There was a big world out there with lots of ideas and lots of feelings that could encompass [different traditions] and you could still be Jewish. My definitions changed. -Burton Albert

 

Frances and Sidney Leopold, 1943 (Collection of Leo and Ethel Goldberg)

As the children of the second and third generation went away to college and served in the military during World War II, they became part of larger social communities. They became engaged in international Jewish issues to a greater extent than the previous generations. Returning to Waterbury, they brought new perspectives to the practice of their faith and a new sense of their relationship to the traditional Jewish community.

 

Well, lots of things happened after the war. So many people had never left their own town before the war. They were born and brought up and half the time didn’t move out of town but the war just blended everybody.... Then when we came back, this one was married to that one. You didn’t know what the background was. It didn’t make any difference. We were all part of the conservative synagogue. -Morton Greenblatt

 

My best friend was Phyllis Kenney who lived around the corner. When she got married, I couldn’t be in the wedding because I wasn’t Catholic, and she couldn’t be in my wedding [in 1953]. When her daughter got married [in the 1970s]...they were playing the guitar and the best man was Jewish and she said, things have changed a little. You didn’t date non-Jews [before the war]. Nobody ever said you shouldn’t, but it was sort of something you knew. Now my kids have all married non-Jews. I have no Jewish grandchildren. -Nancy Friedman Fierberg

Many families in this generation moved to the suburbs west of Waterbury, although the Cooke Street neighborhood remained a center for others. By the second half of the 20th century, marriages beyond the local community, and outside the faith, were increasing in frequency, leading to new interpretations of Jewish traditions. By 1970, the city of Waterbury had 2,500 Jews in a city population of 112,000, fewer than the number of Jews who had lived in the city 50 years earlier.

Wilensky Barbeque, 1947 (Collection of Edward Wilensky)

People from Waterbury started to move west. First it was the western section of Waterbury, then Middlebury, and Southbury of course. Rabbi Miller and myself pinpointed on the map [where] the individual members of the temple [were living] and you saw vividly where our membership was, and it was predominantly in the western part of Waterbury and then going into Middlebury. -Leo Goldberg