On Veterans Day, my parents posted a picture of my grandfather on Facebook. I’d seen it before, though not recently. My mother’s father passed away just after I turned eight, and I have few intact memories of him from when he was alive. Most of what I “remember” comes from stories told by my grandmother, who survived her husband for nearly three decades. She told me, for example, about her first date with my grandfather, who interrupted their dinner to say he’d had a bad premonition and needed to go home; it turned out his father would die that evening.
When scanned and uploaded to Facebook, the black-and-white image looked sharper than the framed photograph at my grandmother’s house. Perhaps that’s why only now I noticed a strange detail: what looked like a small Jewish star, inscribed in a circle behind him. It appeared to be part of the building itself, incorporated into the stone and mortar work.
Many of the houses in Pennsylvania Dutch country, where I live now, are adorned with large five-pointed “barnstars,” and I’d joked about getting a six-pointed one custom-made. But this photograph was taken in Philadelphia; besides, I’d never heard of anything like this on a Jewish home. Where was my grandfather standing—outside a synagogue? It looked like he was standing in front of rowhomes. Perhaps a rabbi’s house? In an era when antisemitism was an ongoing concern, would any house be so openly marked?
As I stared at the screen, I found myself no longer thinking like a story-besotted grandchild but instead like a historian. I’ve spent years uncovering the details of relatively non-famous people who lived in Pennsylvania and Nebraska about a century ago, finding old newspaper articles, emailing descendants, and looking up old maps, court records, census listings, and other government documents. I’ve squinted through miles of microfilm and looked at pictures on the walls of church basements. (Sometimes it feels like what I really do is stalk dead people.) But I’d never really thought of using these tools on my own family’s history. Now I had a new research question: why was there a Jewish star on this house in West Philadelphia?
I started the same way I would for any historical figure, searching for mentions in old records. The 1940 census record showed my grandfather living in his parents’ house as a 24-year-old and working as an ice cream salesman. I didn’t know about this past occupation of his, but how fitting—my grandmother loved ice cream, so much that she and her mother would go to buy ice cream in the dead of winter, and walk back home clinging to each other with cold.
The census form gave me the address of a house in West Philadelphia, which I then looked up on Google Street View. The buildings dated to 1925, so I knew this was the rowhouse where he lived. But the front steps were all wrong; this wasn’t where the picture was taken.
I grew up in Northeast Philadelphia’s Jewish community, where I witnessed the impact of suburbanization firsthand. The synagogue where I had my bar mitzvah incorporated other congregations as they closed their buildings and merged with ours, until eventually our congregation closed too, as more and more of the community dispersed to the suburbs. West Philadelphia’s Jewish community had a similar trajectory a few decades earlier, when my grandparents and many like them moved to new developments, including those in the Northeast, after World War II.
I found a pictorial history of Jewish West Philadelphia, one of those Images of America books I’ve sometimes scoffed at for their cynical nostalgia and inattention to historical context. It was an impressionistic collection, detailed in some regards but incomplete in others: old family get-togethers, weddings, bar mitzvahs. The book helped me eliminate some possibilities. There were several large synagogues well-established in West Philadelphia by the 1940s, and one of the largest was just a half-block from my grandfather’s house. (The building remains, no longer a synagogue but largely recognizable; the stained-glass Jewish star in the upper window, as shown in one of the book’s undated photos, has been replaced with a more utilitarian pane.) I had thought that perhaps the house with the mysterious star had regularly hosted a small prayer group. But this no longer seemed likely, given how close the house was to a synagogue that held thousands of people. I needed to revise my hypothesis.1
I went back to the 1940 census and looked up my grandmother’s entry. There she was, at age 18, under her maiden name. I’d never known that her maternal grandfather lived with her. It took me a while to find out where her house was (the street name was misspelled) but once I found it on Google Street View it was clear where the picture was taken. My grandmother’s block was comprised of rowhomes with front porches that each had seven concrete steps leading down, flanked by basement windows. These had to be the homes in the photograph.
Then I recalled that my grandparents had their wedding at my grandmother’s house. She’d explained to me that her older sister had just gotten married a few months earlier, and her parents couldn’t afford an elaborate second wedding. But when I’d asked my mother if she still had their wedding contract—their ketubah—I learned another detail that may have explained why their wedding was at home. They had to move up the date of their wedding because of my grandfather’s Navy deployment.
Here he was, outside my grandmother’s house, in the crackerjack dress blue uniform of the WWII-era enlisted sailor. Was the photograph taken on their wedding day? I wanted that to be true, but then I noticed a detail that made me question this: to his right, the sidewalk was clear, but there appeared to be a thin layer of snow or ice on the grassy patch that was elevated a bit above ground level.
