FIRST ZOLYNIA CHEVRE SOCIETY AND ZOLYNIA CEMETERY PLOTS

Signatures of the first board of trustees on the Society's 1901 incorporation papers. Names are Samuel Fensterheim (President), Israel Langer, Jacob Wilkenfeld, Joseph Margulies, Osias Kanan, Zoka Adler, Isaac Nusbaum and Isaac Buchin. The notary public is Joseph Wilkenfeld.

In October 1901, some of the growing number of Zolynia immigrants living in New York City held the first meeting of a religious organization for Jews from their hometown, the "First Zoliner Congregation Anshe Sfard" (in Yiddish, "Erste Zoliner Chevre Anshei Sfard"). Early meetings were held in a building at 26 Ridge Street, in the "Galitzianer" section of the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where most Zolynia immigrants lived or worked.

In the first third of the twentieth century there were over 2,000 Jewish hometown associations or landsmanshaftn in New York, many larger towns having multiple clubs with different philosophies or purposes. Some landsmanshaftn were independent clubs, and others were units of one of the large fraternal orders, as the Order B'rith Abraham.

"Anshei" indicates that the Zolynia group was intended as a religious congregation. In the 1930s there were more than one hundred Ansheis on the Lower East Side, some with their own synagogue. Worshiping together maintained ties to one another, and the Society must have also acted as a mutal social support network. By 1920, the Society purchased the first of what would eventually be three group cemetery plots, assuring that members had available a proper Jewish funeral and burial in the local tradition, a vital concern to the immigrant generation.

The word "Sfard" in the organization's name is not a reference in any way to Sfardic Judaism or any possible Spanish origins of Jewish families from the town. It's a reference to the "Nusach Sfard," a set of praying customs very common among Ashkenazic hassidic and orthodox, especially from Galicia. The word in the name was a signal to former Zolynia Jews that there was a place where the order of the prayers, tunes, davening procedures and other rituals were those with which they were familiar.

For decades, the Zoliner Chevre had several hundred members. The organization still exists today, mainly as a chevra kadisha or burial society, with a formal membership of over fifty people. Members are from Zolynia and from a number of nearby towns too small to support their own organization, such as Grodzisko Dolne and Brzoza Stadnika.

Questions about membership, the availability of cemetery plots or other matters can be e-mailed to this site. Please keep in mind that the Zoliner Chevre is not a historical society and does not maintain genealogical profiles of its members.

The next page contains lists of those buried in the three Zoliner Chevre Society plots in the New York metropolitan area. There are over 320 graves in these plots, representing a large cross-section of Zolynia's immigrant generation and their families.