Jewish Pennsylvania: Squirrel Hill and the City That Never Left
Pennsylvania holds roughly 434,000 Jews. The story of the largest of those communities is unusual, because it is a story about people who did not move.
Pittsburgh: The Numbers
The first Jewish traders reached Pittsburgh from Philadelphia and Baltimore in the mid-1700s, but nobody settled permanently until after the Revolutionary War. A minyan first met for worship near The Point in 1842. The Beth Almon Society formed in 1845; cemetery land on Troy Hill was bought the following year.
After that the growth is steep and easy to follow:
- 1877 — 2,000 Jews, many from Lithuania
- 1900 — 13,000
- 1912 — 35,000
- 1925 — 60,000, at the close of free immigration
Squirrel Hill
Wealthy Jews began moving to Squirrel Hill in the 1890s, and the migration continued well past the First World War. Over roughly ten to fifteen years, small congregations scattered across the city consolidated there.
Today Squirrel Hill has about 28,105 residents, roughly 40 percent of them Jewish. A 2002 study found that a third of Greater Pittsburgh's Jewish population lived in the neighbourhood and another 14 percent in adjacent ones. Squirrel Hill and the surrounding part of Allegheny County now hold close to 50,000 Jews, up 17 percent from 2002.
The neighbourhood is also becoming Pittsburgh's new Chinatown, with students arriving from mainland China for Carnegie Mellon.
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What Makes Pittsburgh Different
Compare it with Philadelphia, Chicago or Cleveland and one thing stands out: Pittsburgh's Jews never moved to the suburbs en masse. The community stayed in the city, centred on one neighbourhood, and that is widely credited with its unusually complete integration into Pittsburgh life.
Eric Lidji, who directs the Rauh Jewish History Program at the Heinz History Center, adds a correction to the usual story. In the early 1900s Pittsburgh had the most regionally diverse Jewish population in the country. Every part of the city had a community with its own institution, not merely Jewish residents. Squirrel Hill ended that by absorbing them.
Philadelphia
The Philadelphia-Reading-Camden metropolitan area holds about 440,000 Jews, with roughly 214,600 in the city itself. Philadelphia's community is older than Pittsburgh's and followed the more familiar American pattern: a dense immigrant core that dispersed into the suburbs over the twentieth century.
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Common Questions
How many Jews live in Pennsylvania?
Roughly 434,000, fifth among American states.
How Jewish is Squirrel Hill?
About 40 percent of its roughly 28,000 residents. It has been the centre of Pittsburgh Jewish life for a century.
Why did Pittsburgh's Jews stay in the city?
Unlike Philadelphia, Chicago or Cleveland, Pittsburgh's Jewish community never suburbanised as a whole. Squirrel Hill absorbed the smaller neighbourhood congregations instead, and the community remained inside the city.
When did Jews first settle in Pittsburgh?
Traders arrived in the mid-1700s, but permanent settlement came after the Revolutionary War. The first recorded minyan met in 1842.
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