Northattan

Sugar Hill Mennonite Mission church on St. Nicholas Avenue. Photo by Allison Gaito/Northattan.

“They must think something of this space because it’s on the subway map at the 145th Street station,” said Dalen Ratzlaff as he stood in the fellowship hall on the basement level of a renovated Harlem row house. Women in long, simple dresses and devotional caps served up casseroles and mashed potatoes as a line of Mennonites made their way down the buffet table.

On Sundays, the Mennonites of the Sugar Hill Mission worship for an hour and a half. After that, they serve lunch to the 20 or so men and women who come to pray with them in a small, dimly lit hall – their church of sorts. Then, the day of rest is spent doing the Lord’s work.

“We tell the gospel story and we help our neighbors,” said Ed Warkentin, the leader of the mission. “We just kind of spread the love.”

As Mennonites, the descendants of Anabaptists, they hold that baptism can be given only to adult believers. The Warkentins follow a particularly conservative branch of Mennonite known as the Church of God in Christ. They shun war, technology like radio and television and end formal schooling once children reach their teenage years.

Warkentin and his wife, Yvette, left Alabama and arrived at the Sugar Hill Mission in the spring, taking over for a couple that had led the mission for three years. Easily mistaken as Amish, with her plain dress and his fluffy beard, their simple lifestyle seems out of place in the hustle and bustle of a traditionally African American neighborhood in Harlem.

Though their tradition is an outlier in a group of about a half-dozen other far more liberal sects of Mennonite in New York City, the Warkentins have had to adapt to the modern metropolis they live in. They use subways and buses to get around. Equipped with walkie-talkies in case of trouble, a few of the mission’s visiting Mennonites even drive a van to pick up a blind man who joins them for Sunday worship. They have a telephone, a computer and use the Internet for business purposes. Warkentin said the good that comes from the exceptions they make outweigh following the faith to the letter. “We don’t live by laws. We live in the liberty of the spirit,” said Warkentin. “We can do anything we want to, but what we want to do is controlled because we want to live in Christ.

In Sugar Hill, churches take up a lot of real estate, with a house of worship on nearly every block. Warkentin said he knew a traditional Mennonite church was a tough sell. “A lot of them don’t know what’s here. A lot of them walk straight on by and never look.” No matter, Warkentin said there are still people out there looking for their brand of faith. Faith isn’t geographically sensitive for Warkentin and he said that’s reason enough for the Mennonites to continue spreading their message in Sugar Hill. “The thing is is that there are things in the Scripture that probably were for a time relevant, but we can still make applications for our times because we’re still made out of the same cursed dirt. It all comes from the earth,” said Warkentin.

No matter how unlikely the mission’s presence in the neighborhood, the leaders of local churches think that after 23 years in Sugar Hill, the Mennonites have found a fit among all the others. “This is a city, everybody jams in,” said pastor George Ramsudh of the Mount Zion Lutheran church, just a few blocks away on the corner of 145^th Street and Convent Avenue. “Each one of these entities has its own objective, its own uniqueness. Yeah, we’re clustered together. We’re competing, it appears. But at the back of all that we have our own goals.”

A fellow Mennonite, Don Toews said the goal is not to establish a huge Mennonite congregation in a place like New York City, but to illuminate the faith for someone looking for it. “Our goal is to hold up a light and so if somebody responds, fine. If not, we still did our part, we held up the light. It’s God’s light,” he said.

A Colorado businessman who sells oil field equipment, Toews was in the city visiting his 20-year-old son Carson. Along with two other young men, Carson Toews volunteers with the Warkentins at soup kitchens in the Bowery, in the children’s oncology unit of NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital and with humanitarian groups like Habitat for Humanity. Other days are spent helping the random stranger who shows up on the doorstep of the mission, like one man who needed help tracking down the name of his birth mother and with the assistance of a church-filtered Internet search engine, a name and address were found.

But most of the energy of the mission goes into small pamphlets containing Bible verses and inspirational messages, passed out at subway stations or in front of the mission on St. Nicholas Avenue.

