Jersey Shore Medical Center. This 502-bed acute care facility in Neptune traces its roots to Ann May Hospital, which was founded in Spring Lake between 1903 and 1905 to provide homeopathic nursing care. In 1932 the hospital moved to Neptune, where physical additions and an increased range of services resulted in the creation of Jersey Shore Medical Center-Fitkin Memorial Hospital. With over thirty cardiologists on staff, JSMC is a center for cardiac services, including myocardial revascularization. The facility is also a regional trauma center. JSMC is affiliated with the Cancer Institute of New Jersey and is a member of the University Health System, comprising New Jersey’s major teaching hospitals.
Jewelry industry. Through the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, Newark was a major national jewelry center. The industry originated in 1801, when Epaphras Hinsdale established the country’s first factory manufacturing only jewelry. Until then, jewelry had been "bespoke’—made to order. The Newark jewelry industry began as small shops that gradually expanded into partnerships. Apprentices, many emigrating from Germany, worked for these companies and either stayed at the same company until they retired or went on to form their own establishments.
Hinsdale’s shop served as a paradigm for the jewelry manufacturing industry. John Taylor became a partner in 1804 and, after Hinsdale’s death in 1811, took Isaac Baldwin into the business. Together Taylor and Baldwin radically changed the way jewelry was made. They introduced machines into the process, established markets across the country serviced by traveling salesmen—also known as jobbers—and opened a sales office in New York City. Many Taylor and Baldwin apprentices, including James Madison Durand of Durand and Company, Aaron Carter of Carter, Gough, and Company, and William Riker of Riker Brothers later became prominent jewelers.
Large-scale manufacture of jewelry in this country began in the 1840s. As the nation expanded from coast to coast, people wanted to show off their rising prosperity. To meet the increasing demand for jewelry, innovators devised machines to speed manufacturing. William C. Edge of William C. Edge Company is credited with forty to fifty inventions, including techniques and machines that reduced the cost of woven chains from a dollar per foot to two cents per foot. George Krementz, founder of Krementz and Company, revolutionized the manufacture of the collar button so that it could be made in one piece in either rolled gold plate or ten- to eighteen-karat gold. Halsey Larter of Larter and Sons created the spring-back stud to secure the stud in the shirt. Herpers Brothers, a findings manufacturer, contributed two breakthrough advances. Its founder, Ferdinand Herpers, patented the first prong setting for gemstones, and an employee, August Knaus, introduced the first safety catch.
Durand and Company, Newark, gold testimonial medallion made for Mayor Thomas B. Peddie, 1868.
Newark manufacturing jewelers not only distributed their jewelry to retail outlets around the country but also made exclusive jewelry for prominent retailers. These included Tiffany and Company, Starr and Marcus, and Theodore B. Starr in New York; Bailey, Banks, and Biddle and Caldwell and Company in Philadelphia; Bigelow and Kennard in Boston; Duhme and Company in Cincinnati; Jaccard and Company in St. Louis; M. W. Galt and Brothers in Washington, D.C.; and Samuel Kirk and Son in Baltimore.
The Newark jewelry industry grew rapidly. In 1867 there were thirty factories. By 1872, the total annual product of all the jewelry manufacturers amounted to $5 million, a sum matched by only one other Newark manufacturing industry, leather making. That same year, the Newark Industrial Exhibition was held, providing the first opportunity for jewelers to show off their wares to the public. Nine jewelers contributed exhibits. One of these was the display of Durand and Company’s case of diamonds and exquisitely fine jewelry, valued at some $120,000. In 1878, Carter, Howkins, and Sloan (later known as Carter, Gough, and Company) became the largest jewelry factory in the world, boasting an annual output of $2 million.
Newark jewelers designed distinctive jewelry to be worn during the day by "average” Americans of both sexes. They did not attempt to compete with designs by New York makers whose jewelry glittered with elaborate gem-stones and diamond patterns. Newark jewelry was typically realized in sterling silver, ten-, fourteen- and eighteen-karat gold, and platinum. It was often enameled and set with gem-stones and freshwater pearls. This was tasteful jewelry that a relatively large segment of the population at the turn of the last century could afford. Diamonds served as "sparkle points,” glittering in the new incandescent light.
