Jewish Trenton’s Third Generation

 Jewish Trenton’s Third Generation 

The 1929 Census records 4,100 Jews. In 1937, a Jewish census study counted 7,191 Jews (about six percent of Trenton's population). Statistics show that thirty‑two Jewish philanthropic organizations existed, including six synagogues. Fifty-nine percent of Jews worked in commerce.

The 1949 and the 1961 censuses documented increases in the professions, which in 1970, probably amounted to nearly 30 percent of all professionals. In 1970, there were 40 Jewish philanthropic organizations, including three Conservative, two Orthodox, and one Reform congregations. By the beginning of the new millennium, the community within Trenton's city limits had diminished to three congregations: one Orthodox, one Conservative, and a Reform congregation.

In 1938, Professor Marcus L. Hansen formulated for students of immigrant history the notion that "what the son wishes to forget the grandson wishes to remember." The third generation regularly meant the approaching dissolution of the ethnic group, which the first generation had formed and with which the second generation had perforce been identified.⁷¹

Investigating this premise, John Appel found that, unlike Poles or Italians, the third generation only retained their grandfather’s religion. Jewish community demonstrated their Jewishness, not by the Orthodoxy of the first generation, but by accommodation, that which other groups achieve by dissolution and disintegration. Far from resisting the process of acculturation, Jews submitted themselves to it, but with positive effects. (Somewhat akin to what Jacob Riis hypothesized some 45 years prior). Even before the 1968 race riot, Trenton’s Jewish population drifted out of Trenton to the suburbs.

Today, Trenton’s Jewish community is a nostalgic memory. The few remaining Jews are well over the age of fifty; children are few. Even the Jewish populations in the contiguous Ewing Township and Hamilton Township are moving to the exurbs.

The Lawrenceville and Yardley-Makefield areas are home to substantial numbers of Jewish child-raising families.

The burgeoning residential areas center in East Windsor (Twin Rivers Planned Unit Development), West Windsor, Roosevelt, and Princeton.

By 2006, there were only two congregations within the city limits, Congregation Brothers of Israel (200 families) and Har Sinai Temple (500 families), both of which were relocating.

	Trenton Jewish Professionals 1915 - 1956
Professions	1915	1935	1946	1956
Accountants	0%	36%	40%	48%
Physicians	6%	13%	14%	24%
Lawyers	12%	25%	29%	37%
Druggists	16%		15%	20%

(Source: Donnelly's Trenton City Directory for raw data)