Dos Vashingtoner Leben

 I have been scouring around for Jewish history in Washington, DC for a few years now. Which means that I’m always eager to locate primary source material produced by the Washington area’s Jewish community. The community of Eastern European immigrants that comprised most of the District’s Jewish community from the 1880s to 1920s definitely engaged with one another in Yiddish. The fairly small size of that community means that little of the material survives and is accessible in the present day. When I learned of the digitized 1921 Vashingtoner Yidishe Shtime on the National Library of Israel’s website, I assumed this was a rare and unique publication. After all, how many Yiddish newspapers were actually printed in the District, and how many of those would be saved in a library somewhere?

It turns out that the New York Public Library maintained a subscription of another short lived Washington Yiddish newspaper from 1911. This paper was called Dos Vashingtoner Leben (The Washington Life דאס וואשינגטאנער לעבען). I requested the microfilm of this paper at the Dorot Jewish Division and I was able to view it on August 22. I made sure to bring a flashdrive (that ancient technology) so I could save scans of the paper. I scanned all 22 issues of the paper contained on the reel. The paper began in August 1911 and its first two issues were published monthly, each being eight pages in length. In September 1911, the paper transitioned to be a four page weekly paper. The microfilm had all the issues of the paper from August 1911 until February 23, 1912 missing just one issue from the last week of November.

Header of the August 15, 1911 issue of Dos Vashingtoner Leben

I have only had time to briefly skim through this paper, but I noticed a few general details about it. The publishers and editors of the paper, Reuben Finkelstein and Alfred Klein were both college educated. In the first issue of the paper they ran advertisement for the “Capitol Ideal School” that they ran together. The school seems to have offered adult education to help people (presumably Jewish immigrants) navigate the US economy. In later issues of the paper, the Finkelstein and Klein individually advertised their services as financial bookeepers. The paper itself contains some local news, editorials, poetry, a serial novel, and plenty of ads for local Jewish businesses. In December 1911, the editors of the paper started circulating a petition to ecourage the Washington public library to create a Yiddish book collection. There are even some ads for Yiddish theater productions that traveled to the District. The paper seems to skew secular with more information from the Jewish Workers Circle than from any of the synagogues. This is in contrast to the later Washington Jewish Voice that was much more focused on the religious Jewish community.

Here are the issues that I scanned:

1-1 Aug. 15, 1911	1-2 Sept. 15, 1911	1-3 Sept. 29, 1911	1-4 Oct. 13, 1911
1-5 Oct. 20, 1911	1-6 Oct. 27, 1911	1-7 Nov. 3, 1911	1-8 Nov. 10, 1911
1-9 Nov. 17, 1911	1-11 Dec. 1, 1911	1-12 Dec. 8, 1911	1-13 Dec. 15, 1911
1-14 Dec. 22, 1911	1-15 Dec. 29, 1911	1-16 Jan. 5, 1912	1-17 Jan. 12, 1912
1-18 Jan. 19, 1912	1-19 Jan. 26, 1912	1-20 Feb. 2, 1912	1-21 Feb. 9, 1912
1-22 Feb. 16, 1912	1-23 Feb. 23, 1912