Goldfoot Genealogy

 Nadene Goldfoot                                                         

My family had moved to SE Portland of Ladds Addition that consisted of a mixed population of 3 Jewish families of Padrow and Robinson and Bricker and us; Swedish, several Chinese, Irish, and Italians and others.  Our school potlucks were a marvelous feast of around the world foods.  When I was born, my father worked in South Portland where he was born, in the kosher butcher shop on Lincoln Street. 

Later on, he had his own business of Lincoln Wholesale Meats, and after that he had grown into Silver Falls Meat Packing Co. I don't think anyone cared that he was like the Jewish Cowboy with jeans down to his hips way back then, and even wore cowboy boots. He was a great cattle-buyer and truck driver.  Being Jewish was not an issue that I ever heard about.     

     Middle aged in Ontario, Oregon dressed for Rosh Hashanah, and my mother and I were the only Jews in this town.  Oh yes, we did find one lady who had married an Italian fellow, and she became my mom's best friend.  This was a town that was important to my father's business.  He had a feed lot here for his cattle.  

 I taught 4th grade.  

  1980 Mom gave us a party before we left; making aliyah to Israel.  

     86 years, hiking in April 2021 in Gresham, Oregon

The problem of anti-Semitism and my life synchronize.  From 1933 on, life in Germany for the Jewish people had changed dramatically.  It was the start of a government sponsoring anti-Semitism as Hitler was coming into power.  I was born in 1934 and fortunately for me, in the United States. So here I am in January 2023 and still am alive!

I still am witnessing anti-Semitism in the world, and it's been 89 years since it started in 1933, that is governmental sponsored anti-Semitism.  

In their 25-point party program published in 1920, Nazi Party members publicly declared their intention to segregate Jews from “Aryan” society and to abrogate their political, legal, and civil rights.

Nazi leaders began to make good on their pledge to persecute German Jews soon after their assumption of power. During the first six years of Hitler's dictatorship, from 1933 until the outbreak of war in 1939, Jews felt the effects of more than 400 decrees and regulations that restricted all aspects of their public and private lives. Many of these were national laws that had been issued by the German administration and affected all Jews. But state, regional, and municipal officials, acting on their own initiatives, also issued many exclusionary decrees in their own communities. Thus, hundreds of individuals in all levels of government throughout the country were involved in the persecution of Jews as they conceived, discussed, drafted, adopted, enforced, and supported anti-Jewish legislation. No corner of Germany was left untouched.

Then Nazi Germany entered Poland on September 1, 1939 and their hatred  and jealousy of and for Jews spread throughout the world.  WWII had started.

To justify the action, Nazi propagandists accused Poland of persecuting ethnic Germans living in Poland. They also falsely claimed that Poland was planning, with its allies Great Britain and France, to encircle and dismember Germany.

According to their logic, they, who were persecuting Jews living in Germany, should have had the world to invade Germany to free the Jews.  Ha!  No one came to the Jews' aid, not even the United States.  They were dealing with their own anti-Semitism at that time.  No Jews allowed into many athletic clubs;  the telephone company of NY not hiring Jewish women,  These are things that happened to my friends.

In the first half of the 20th century, Jews were discriminated against in employment, access to residential and resort areas, membership in clubs and organizations, and in tightened quotas on Jewish enrollment and teaching positions in colleges and universities. Restaurants, hotels and other establishments that barred Jews from entry were called "restricted".  As to stores, they started their own.  That's how Meir & Franks

 developed.                         

friend, Sam Arnstein, on left, at one of our formal dances.  

My Jewish peers and I were not asked to join any sororities or 

fraternities in   high school or college so we had our own.  Actually, we had a great time and 

had formal dances at wonderful places.  I remember sitting in 

the cafeteria of 

high school and the other students were talking about those 

terrible Jews.  I  mentioned that I was Jewish, and were they

 ever surprised! 

 That was it; I embarrassed them.  It felt good.  

