MARBLEHEAD — Temple Sinai is hosting a free screening of and discussion on “Chelsea: The Jewish Years” April 6 at 4 p.m.
The 18-minute documentary was created by The Chelsea Gateway Project: a community-based initiative exploring Chelsea’s historic Jewish past and its current multicultural immigrant present.
Ellen Rovner, founder of The Chelsea Gateway Project, emphasized the importance of this documentary.
“Chelsea has been an immigrant stronghold since the mid-19th century. For Jewish people in particular, it was a destination, a little Jerusalem, if you will. It was a very important place where Jewish American lives flourished for about four generations,” Rover said.
“I started doing some research in Chelsea in the mid-2000s and saw there were very, very few signs of the Jewish community that once existed,” she continued. “My entire family settled in Chelsea — my grandparents on both sides, great grandparents, my parents were born and raised and graduated from Chelsea High School, married in Chelsea. I was born in Chelsea, lived there as a child, and there was really nothing.
“Nobody even knew. People who live there now had very little knowledge or awareness of the Jewish stronghold that Chelsea was, so I thought that all this history is certainly worth exploring and preserving.”
Rovner said the video is not a comprehensive account by any means, but “it’s a statement that honors the city and its immigrant history.”
“When I started the project, I was concerned with creating this film to highlight commonalities between immigrant experiences, regardless of background, religion, history, etc.,” Rovner said. “And also about the rising incidences of antisemitism and the fact that people who have very little knowledge of Jewish people think of Jews in America in a kind of very uni-dimensional way — and, in fact, we’re very heterogeneous people with very similar beginnings as people who reside in Chelsea now.
“That was what motivated me, and now it feels even more critical in the sense that I think we’re really in a crisis now, especially around immigrants. I just keep thinking: If it had been my grandparents at the beginning of the 20th century who spoke no English, came with very few family members, had no money, were peddlers, what would happen to them? What would happen to them given the current climate, given what’s happened?”
She added, “I mean, not that things were so welcoming back in the early 20th century, but at least the government wasn’t deporting people illegally.”
Rovner’s family was part of the migration from Chelsea to Marblehead. She said Marblehead had single-family houses with lawns and driveways that were close to the water — and, more importantly, the housing was available to Jews.
“One of the factors may have been the fact that there was a Jewish family from Chelsea that, during the Depression, bought a lot of land in Marblehead that was foreclosed. It had been farmland that was then all developed into housing after World War II,” she said. “(Jews) knew there was housing available, and it was available to them kind of for the first time after World War II.”
Rovner said coming to Marblehead for the screening is somewhat of a “homecoming,” as she graduated from Marblehead High School alongside her husband, who actually had his bar mitzvah at Temple Sinai.
Rabbi Michael Schwartz of Temple Sinai said the temple is “delighted” to be hosting a screening of “Chelsea: The Jewish Years” because many synagogue members, including him, have roots in Chelsea.
“In some ways, it feels like the original home here in the States for so many of us. The idea of it, if not the place itself, has a special place in our hearts, so we, of course, want to celebrate it and learn more about it,” Schwartz said.
He added, “There are a lot of people eager to see historical footage and photos and trying to identify places they’ve heard about, the old family homes they may know of, the old synagogues that their families used to go to.”
Although the screening is free, Schwartz said Temple Sinai is asking hopeful attendees to RSVP by emailing [email protected].