In the nineteenth century, fashionable designs for women included mourning jewelry as well as necklaces, lockets, rings, and bracelets featuring cameos, mosaics, coral, pearl, and jet. Brooches were enameled or set with colored gemstones. The period’s interest in nature was reflected by a plethora of animal designs—insects, birds, lizards, bats, and the mythological griffin—and flowers, the perennial favorite. Art nouveau jewelry was produced by many houses; Rikers Brothers and Whiteside and Blank, for example, made jewelry with plique a jour enameling, and two silver-making firms, Unger Brothers and William B. Kerr Company, dominated the market for sterling silver buckles and belt pins. Other makers produced accessories such as chatelaines, vanity cases, card cases, spectacle cases, cigarette boxes, match safes, lorgnettes, posy holders, folding fans, and bib and napkin clips. Larter and Sons, Carrington and Company, and others specialized in men’s jewelry— collar buttons, sleeve buttons, sleeve links, stud sets, watch chains, watch fobs, belt buckles, suspender buckles, rings, and scarf pins. Whitehead and Hoag Company concentrated on fraternal jewelry and badges.
In the twentieth century, as styles changed, Newark jewelers adapted their stock to include rectilinear art deco designs. The industry had continued to grow impressively. By 1914 there were 122 factories with 3,610 employees. By 1929, 90 percent of the fourteen-karat gold jewelry and 50 percent of the eighteen-karat gold jewelry made in this country was produced in Newark. In that year, just before the stock market crash, the city housed 144 manufacturing jewelers with an annual product of over $22 million. Soon afterward, as the country entered the Great Depression, demand for high-quality merchandise dropped, and many jewelers were forced out of business during the 1930s. Those who survived turned their production to less expensive merchandise. For example, by the end of the 1930s, Krementz and Company had converted a majority of its stock to rolled-gold-plate jewelry.
The 1940s brought renewed, though temporary, vigor to the industry. Less formal, sportier modern styles dominated Newark jewelry. In 1954 the annual product amounted to $50 million. Within ten years, however, the figure had dwindled to $10 million. Some jewelers closed their doors, while others relocated nearby. Jabel, for example, moved to Irvington, Larter and Sons to Laurence Harbor, and Erwin Reu to Springfield. Krementz and Company, which remains as one of the last jewelers in Newark, is a worthy symbol of what was once a true golden age for the city.
Jewish Historical Society of Central Jersey. Founded in 1977 by Ruth Marcus Patt, the society is located in New Brunswick and serves all of Central New Jersey. Its mission is to promote, research, and publish all facets of the history of the Jewish community in the Central Jersey region. It maintains a research library with book and manuscript collections, mounts exhibitions, sponsors lectures, holds genealogy workshops, and publishes a newsletter and a series of pamphlets relating to New Jersey history and bibliography. Publications include those on the Sephardim of New Jersey, the Jewish experience at Rutgers University, and the Workmen’s Circle in New Jersey.
Jewish Historical Society of MetroWest. Founded in 1990 by Ruth Fein and affiliated with the United Jewish Federation of MetroWest, the society is located in Whippany and serves all of Essex and Morris counties and the surrounding region. It maintains a research library with archival collections, books, newspapers and indexes, maps, audiovisual materials, and oral history interviews. The society also mounts exhibitions, sponsors lectures, holds workshops, and publishes a newsletter. It sponsored a major exhibition in 1995 and commissioned a comprehensive history of the Jewish community of MetroWest in 1999.
Jews. The Garden State’s community of Jews, 460,000 strong in 2000, was built principally from three successive waves of emigration to the United States. Sephardic Jews, expelled from Spain and Portugal, were the first to arrive. By 1698, the merchant Aaron Louzada and his family—generally agreed to be New Jersey’s first Jewish settlers—had built a home in Bound Brook. Sephardic Jews were followed in the 1840s by German Jews and, in the 1880s, by eastern European Jews fleeing oppression.
Most of the arrivals in the third wave were processed on Ellis Island. Contrary to popular belief, two-thirds of the twelve million immigrants who came through Ellis Island first set foot in America not on Manhattan, but in New Jersey. They were ferried to the Central New Jersey Railroad Station in Jersey City, where they took trains to points in New Jersey and elsewhere in the United States.