It was the kind of lingering remnant you might expect to see several days after a small snow. But according to a website devoted to historical Philadelphia weather, there was no snow in Philadelphia until December that year. They were married in November.
There was another, more relevant problem: if my grandfather was standing in front of my grandmother’s house, then the angle of the photo meant the Jewish star was actually on her neighbor’s house. But that house was owned and occupied by a Greek widow and her four children. If a Jewish star built into the home of one of my Jewish grandparents was hard to understand, the thought of that symbol worked into the masonry of their Christian neighbors made even less sense.
It was time to take a train ride.
My grandparents grew up in a part of West Philadelphia that is well-removed from the university-driven gentrification that’s gradually pushed prices up and whiteness further west for the past two decades. Yet some investors are clearly snapping up and sprucing up cheap properties with the hope of flipping them in the not-too-distant future. The porch in the background of the photo has been partially rebuilt, though not enclosed. Some houses looked well cared for, others boarded up. One appeared to be in the midst of renovation. I was a bit nervous as I rounded the corner, wondering what I’d say if someone asked what I was doing. Assure them that the people I was stalking were already long gone?
The house looked different than it had in 1942. The basement window has been replaced, and there was none of the cast-iron work around it. The raised curb was gone, and a railing has been installed on the steps. The basement exterior has been painted white, stone and mortar all together, so that the pattern of the stonework is almost indecipherable. And yet, just visible in the shape of the mortar, I could see the remnants of the Jewish star.
I looked at the same spot on my grandmother’s former house and saw another Jewish star, more visible in white against painted gray stonework. Online, the star on her old house had always been blocked by a shrub or a garbage can.
As I made my way further up the block, and looped around to return to the station, I noticed more stars. Some were painted over, some were partially destroyed by renovations.
I had made a discovery of sorts. I’d confirmed where the photograph had been taken. But my original question had been multiplied: why were several of these houses decorated with Jewish stars? And then finally I saw some houses on the next block that made the answer painfully clear.
On these houses, I noticed several more encircled six-pointed stars, and emerging from the center of each was a spigot, often with a hose attached. Another house had the six-pointed star with a hole in the center of exactly the right width for a water tube, though nothing protruded from it. In every case, the circle inscribing the six-pointed star was centered at a corner where two or more stones came together. The star was nothing more than ornamentation for where the house builders had installed an exterior tap. As I looked at more houses, I saw that some of these plumbing embellishments had five-pointed stars instead of six.
All my research and speculation, drawing on family stories, government records, local Jewish history, and weather data, culminated in a hosepipe. This felt anticlimactic and even unromantic. But at the same time, I knew that all I had done was what I’d been trained to do as a historian: to ask questions about sources; to consider the cultural and personal significance of symbols; to rigorously seek out evidence and to use it to test, reject, and reshape my explanations.
Of course I wanted the star to mean more: a mark of a Jewish-American sailor’s identity, in defiance of the atrocities committed by the enemy he had just enlisted to fight. But as I rode back home, I realized there was another story to be told about the stars on these houses. Philadelphia underwent a massive construction boom between 1923 and 1925, with over 20,000 new homes built in that span, including the future homes of both of my maternal grandparents. These rowhomes were likely among the first working-class houses built in Philadelphia with indoor plumbing.
So the star is still a symbol of sorts: a symbol of the improved living conditions for white and white-passing immigrants who saw home ownership as a testament to their growing prosperity, but who also benefited from racial redlining and access to education and jobs denied to others because of systemic discrimination. (As historian Stanley Arnold points out, of those 20,000 homes built between 1923 and 1925, “only fifty went to black buyers.”) Access to these homes was not only how Jewish-Americans like my grandparents entered the middle class; it was part of how they became white.2
There was a story here after all, one about a kind of social mobility, about the relationship between serving the nation and the kind of opportunities the country made available to some of its working-class families. It’s a story that follows my family’s history and the larger history of Jewish Philadelphia, and continues today with the continual self-reinvention of the post-industrial city. As real-estate speculation and development displaces many residents of West Philadelphia, neighborhoods which were home to large working-class Jewish communities a century ago are recolonized by their great-grandchildren, now middle-class whites. When the history of these changes are written, perhaps by our own great-grandchildren, they will seek meaning in symbols we cannot now guess at, which may be as profound or profane as those written in the stars.
- Allen Meyers, The Jewish Community of West Philadelphia (Portsmouth, NH: Arcadia, 2001).
- Stanley Arnold, Building the Beloved Community: Philadelphia’s Interracial Civil Rights Organizations and Race Relations, 1930–1970 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2014), 72; Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998)
