Triangle Fire Chalking Links a Shul to Its Past

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.forward.com/articles/126988/

By Josh Nathan-Kazis
Published March 31, 2010, issue of April 09, 2010.

On the morning of the 99th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, Esther Malka Boyarin is sweeping trash off the stoop of the Stanton Street Shul, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.


In Memory: Esther Malka Boyarin memorializes a Triangle fire victim in front of the Stanton Street Shul.


Boyarin is not the janitor — she’s a synagogue board member. But such distinctions are blurred at the synagogue, one of the poorest of the few remaining in the neighborhood whose storied streets once teemed with newly arrived Eastern European Jews.

The stoop clean, Boyarin kneels on the sidewalk with a few pieces of chalk and deliberately writes a name, an age and an address using different colored sticks:

Louis Rosen, 33, 174 Attorney Street.

As the synagogue’s rabbi and a few onlookers stand by, Boyarin adds another phrase: “We Remember.” Finally, someone lights a yahrzeit candle atop the temporary shrine.

Rosen was one of 146 people killed in the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire on March 25, 1911. The victims, mostly young Jewish and Italian immigrant women, were trapped behind doors that were locked by managers protecting against theft. The outrage over their deaths brought about sweeping new workplace-safety laws. For the descendants of the communities the victims left behind, their deaths serve as a reminder of a Jewish reality that now seems very distant.

But not for Boyarin. She has flown in for the occasion from North Carolina, where her husband holds a distinguished professorship in the religious studies department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Despite his recent posting there, she still considers the Avenue A building in which she lived for some 30 years to be her home. She returned to make Passover there and to be with her community — and for this ceremony.

FULL story at link.

[rockymountaindem]

1. Thanks for posting

I'm glad people still mark that tragedy.

[WorseBeforeBetter]

2. It depresses me to think of how few Americans are even aware of...

the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. There have been many dark events in our country's history, but this one particularly gets to me.

Thank goodness for women like Mrs. Boyarin.

[Arctic Dave]

3. It is part of the cirriculum for Fire Protection Engineers.

[WorseBeforeBetter]

4. Good. It should also be part of a curriculum on labor for...

high school students. It could be already, but I doubt it.

[Renegades of Funk]

7. High School

I remember touching on it, in regards to reform and progressive laws.

[WorseBeforeBetter]

8. Well, that's something.

We never touched on it, but high school was decades ago for me...

[starroute]

5. My mother once told me my grandmother had dreamed about it before it happened

Then I asked my grandmother, and she said no, it wasn't the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, it was another one like it that also had women screaming and jumping out of windows. But I've looked around and never found any mention of a similar disaster, so I still don't know the truth of the matter. My grandmother was given to having occasional precognitive flashes, though, so I'm certain there was something to the story.

What's a definite fact is that in March of 1911, my grandmother was 20 years old, living on Avenue A on the Lower East Side and working as a hat-maker. (She married my grandfather just a month after that and went to live in Brooklyn.) So the fire would have struck very close to home.

And it's also a fact that the Triangle Shirtwaist fire was part of my family mythology as I was growing up -- along with the Spanish flu of 1919, which killed my other grandmother before she was 30. Those were hard, painful times, and most of us have no inkling of it.

[roguevalley]

6. my grandma spoke of the flu with fear in her voice even at 90

[WorseBeforeBetter]

9. Interesting family history...

thanks for sharing.

[amborin]

10. too late to recommend; reminds me of the Thailand factory fire:

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/may2003/kade-m16.shtml