The new year begins with reverberations from years and years past. A few weeks back, Jmore’s Alan Feiler and William Linker wrote about the impending closure of the last synagogue along the Liberty Road corridor, the Winands Road Synagogue Center in Randallstown.

I remember when the great Jewish exodus to Liberty Road was just beginning.

My first childhood girlfriend lived on Marmon Avenue, just up the block from the Liberty Jewish Center where I attended Hebrew school. The time was the late 1950s.

“We’re moving,” my girlfriend said, shaking her head sadly.

“How come?”

“The gentiles,” she replied, in a kind of conspiratorial whisper. “They’re starting to move onto the block.”

The gentiles were white, to be replaced shortly thereafter by those who were black. Marmon Avenue emptied of all Jews within a couple of years, as did much of Northwest Baltimore, including the Liberty Jewish Center.

The Jews headed out Liberty Road, out Reisterstown Road, out Park Heights Avenue, to places with bigger yards and air conditioning and public schools that certainly were not exclusively Jewish but were, for quite a few years, almost all white.

My family joined the exodus to Liberty Road in 1962 – Courtleigh Drive, just below Old Court – followed shortly thereafter by a succession of synagogues, including my family’s.

But note the journey: the Liberty Jewish Center originated on South Baltimore’s Hanover Street, moved for a year or so to Gwynn Oak Junction, then further out to the corner of Liberty Heights and Marmon avenues, then well out Liberty Road beyond Old Court.

Meanwhile, the Jews in their post-war movement left the old Baltimore shtetl of synagogues and delicatessens around Lombard Street for the golden ghettos just north of Park Circle, and then just kept going and going.

The closing of the last Liberty Road shul, Winands Road Synagogue, means, Alan Feiler wrote, “quashing, once and for all, any signs of organized Jewish life in Randallstown,” including Shapiro’s kosher supermarket and Caplan’s Deli and a bagel shop, all of treasured memory.

Well, we are a wandering tribe.

But while we spent much of half a century wandering mainly from Northwest Baltimore out to its northwest county suburbs, maybe the exodus from Liberty Road hints at two modern developments: some movement back toward the city, with its hip Inner Harbor waterfront neighborhoods; and a drift toward cosmopolitan neighborhoods where Jews feel comfortable living among people who don’t have to have religious roots that mirror our own.

A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books, most recently “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age” (Johns Hopkins University Press).

 

 

Photo of Liberty Jewish Center at its 8615 Church Lane location in Randallstown, in September of 1967, courtesy of Jmore

 

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