A seven-year, volunteer-led quest to tell of the history of Jewish life in the Upper Valley has come to fruition with a book that is set to be released next month.
What Came Before: An Oral History of the Upper Valley Jewish Community will be available beginning Sept. 8. Copies cost $34.95 and can be purchased at the Upper Valley Jewish Community’s website, uvjc.org. The book includes chapters on leadership, Jewish identity, religious education, founding the Roth Center for Jewish Life in Hanover and establishing the Jewish cemetery in Lebanon. Proceeds will benefit the nonprofit organization.
The idea for the book started in 2012 when some members of UVJC decided to create a history of Jewish life in the Upper Valley and to interview some of its oldest residents.
“When we first started we didn’t quite know what we would end up with,” said Barry Scherr, one of the volunteers who was with the project since the beginning. “I don’t think we thought it was going to be as vast as it turned out to be.”
The group ultimately decided to collect oral histories from community members and compile them together in a book, which covers the time from the late 1800s up through the opening of the Roth Center for Jewish Life in 1997.
“We all decided that there’s a lot that isn’t known about what life was like up here that many years ago, how few Jews there were and how difficult it was to maintain a Jewish existence,” said Jill Schiffman, who has been working on the project since it started. Doing an oral history project, the group reasoned, “would be best way to capture stories that newer residents were afraid we would lose.”
It was a massive undertaking. The group of about a dozen — five of whom stayed with the project for all seven years — compiled a list of people to interview. It then took about a year to come up with a questionnaire for interview subjects.
“We didn’t just want to ask open-ended questions,” Schiffman said. “We wanted to have some consistency across all the interviews.”
More than 90 people were interviewed by volunteers, and many of those interviews were videotaped or recorded. Volunteer Barbara Brown, whose husband, Channing Brown, served as mayor of Lebanon, was particularly instrumental in reaching out to and interviewing older residents. The recordings were then professionally transcribed before being fact-checked by volunteers and interview subjects. Then came another challenge: deciding how to organize the information into themes and chapters.
“Rather than just go A-Z with one speaker, it’s all 90-plus voices woven into one narrative,” said Liza Draper, who joined the project as editor and studied oral history at Dartmouth College.
That included picking and choosing which parts of which interviews to use.
“We tried to keep people’s voices as they were,” Scherr said. “Getting people’s various stories about being here was probably the most interesting part of it.”
Scherr and Schiffman found themselves learning more — and even being surprised by — a community they have been part of for decades.
“Life through the mid-70s, the community was really just a total volunteer effort,” Scherr said. “It was really kind of a bootstrap operation for quite some time.”
The first full-time rabbi came to the community in 1975 to serve both students at Dartmouth College through Dartmouth Hillel and Jewish residents in the Upper Valley.
“One of the challenges up here is you really had just one single Jewish community when there are various branches of Judaism,” Scherr explained.
Schiffman learned how difficult it was for Jewish families to keep kosher.
“They had to travel to really to Massachusetts and New York to obtain kosher food, kosher meat,” she said.
She also was amazed by “how these people found each other and decided to form informal schools so that children could be educated as they would be in a religious school.”
Lessons were held in people’s homes, various locations at Dartmouth College and even in area churches. It took until 1997 when the Roth Center was opened for the UVJC to have a permanent home. The establishment of Jewish cemetery in Lebanon in 1992 was also viewed as a major milestone for the community.
“There were many opinions about what life was like here,” Schiffman said. “Everyone saw it from their perspective.”
Liz Sauchelli can be reached at esauchelli@vnews.com or 603-727-3221.
