Around
the First World War, Jews started settling in
loose knit groups on farms in south central New
Jersey. Some of the bigger Jewish farming
communities were in Tom's River, Farmingdale and
Lakewood. Primarily a poultry center, it was
comprised of independent farmers united through
economic cooperation such as cooperative
purchasing.
Its
Jewish farmers came in four waves:
- First was the Eastern Europeans
who generally had stayed in the slums of New
York and had their children school there in
their early years.
- The second wave of inhabitants
consisted of mainly those who wanted to flee
the tenements of New York.
- The third migration came in
the 1930’s fleeing German oppression.
- Displaced Persons who arrived
after World War 2 formed the fourth wave.
Concentration camp survivors arrived needing a
place in which to heal from their ordeal and
build a life anew. Used to backbreaking work,
they were good farmers.
![Layd
Eggs](eggs.jpg)
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At their
peak in the early 1950’s, there were
1,200 farms in Farmingdale, Lakewood and
Toms River. At their peak, they raised
16 million chickens and 240 million eggs
a year.
Small-scale poultry farming, and the
Jewish farming community along with it,
began to decline by the 1960's as a
result of the overproduction of eggs,
the withdrawal of Government price
supports for eggs, the persistently high
price of feed and the consolidation into
corporate farming.
Many farmers sold their farms to
developers as suburbanization swept
Monmouth and Ocean Counties. A few of
the farmers sold their neighbors' eggs
door to door in New York. |
Farmingdale, in Monmouth
County, six miles from Fort Monmouth, is a study
in how Jews could live the dream of achieving
spiritual development by working the soil to
become the egg capital of the United States in
the 1940’s.
Begun in 1919, immigrants from Galicia, and the
tenements of New York City, the Farmingdale
community was initiated by the Jewish
Agricultural Society. Initially, it grew
produce (potatoes and corn), then animals (pigs
and cows). When the Jewish Agricultural Society
saw that this community needed a different
product, it suggested poultry. Supported by the
Jewish Agricultural Society, Farmingdale struck
it rich over a period in the poultry and
egg business.
A general organization of an Egg Cooperative
that included the corridor of egg farmers in the
Route 130 corridor was formed. The coop members
shared farming knowledge, marketed eggs and
poultry and kept up on the latest in the
industry.
They built a Community Center,
with the help of Jewish Agricultural Society
around which they centered their lives, culture
and cooperative venture meetings.
Farmingdale's Jewish Community
Center served as a synagogue, a lecture hall and
a social club. Built by 12 farming families in
1928, it was a wood structure.
The initial population and later
waves of immigrants did not practice most Jewish
rituals or prayer. Nevertheless, their social
lives centered on the Jewish holidays, the rites
of passage and the never-ending discussion of
issues probably derived from Talmud study of
their forbears.
The community formed a committee of
Arbitrators (or Bet Din) to settle disputes that
consisted of a judge chosen by each party and the
chosen judges selected a third neutral
judge.
Mallow Farm photos - Farmingdale, NJ
![Mallow Farm](Mallow_Farm2.png)
Morris Mallow
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![](Mallow_Farm3.jpg)
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![](Mallow_Farm1.png)
Sophie Kagle Mallow
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Rutgers University Library has a collecton
on Farmingdale (1890-1995)
Lakewood,
is a township in Ocean County
When Lakewood's half-century heyday as a
resort destination ended in the 1920s, the
Jewish chicken farmers began to arrive.
Fresh from the Eastern Europe, they came to work
the land because proving themselves economically
self-sufficient was part of their commitment to
throwing off centuries of oppression. They were
different from their neighbors with Yiddish as
their language, often an agnostic culture
and socialism as their faith. They
attracted the antagonism and anti-semitism.
A generation after the chicken farmers
appeared, there materialized in Lakewood an
even less likely newcomer, an ultra-Orthodox
rabbi named Aharon Kotler. Until the German
invasion of Poland in 1939, he had served as the
rosh yeshiva [head of a school of
advanced Jewish learning] of the renowned
religious academy in Slutzk, and his journey to
America had traced a furtive refugee's path to
Vilna, then Siberia, then Shanghai, then San
Francisco, then New York, and finally to a
backwater in southern Jersey, where the
prevailing style of Jewishness was anathema to
all Rabbi Kotler embodied. Undeterred, he went
ahead and in 1943 established a classical
yeshiva for 15 students. Over the decades to
come, it grew 50 times as large.
Today Lakewood is one of the hubs of Orthodox
Judaism and is home to one of the largest yeshivas
in the world.
Toms River
is located about fifty miles northeast of the
Vineland colonies and ten miles from Lakewood in
Ocean County.
Jewish farmers were guided to the Toms River
area by the Jewish Agricultural Society
following World War I. JAS provided many
of the farmers with loans, but the farmers also
invested their savings. With the
depression that followed World War I, many out
of work city dwellers found the opportunity of
farming in a community that was newer than
Woodbine and the Vineland areas
attractive. By the mid-1920's about sixty
families had formed the Toms River Community of
Jewish Farmers.
The community supported the Sholem Areichem Folk
School, housed in the Community Hall, which
taught the mahme loshen (mother tongue),
Yiddish. Additionally, there was the
Hebrew School of Congregation B'nai Israel.
The community, under the leadership of Aaron
Pincus who was a graduate of the Woodbine
Agricultural School, had an ongoing
correspondence with the colonists of Freileben
(Free Life) in the "autonomous" Jewish region of
Soviet Siberia. Feeling a sense of
responsibility for their fellow colonists
abroad, Toms River provided aid for Palenstine
Yishuv and collections for the Joint
Distribution Committee. The National Labor
Committee and Poale Zion (Labor Zionists) were
active in the community
The Toms River community prospered and grew to
360 families including refugees from the 1930's
and of World War II.
The story of First
Jewish Family of Toms River is
found on the site of the National Museum of
American Jewish History.
A Reform synagogue occupies
what was once a Jewish community center for the
local farmers, many of whom were socialists who
would have scorned the formal establishment of a
synagogue in their days.
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