Jewish Heritage Collection: Oral history interview with Nat Shulman

OralHistoryResource

Jewish Heritage Collection: Oral history interview with Nat Shulman

1995

Nat Shulman was born in 1914 in Newark, New Jersey, to Bessie Tanzman and Abraham Shulman, who emigrated from Poland and Romania, respectively, in the early 1900s. Nat talks about his Jewish education at Adas Israel in Newark, his bar mitzvah, his mother’s preparations for the Sabbath, and his father’s produce business and wine-making avocation. Nat and his sister, Gertrude, and brother, Joseph (“Jerry”), grew up hearing Yiddish, Polish, and Russian spoken at home. Nat learned how to read and write Yiddish. In 1938, two years after graduating from Upsala College in East Orange, New Jersey, Nat married Lillian Rosenstein, also of Newark. They moved to Baltimore in the early 1940s, where Nat worked for the National Jewish Welfare Board (NJWB), one of the agencies that comprise United Service Organizations (USO). He describes the services the NJWB provided for the military men stationed in the Baltimore vicinity. He was transferred to Charleston, South Carolina, in 1943, where he and Lillian raised their children, Elaine, Sanford, and David. During the remainder of World War II, Nat coordinated with Jewish communities up and down the South Carolina coast to provide services and entertainment for Jewish military personnel. The NJWB sought to organize Jewish groups at the local level during peacetime as well, using the wartime model. The result in Charleston was the opening of the Jewish Community Center in September 1945 on St. Philip Street. Nat was its first director, a position he held for twenty-seven years. The interviewee discusses a number of topics regarding Charleston’s Jewish community: a failed attempt to organize a community center on George Street in the 1920s; relations among congregants of the Reform and Orthodox synagogues; distinctions made between Uptown Jews and Downtown Jews; how World War II, the Holocaust, and the State of Israel unified Jews; prejudice toward African Americans; school integration and the change in residential patterns that followed; memories of Joe Truere, Rabbi Jacob Raisin, and Rabbi Burton Padoll. Nat recalls what American Jews knew about what was happening to the Jews in Europe during the Second World War and comments on their response. He summarizes his efforts to fight discrimination against African Americans in the 1940s and ?50s; the founding of the Charleston Jewish Community Relations Committee in 1959; and the 1972 establishment of the Charleston Jewish Welfare Fund, later renamed the Charleston Jewish Federation (CJF). Nat details how the CJF has sponsored the settlement of more than 100 Russian refugees beginning in 1980, and he offers his view of what constitutes an antisemitic incident. Note: Special Collections, Addlestone Library, College of Charleston, is the repository for the Nat Shulman papers, the Jewish Community Center papers, the Charleston Jewish Community Relations Committee papers, and Charleston Jewish Federation publications.

Sound recording : 1 sound cassette : digital.Transcript : 34 p. ; 28 cm.

eng, Latn

Related Entities

There are 11 Entities related to this resource.

National Jewish Welfare Board

http://n2t.net/ark:/99166/w6v22xsh (corporateBody)

Origins of the National Jewish Welfare Board (1913-1919) Organized in 1917 to meet the needs of Jewish servicemen in the Armed Forces, the National Jewish Welfare Board (JWB) became a national federation of local agencies and social service institutions dedicated to meeting the social, cultural, intellectual, physical and spiritual needs of the American Jewish community. The roots of JWB can be traced to the founding of the Council of Young Men's Hebrew and Kindred Associations (YMHA-KA) ...

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Raisin, Jacob S. (Jacob Salmon), 1878-1946

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Shulman, Nat, 1914-2000,

http://n2t.net/ark:/99166/w6vd9nkm (person)

Born in New Jersey in 1914, Shulman became the first director of the Charleston Jewish Community Center in 1945, after working with the Jewish Welfare Board in the USO program. Shulman remained Director until 1972, when he became director of the Charleston Jewish Welfare Fund (renamed Charleston Jewish Federation in 1980.) He then served (1981-1993) as consultant. A recipient of national and local awards, Shulman served on many service, volunteer, and benevolent agencies. He helped found (1959) ...

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Shulman family.

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Rosengarten, Dale, 1948-...

http://n2t.net/ark:/99166/w6m04dd8 (person)