The American Jewish Historical Society archives include a lot of family collections, many of them of immigrant Jewish families who built lives and careers in the United States and ran small businesses. As an example, this collection is of the Fleischer Family, comprising of photographs, personal correspondence, and business records of Simon and Lilly Fleischer. The family ran the Fleischer Bros. Butcher Shop in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, N.Y., a neighborhood that has been predominantly Eastern European Jewish, like Ukrainian and Polish. Simon and Lilly Fleischer had immigrated from Poland in the early 1920s and married in 1928, having two sons, Martin, and Bernard.
The family also ran a hotel in Monticello, N.Y., named Fleischer’s New Star Mountain Hotel, with the business card reading “strictly kosher.” Monticello is in the Catskill region of New York, and for decades was a summer vacation resort for many Jewish families (as depicted in films like Dirty Dancing and A Walk on the Moon), so the family had their city butcher shop and their summer resort hotel, becoming a successful American Jewish immigrant family in the mid-twentieth century.
The archives include a certificate of literacy for Lilly in 1947; their son Martin’s U.S. army records with an honorable discharge in 1951; U.S. naturalization certificates for Simon and Lilly in 1945, and a labor union notebook for Simon from the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen of North America, Local 234.