The majority of New Jersey’s immigrant Jews settled in poor, ghetto like sections of cities often referred to as "Jew towns.” The Third Ward of Newark was home to most of the city’s Jews in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; by 1948, there were 56,800 Jews in Newark and fifty synagogues.
Jules Nelson at his bar mitzvah, New Brunswick, 1919.
Many of the talents that Jews brought from abroad found ready employment in the growing industrial and commercial enterprises of Newark. The poverty of the initial immigrants only increased their desire to succeed through education. This central value of Jewish life helped move the immigrants up the economic ranks from peddlers to store owners to entry into the professions. Networks of family, friends, and often strangers provided assistance for Jews to move to the state and then to colonize its cities and, later, its suburbs.
Other New Jersey cities also had thriving Jewish communities. For example, the state’s first congregation, B’nai Jeshurun, was founded in Paterson in 1848. In the early decades of the twentieth century Jews were prominent in Paterson manufacturing industries and were instrumental to the growth of the American labor movement. Nathan Barnert, who immigrated to the United States in 1849 as a poor boy of eleven, made his fortune in Paterson and was twice elected mayor of the city. Many Jewish and non-Jewish institutions founded through his philanthropy persist to this day.
Jews sought freedom from urban constraints by moving to the suburbs. Jewish settlement in Newark’s surrounding towns, such as Hillside, Livingston, and the Oranges, had been occurring steadily from the 1920s through the 1950s, but accelerated after the Newark riots of 1967. Similarly, Cherry Hill saw a large influx of Camden’s Jews, Princeton and surrounding towns received Jews from Trenton, and many of New Brunswick’s Jews crossed the Raritan to adjoining Highland Park. In his 1959 novella Goodbye, Columbus, Philip Roth, a Newark native, described the common pattern of generational movement of Jews in New Jersey: "The old Jews like my grandparents had struggled and died, and their offspring had struggled and prospered, and moved further and further west, towards the edge of Newark, then out of it, and up the slope of the Orange Mountains, until they had reached the crest and started down the other side, pouring into Gentile territory as the Scotch-Irish had poured through the Cumberland Gap.”
Jews experienced anti-Semitism once their numbers increased to a substantial presence in the state and as they infiltrated "Gentile territory,” but it was mild compared with the brutality they had suffered abroad. Part of the Jews’ success in the United States and in New Jersey resulted from their conviction that they were here to stay—there was nowhere to go back to.
As Jews became middle and upper middle class, they established vacation traditions on the Jersey Shore in such towns as Bradley Beach, Deal, Long Branch, and Atlantic City, and inland at resort towns such as Mount Freedom and Lakewood. "Bagel Beach” was the name that locals in the 1950s gave to Bradley Beach because of the large number of Jews who summered there. Despite such singling out, New Jersey’s secular liberalism made it a relatively safe and welcoming haven for the successive waves of Jewish immigrants.
Not all Jewish New Jerseyans began their American sojourn in the cities; quite a number of immigrants became farmers. Jews had largely been precluded from landownership in Europe, leaving them with a lasting hunger for agricultural enterprise. Although their children and grandchildren would usually enter the professions and the arts, almost 90 percent of New Jersey’s chicken and egg farmers by mid-twentieth century, as well as a substantial number of the state’s dairy farmers, were Jews. A German Jewish philanthropist, Baron Maurice de Hirsch, helped establish agricultural colonies such as Alliance, Woodbine, Carmel, and Rosenhayn, most in south Jersey. The farmers organized cooperatives and agricultural schools, which contributed enormously to agricultural science and the state’s status as the Garden State. But farmwork was grueling. "With criminals they lock them up and throw away the key,” joked Sam Epstein, a farmer in Dover Township for forty-four years, "but with this farm, we locked ourselves in and threw away the key.” Like Epstein, many of the later Jewish farmers were Holocaust escapees or survivors.
One of these escapees was Albert Einstein, who became director of the School of Mathematics of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, founded by New Jersey Jewish philanthropists Louis Bamberger and his sister Caroline Bamberger Fuld. At the time, Princeton University, like many colleges, placed unofficial quotas on Jewish admissions. Einstein’s international fame, and his efforts before, during, and after World War II to assist Jewish refugees, helped to lessen anti-Semitism. "We have no other means of self-defense than our solidarity,” Einstein asserted. Although New Jersey still has a high number of anti-Semitic incidents, the crimes are usually anonymous, a far cry from the pre-World War II days when a thousand Nazi Bund members marched openly at Camp Nordland in the town of Andover in Sussex County.
