![]() ![]() And though Hyman notes that the prices began to rise again after the boycott, the movement could still be considered “a qualified success,” thanks to the efforts of the women of the Lower East Side and Brooklyn. The wholesale price of kosher meat dropped to nine cents a pound, meaning that the retail price was a more affordable fourteen cents a pound. And the Allied Conference for Cheap Kosher Meat, which grew out of the conference, appointed only three women to its ten-member steering committee.īy June 5, the boycott was over. Yet some “Jewish communal leaders were clearly upset by the initiative assumed by the women activists.” For instance, though a rallying figure early on, labor leader Joseph Barondess supposedly urged “the women to be quiet and leave the fighting to the men” at a May 21 conference that had been organized by male communal leaders. Located in Manhattan, the 45,000 sq ft club features a rooftop terrace, a spa, a members-only restaurant and a screening room, plus spacious bedrooms with. “Friendly crowds packed the courtroom to cheer the arrested women.” “Support for the boycott was widespread within the community,” Hyman explains. Buyers of meat continued to be assaulted and butcher shop windows smashed.” “Using the traditional communal tactic of interrupting the Torah reading when a matter of justice was at stake, they called on the men in each congregation to encourage their wives not to buy meat and sought rabbinic endorsement of their efforts,” Hyman writes.īy May 18, most Lower East Side kosher butchers had closed their doors, and the action had spread to Brooklyn, where “four hundred women signed up to patrol neighborhood butcher stores. On May 17, efforts expanded even further when the women interrupted synagogue services to spread their message to the community. On May 16, pickets (i.e., human volunteers) stood in front of each kosher butcher shop to talk customers out of their plans to purchase meat. They went from house to house to encourage residents to support the boycott. Some 20,000 people were reported to have massed in front of New Irving Hall, resulting in the arrest of seventy women and fifteen men for disorderly conduct.Īfter a day of protest, neighborhood women formed a committee to better organize and strategize. ![]() One policeman, trying to rescue those buying meat, had “an unpleasant moist piece of liver slapped in his face.” “Women were pushed and hustled about, thrown to the pavement. The next day, “thousands of women streamed through the streets of the Lower East Side,” Hyman writes, “breaking into butcher shops, flinging meat into the streets, and declaring a boycott.” On the evening of May 14, the women gathered to plan their action. Hyman, Lower East Side housewives began agitating for a strike against the butchers. According to the late social historian Paula E. Not surprisingly, then, the rapid and steep increase in the cost of kosher meat-the result of retailers passing on the rising prices of wholesalers to customers-led to drastic, quick action. Hyman notes that the newspapers of the time considered the rioting both violent and comical. ![]()
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