Jews encountered resistance when they tried to move into white-collar and professional positions. Banking, insurance, public utilities, medical schools, hospitals, large law firms and faculty positions, restricted the entrance of Jews. This era of "polite" Judeophobia through social discrimination, underwent an ideological escalation in the 1930s.  Many Jewish students were turned away from Medical school as they had quotas, and we had so many bright and eager Jews that missed out becoming doctors, something my father would have loved to be able to do, but he was one of the poor Jews.  He went on to be the designer and owner of his own meat packing company, and he knew a lot, so much, about anatomy.  

My family and I living on the West Coast weren't harmed, but throughout the world, other Jews were losing their lives.  

Portland had 8,000 Jews in the 1920s.  Today, Portland is home to more than 40,000 Jewish residents, and Jewish history in Oregon goes back to 1849.   Many Jewish residents helped shape Portland’s future, such as Bernard Goldsmith, the mayor of Portland from 1869-1871, who built the Willamette Falls Locks in Oregon City; Aaron and Jeanette Meier and Emil Frank, of the Meier & Frank department stores; “Soda Pop King” Louis Albert; and Sam Schnitzer of Schnitzer Steel, to name just a few.

TABLE B (CONTINUED) Jewish Jewish City Population City Population Kansas City, Mo 12,000 Reading, Pa 1,750 Butte, Mont 1,000 Scranton, Pa 7,500 Omaha, Neb 10.000 Providence, R. 1 15,000 Camden, N. J 2,000 Memphis, Tenn 7,000 Jersey City, N. J. 12,500 Nashville, Tenn 3,000 Paterson, N. J 15,000 Dallas, Tex 8,000 Trenton, N. J 7,000 Fort Worth, Tex 2,250 Albany, N. Y 7,000 Houston, Tex 5,000 Buffalo, N. Y 20,000 San Antonio, Tex 3,000 Rochester, N. Y 20,000 Salt Lake City, Utah... 2,500 Syracuse, N. Y 12,000 Richmond, Va 4,000 Akron, 0 2,000 Seattle, Wash 5,000 Cincinnati, 0 25,000 Spokane, Wash 1,100 Columbus, 0 9,000 Tacoma, Wash 900 Dayton, 0 4,000 Milwaukee, Wis 20,000 Toledo, 0 7,500 Youngstown, 0 5,000 Total 513,000 Portland, Ore 8,000 or about 4.1$ As to cities of the second class, namely, those having a general population of between 50,000 and 100,000, their percentage of Jews averages about three per cent. Generally speaking, with regard to both classes mentioned above, it may here be noted that the proportion of Jewish residents is greater than the mean in the East, and less than the average in the West. The tables given below are peculiarly instructive as exhibiting how the percentage of Jewish residents tends to become gradually lower as the total number of citizens decreases.

Children of Eastern European and Sephardic immigrants who came of age in the 1920s and 1930s remember the neighborhood as insular and nurturing. It was a time of increased antisemitism locally and nationally, and the neighborhood of South Portland and its institutions provided a respite. Beginning in the 1920s and 1930s, and accelerating in the 1940s and 1950s, families moved to more prosperous areas of the city. Still, South Portland remained a Jewish institutional hub, with ethnic shops, the Portland Hebrew School, the Jewish Home for the Aged, Neighborhood House, the B’nai B’rith Building (later the Jewish Community Center), and all but two of the city’s congregations.

Anti-Semitism makes fun of to the point of cruelty of being Jewish.  It states that Jews are stupid when our IQs say otherwise.                             

Many of our Jews could be classified as "star" people, and we are the Star of David people,  a group talked about of immense talent in many fields on the internet today.  The author implies that they may have come from the stars.  Well, our people did come as aliens from other countries but not from the stars.  For us it was good genes; good families that believed in education.  Native Americans, Chinese, etc all have found star people among themselves.  

Resource:

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/antisemitic-legislation-1933-1939

https://www.census.gov/history/pdf/jewishpop-ajc.pdf

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_antisemitism_in_the_United_States

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/invasion-of-poland-fall-1939#:~:text=On%20September%201%2C%201939%2C%20Germany,to%20encircle%20and%20dismember%20Germany.

https://www.oregonencyclopedia.org/articles/jews-in-oregon/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_people_(New_Age_belief)

Labels: anti-Semitism, Jewish population, Oregon, Portland, WWII

# posted by Nadene Goldfoot @ 4:37 PM