At the end of the twentieth century, five Jewish historical societies existed to preserve and perpetuate the history of Jews in New Jersey. But, as is often said, it is when an ethnic group begins to preserve its history that it is in danger of decline. Intermarriage is common, and the fear that Jews will be quietly absorbed through assimilation is a real one. However, Orthodox and Hasidic communities thrive in such towns as Deal, Morristown, Highland Park, and Tenafly. There are no fewer than twenty-two Lubavitch communities in New Jersey. At Rutgers University, Hasidim have built a thriving Chabad house on campus. Similarly, small groups, such as the Re-constructionists and New Jersey’s lesbian and gay havurah, are creating new traditions that include women in all aspects of worship. Indeed, women increasingly serve as rabbis in less traditional Jewish congregations. Further, many secular Jews actively participate in Jewish life through Jewish community centers. The Children of Abraham have established a thriving presence in the state and will continue to meld the temporal and the sacred as they add to the vitality and diversity of New Jersey life.
JFK Medical Center. Founded in 1967, the JFK Medical Center is located in Edison. It currently provides 441 medical-surgical beds and 94 beds in the Johnson Rehabilitation Institute. The rehabilitation institute’s Center for Head Injuries has pioneered in head trauma evaluation and treatment. The New Jersey Neuroscience Institute, which is a nationally recognized center for the diagnosis, treatment, and study of neurological disease, is also located at JFK. The Family Practice Center at JFK provides a residency training program for family physicians. In 1997, JFK Medical Center joined with Muhlenberg Regional Medical Center to form the Solaris Health System; Muhlenberg Hospital, founded in 1877, is a 396-bed university-affiliated teaching medical center located in Plainfield.
J. L. Mott Company. This company, which manufactures plumbing supplies and sanitary fixtures, was founded as the J. L. Mott Iron Works in Mott Haven, New York, in 1828. In 1873 it was the first company to make bathtubs out of cast iron with a baked-enamel finish, a type of tub that eventually replaced baths of all other types. As modern sanitary plumbing became standard during the early 1900s, plumbing companies made alliances with and eventually bought the potteries that were making toilets, tubs, and sinks. In 1902, J. L. Mott Iron Company bought the Trenton Fire Clay and Porcelain Company—a firm begun in 1845 by Edward David for making firebricks and later bought by O. O. Bowman in 1867—to form the Mott Company of New Jersey. Bowman’s company claimed to be the first in America to make a bathtub of clay. About 1915, the operations of the Mott Haven, New York, plant were transferred to new quarters in Trenton near the pottery branch of the business. The company was known from 1902 for having made the largest bathtub in the White House and perhaps the world. Built to accommodate the portly President William H. Taft, the tub could hold four men of average size. Labor unrest, nationalization of the industry, and a shifting geographical base for sanitary production during the 1920s undercut Mott’s profitability. In debt in 1928, Mott sold out to Lail Pottery Corporation of Louisville, Kentucky, which drastically cut the size of Mott’s workforce. Despite this severe cost-cutting measure, the company did not survive through the 1930s.
Jockey legislature. Most citizens of New Jersey in 1893 strongly opposed the legalization of gambling at horse-racing tracks. Evangelical Protestants, especially, objected to it on moral grounds. On the other hand, several prominent Democratic legislators, including Assembly Speaker Thomas Flynn, were employed at the racetracks in Gloucester, Monmouth, and Guttenberg, and all legislators were given free passes to the tracks. Dubbed by the media as the "jockey legislature,” the lawmakers ignored overwhelming public opinion and pushed through a bill to legalize betting on horses. Although Gov. George Werts rejected the legislation, the "jockey legislature” quickly overrode his veto. The political backlash of an angry electorate in the fall elections of 1893 gave the Republicans control of both the assembly and the senate.
