community. (6)

The beginnings of the Farmingdale Jewish community are attributed to Benjamin Peskin and Israel Friedman who arrived in 1919. Although they were not the first Jewish farmers in the area, they were instrumental in the growth of a discernible community because of their connection with the Jewish Agricultural Society. The JAS helped them, and subsequently many other immigrants, to settle. (7)

The first years found immigrant farmers in Farmingdale struggling to adjust to a new life style in a place where they had no common language with their neighbors, no shared religion, and no knowledge of American rural ways or farming practices. It was difficult for them to make a living and many of the settlers suffered from loneliness, often going back to New York City to earn extra money or to visit relatives. The community gradually built institutions, however, like the Jewish Community Center, a combination of synagogue, meeting place and social hall, which was erected in 1928; previously religious services had been held in people's homes. In the early 1930s, the National Council of Jewish Women started weekend instruction in Yiddish in Farmingdale, and by 1934, a Yiddish school was formed affiliated with the Sholem Aleichem Folk Institute, where the children studied Yiddish language, literature and culture. The community eventually contained diverse social, cultural and political groups including the Spinoza Society, Discussion Group, feed buying and egg marketing cooperatives, (Yiddish) Farmers' Chorus and many other organizations.

Although the farm economy suffered during the depression, chicken farming became more profitable in the 1940s. Between 1940 and 1955, the output of poultry and eggs increased 231 percent in New Jersey, a development to which the farmers of Farmingdale and other rural Jewish communities made an important contribution. For instance, Farmingdale residents Louis and Milton Harwood invented and marketed "specking", a way of preventing chickens from pecking one another to death. (8)

During this period, the composition of the Farmingdale Jewish community changed as well. While most of the original settlers were Yiddish speakers from Eastern Europe, in the 1930s German Jews arrived fleeing Hitler, while in the 1940s American-born educated and professional Jews began to settle in Farmingdale looking for a better way of life. Finally in the early 1950s, displaced persons from Europe, many of whom were also Yiddish speaking, arrived in Farmingdale.

Throughout this period, the Farmingdale Jewish community was fairly isolated from its Christian neighbors, although the children attended local public schools. The early settlers reported instances of anti-semitism, particularly in the 1920s, when the Ku Klux Klan was active in New Jersey. In addition, some of the Jews living in nearby towns like Freehold looked down on the Jewish farmers, while many community residents, although they enjoyed farm life for themselves, encouraged their children to aspire to professional careers. (9)

By the mid-1950s, the Farmingdale Jewish community was in decline. Most importantly, the farm economy collapsed because of overproduction of eggs, the recession after the Korean War, and the federal government's withdrawal of price supports from eggs but not from grain. Furthermore, newly developed refrigerated trucks and railroad cars brought fresh eggs and other farm produce from the South and Midwest to Eastern markets. The New Jersey farmer was in an intolerable economic squeeze. As the economy collapsed, the political debates escalated. The community was subjected to investigations by the FBI, which found the farmers' cooperatives particularly suspect. People were forced to look for other ways of earning a living. Many left farming and Farmingdale altogether. By the early 1970s, when the original Community Center was moved to a new suburban location, the Farmingdale Jewish agricultural community had virtually disappeared.

(1) Personal communication from Gertrude Dubrovsky, January 1997.

(2) See Alan S. Pine, Peddler to Suburbanite: the History of the Jews of Monmouth County, New Jersey (Deal Park, NJ, 1981).

(3) Gertrude Dubrovsky, The Land was Theirs: Jewish Farmers in the Garden State (Tuscaloosa, 1992), p. 18.

(4) Uri D. Herscher, Jewish Agricultural utopias in America, 1880- 1910 (Detroit, 1981), pp. 31-72.

(5) See Joseph Brandes, Immigrants to Freedom: Jewish Communities in Rural New Jersey Since 1882 (Philadelphia, 1971), pp. 50-71.

(6) Ellen Eisenberg, Jewish Agricultural Colonies in New Jersey, 1882-1920 (Syracuse, N.Y., 1995), pp. 160-175.

(7) Dubrovksy, The Land was Theirs, p. 140. The remainder of this essay is taken from this source, and from her "The Rural Experience of Jews in Farmingdale, New Jersey," in Paul Stellhorn, ed., New Jersey's Ethnic Heritage (Trenton, 1978), pp. 37 58.

(8) Dubrovksy,The Land was Theirs, p. 140.

(9) Dubrovsky, "The Rural Experience of Jews in Farmingdale, New Jersey," p. 46.