The stone building at 6328 Forbes Ave. has borne several names in its history: the Baal Shem Tov Shul, the Labor Zionist Educational Center. In the 1940s and ’50s — before crusading right-wing activists and politicians shut it down by government edict — it was the Jewish Cultural Center.
Sitting in the heart of the modern-day Squirrel Hill Jewish community, the center was a refuge for left-wing Jews during the Communist movement’s heyday. Just nine years into its existence, however, the center came under attack, with anticommunists claiming it was the site of Soviet indoctrination and guerrilla warfare training. Two years later it was nearly gone, and before long it would be all but forgotten.
A place of culture
The Jewish Cultural Center was founded on Forbes Avenue in 1944, under the auspices of Pittsburgh’s so-called Yiddisher Kultur Farband or Jewish Culture Association. It wasn’t the first gathering place for left-wing Jews in Pittsburgh: The Jewish Labor Lyceum in the Hill District had served for decades as a center of socialist and union organizing. That center had faded in the 1930s, however, and the new center promised to be a boon for radical Jewish cultural work.
News clippings through the later 1940s suggest little of the sinister activity the center’s persecutors would later claim. Receptions for local artists, plays based on Jewish themes and folk music performances appear in ads and articles, both in general-interest and Jewish newspapers. “Proceeds will be used for the relief of Jews in Europe and Israel,” a typical note read on a center-sponsored musical program. A 1950s leaflet defending the center said: “Prominent Pittsburghers lectured there, and its outstanding Yiddish library was dedicated by local leaders in the Jewish community.”
Many events had a political tinge: Reports from Palestine were common in the turbulent late ’40s, when the Communist Party contorted its policy on the new Jewish state and turned against Arab Palestinians to follow Soviet foreign policy. The president of the Jewish People’s Fraternal Order, an affiliate of the Communist-tied International Workers Order, spoke there (the I.W.O. also owned a local Jewish cemetery).
The Red Scare
The first signs of public suspicion appeared in 1950, when the Red Scare was already claiming the livelihoods of left-wing activists from Pittsburgh to Hollywood. Matt Cvetic, an FBI infiltrator who spent years spying on the city’s Communists, told investigators of a party meeting at the Jewish Cultural Center the year prior. Members had competed to sell subscriptions to the Daily Worker; Cvetic claimed to have won, receiving a book of workers’ stories as a reward.
In 1951, newspapers reported that the FBI had named the center as one of seven Communist meeting places across Pittsburgh. An article in the Pittsburgh press noted that the center received an 85-percent tax exemption as a “literary and cultural” office — foreshadowing later attempts to strip the center of its protected status. The claim came as federal authorities cracked down on several of the city’s top party organizers.
A sudden raid
In early 1953, the legal attacks began. Attorney Harry Alan Sherman filed a lawsuit on behalf of two men — one of them his brother Samuel Sherman, a Republican city council hopeful — claiming the center had no cultural role and should lose its legal charter. “Its true and clandestine purpose was the establishment of a Communist formed, controlled and directed front for unlawful purposes,” the suit claimed. The attorney Sherman was the head of Americans Battling Communism, an anticommunist group that included politicians and judges.
Weeks after filing the lawsuit, Sherman and a team of aides — empowered by a court order from a county judge — carried out a private raid on the center. Investigators chased a caretaker off and walked out with piles of left-wing literature. Children’s textbooks pointed to the presence of a “Communist Cheder,” or Hebrew school, Sherman claimed. “The Communist Cheder teaches the student the exact opposite of what he is taught in our American and Jewish schools,” he told reporters. “It concentrates on the Communist theme of materialism.”
“Marching feet of Hitler’s Germany”
In reality, the investigators’ descriptions paint a picture of a typical left-wing fraternal office: piles of blank I.W.O. applications, framed photographs of Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt, a player piano “donated by Comrade David Weiner.” Sheet music for Yiddish-Soviet songs and posters calling for donations to Russia were framed as signs of subversion. Presenting little evidence, the attorney said Spanish Civil War veteran Lou Bortz, a “tough guy and goon squad organizer,” trained Communists to assemble grenades and fire guns in the basement.
When news of the raid broke, the center’s allies rushed to its defense. A leaflet detailed Sherman’s raid:
They forcibly detained the Negro woman caretaker, broke into the locked office, forced open desks and files and rifled their contents. Pictures of Sholem Alechem, Isaac Peretz and Mendele were torn from the walls and desecrated. Cartons of clothing for refugees in Israel were broken open and their contents strewn over the premises. Many valuable books and papers, including original letters from surviving heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto, are missing and have not been accounted for.
The leaflet’s writer compared the destruction to a “pogrom . . . reminiscent of the marching feet of Hitler’s Germany.” In a 1953 letter to the Jewish Criterion, Yiddisher Kultur Farband head Herman Gordon said: “They hope by the aid of anti-Semitism and confusion to hide their main aim — the destruction of a democratic culture.”
Shutting down
A legal battle ensued for two years, eventually reaching the state Supreme Court. After Sherman’s private attempt to strip the center’s charter failed, county officials moved to eliminate it and drew favorable court rulings. Its low-tax status would be lost as well. The government piled on: Federal prosecutors declared the I.W.O. a subversive organization and New York officials seized its assets. The I.W.O. Jewish cemetery in the North Hills was soon handed over to a religious congregation.
In 1955, their legal defenses exhausted, the center’s directors agreed to surrender their charter. A state Supreme Court ruling defended the directors’ rights to dispose of their assets freely, however — drawing an angry rebuke from local red-baiting judge Michael A. Musmanno. When officials moved to empty the building, they reportedly found accused Indian-born Communist and United Electrical Workers member Allan D. McNeil living inside, hoping to avoid deportation under federal charges.
Later decades
The center was placed under trusteeship, and soon became a gathering place for Pittsburgh’s Labor Zionists — the historical left wing of the movement for Israel. In 1958 it was officially turned over to the “Labor Zionist Farband Education Center.”
The building itself remains, even as successive educational and secular groups based there have moved out, faced financial problems or dissolved. Today, there’s little evidence of the left-wing center its defenders once called “an integral part of Jewish life in Pittsburgh.”
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