John Harms Center for the Arts. Located in Englewood, this not-for-profit theater originally opened in 1926 as a silent movie and vaudeville theater. With seating for 1,400, the current center presents a variety of entertainment, including solo performers, jazz, ballet, and folk music. First named "The Plaza,” the theater has undergone two major renovations. After the 1976 reconstruction it was renamed "The Englewood Plaza,” used for classical music concerts, and run as a nonprofit organization by John Harms. The latest renovation, begun in 1998, was completed in 2000. Renamed for the local impresario, the center is also home to a performing arts school.
Johns-Manville Corporation. Johns-Manville was incorporated in 1901 after the merger of the H. W. Johns Manufacturing Company (founded in 1858 by Henry Ward Johns), a producer of asbestos insulation, roofing, and textile materials, and the Manville Covering Company (founded in 1886 by Charles B. Manville). The firm specialized in the integrated production of asbestos products and broke ground for a factory in the northeastern part of Hillsborough Township, Somerset County, in 1912, which in 1929 was officially incorporated as the Borough of Manville.
Although the firm enjoyed success under the active management of the Manville family—becoming a publicly held corporation in 1927—it was subject to a series of lawsuits (beginning circa 1929) regarding asbestos-related deaths. Concern centered around two diseases: asbestosis, a nonmalignant scarring of the lungs that resulted from continued exposure to loose, airborne asbestos fibers; and mesothelioma, a type of cancer centered in chest cavities that usually kills within a year of diagnosis. After Dr. A. J. Lanza of Metropolitan Life completed a four-year study of the effects of worker exposure to asbestos in 1933, the company attempted to have the report’s negative implications downplayed.
During World War II the firm was a leading supplier of asbestos, and thousands of defense workers were exposed to the material. By the 1950s these workers were filing compensation claims based on exposure to asbestos in increasing numbers. Although the firm remained profitable throughout the 1950s and 1960s—diversifying into areas such as carpeting, gypsum, and fiberglass—health concerns persisted, and in 1964 the company finally began placing warning labels on its asbestos products.
In 1973 the firm lost its final appeal in the case of Clarence Borel v. Fibreboard Paper Products Company, et al. and was found guilty of contributory negligence. By 1977 the company estimated that the $16 million available in primary liability coverage would be exhausted within two years and the firm’s insurer, Travelers, declined to renew coverage; Manville was thus forced to self-insure. Although business development continued—including the 1979 acquisition of Olinkraft, a forest-products firm—by 1982 the firm was a defendant in over 9,300 asbestos-related suits and juries were making large punitive-damages awards. In August 1982 Manville filed for protection under Chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code. After repeated delays, a reorganization plan was finally proposed in February 1986 in which the company was split into two firms—the first to handle business operations and the second to handle claims relating to personal injury and property damage.
Although the plan proved popular among claimants, the company—which had finally left the asbestos business for good in 1985— paid a heavy price for its years of intransigence. While the firm emerged from bankruptcy in 1988 and rapidly regained its financial health with a series of new product lines, stockholders and employees alike remained deeply disaffected by the company, as did the general public: the firm ranked dead last in the annual Fortune magazine poll of America’s most-admired companies between the years 1987 and 1991.
Johnson, Eldridge Reeves (b. Feb. 6, 1867; d. Nov. 14, 1945). Inventor and manufacturer. Born in Wilmington, Delaware, Eldridge Reeves Johnson was the only son of carpenter Asa S. Johnson and Caroline Reeves. He married a distant cousin, Elsie Reeves Fenimore, on October 5,1897. They had one son, Eldridge Reeves Fenimore Johnson.
Johnson became a machinist’s apprentice in Philadelphia in 1883. In 1888 Johnson moved to Camden, where he opened his own machine shop in 1894. In 1896 Johnson became interested in the gramophone, a disc-talking machine invented by Emile Berliner. He redesigned the gramophone’s spring motor and sound box, and developed an improved process for manufacturing disc records. During the late 1890s Johnson’s shop manufactured gramophones for the Berliner Company. Following complicated litigation, Johnson gained control of Berliner’s patents and, in October 1901, organized the Victor Talking Machine Company. Under Johnson’s leadership, the Camden-based firm became one of the largest talking machine producers in the world. In 1906 Johnson unveiled Victor’s signature product, the Victrola, a gramophone encased in an attractive wood cabinet. Johnson retired in 1927 and died at his home in Moorestown in 1945.
