Credit to JHS
The late Dr. Clement Price, who taught history at Rutgers University-Newark, was the founder of the Clement A. Price Institute on Ethnicity, Culture, and the Modern Experience. He was also a member of Greater MetroWest’s Jewish Historical Society (JHS) since its inception in 1990. On the occasion that he had questions about Jewish Newark he told researchers to contact JHS. If, he said, the information they were seeking was not in the society’s archives, then its staff knew where to find it.
This brings me to the role JHS played in locating information for “Empty box in NJ basement held key to Israel’s founding” (May 9). It was the JHS staff who knew the story of guns stored under the floor of the bimah at Irvington’s Congregation B’nai Israel. And it was the staff that provided information from its archives about the central figure in this story, A. Albert Eichler, as its archives preserved the synagogue’s newsletter, “The Temple Messenger.” I knew where to find Eichler’s daughter, Barbara Nusbaum, and the rest, as they would say, “is history.”
This is not the first time the JHS has alerted NJJN’s editors to stories that would be of interest to Greater MetroWest’s Jewish community. The society’s traveling exhibits and public forums with subjects of Jewish and general interest are why the JHS and NJJN have had such a productive relationship. We thank NJJN for the opportunity to set the record straight.
Linda Forgosh
Executive director and curator
Jewish Historical Society of NJ
Whippany
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