“We sit down on the steps a lot and just smile,” said Warkentin. “Someone said if you sit and look at the New York City people’s faces, they all look like they had a fight and lost. That’s kind of the way they go around, kind of glum, and so we spread smiles.”

Since their arrival seven months ago, the Warkentins say they’ve seen the congregation grow to about 20 regular worshippers and diversify, counting Indians, African-Americans and even a Jewish man as congregants. Even with that, the church’s size hasn’t made it any easier in spreading the faith. “It takes a while to get through that New York crust, that protection shell we tend to have,” said Warkentin.

But with patience, it’s a challenge Warkentin’s wife, Yvette, said they are willing to take on. “Jesus said go out into all the world. He didn’t say bypass Harlem.”

Look closely at the background in TV shows and films shot in New York City and sooner or later you may learn to spot a familiar setting: the Union Theological Seminary in Morningside Heights, at 121^st Street and Broadway.

In “Gossip Girl,” the seminary’s hallways and inner garden have played a stand-in for Columbia University, where Serena Van Der Woodsen and best friend Blair Waldorf study.

That same Inner Quadrangle Garden, this time playing a private school, was where detectives in a “Law and Order” episode interviewed a piano teacher after a rape case. More recently, ABC’s new series “Pan Am” has filmed across the street from the seminary.

“It has a lot to offer in one place,” said film location scout Nick Carr of the seminary and its medieval architecture. “It has areas from church meeting halls, board rooms, cafeteria, and stage space. It also serves for, like, a British school, like Oxford, or Cambridge. We even scouted this for the medieval look for ‘The Smurfs,’” said Carr, a 2004 graduate of Columbia who studied film and has worked on movies such as “Spider-Man 3” and “War of the Worlds.”

The film industry contributes roughly $5 billion to New York City’s economy every year, according to Marybeth Ihle, press manager of the Office of Media and Entertainment in Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s office. Hundreds of directors use the city and its landmarks as backdrops for dramas, comedies, TV series and documentaries every year – making New York second only to Los Angeles as a film backdrop.

“There are approximately 100,000 New Yorkers who earn their living behind the scenes in film and television production,” said Ihle.

Most film producers who want to shoot in the city check in first with the Mayor’s Office of Film, Television and Broadcast. Starting with a $300 application fee, the office can help filmmakers get permits and services to shoot on city streets, sidewalks, and city-owned properties.

“We make it pretty easy for productions to enjoy the city,” said Habibah Love, who works in the film office permits department. “Only for parking privileges, or a light generator or light stands do you need a permit. Even a lot of students film without permits. We cater to everyone,” she said.

In the case of “Gossip Girl,” early episodes were shot at a Russian Orthodox Church in east Manhattan, a setting meant to represent Serena’s high school. When Serena moved from high school to Columbia University, the show initially tried to film on Columbia’s campus. But that idea was squashed when the school decided that having film crews around for weeks at a time was too disruptive.

So “Gossip Girl” began using other nearby sites as “Columbia” backdrops, including the Union Theological Seminary’s quad, library and social halls.

Old downtown buildings and other film locations provide plenty of quintessentially New York settings for film location scouts. But the Union Theological Seminary is often high on the scouts’ list precisely because it does not look like urban New York City.

“When you go into the grounds, you have this really non-New Yorky looking campus, like you’re in a private school upstate,” said Sam Rohn, another film location scout, who has worked on “Law and Order” and other TV shows that have used the seminary as a backdrop.

The seminary is an independent graduate school of theology founded in 1836. The original building was established in downtown Manhattan. During the late 1890s, the seminary needed to expand its roots by moving to a different location. They decided to rebuild and redesign it entirely, and move to upper Manhattan. In 1908, the cornerstone for the campus was laid down on Broadway and 120^th St. Nearly 300 students currently study there for master’s or doctorate degrees in divinity, social work, arts, sacred theology and philosophy. The seminary is closely affiliated with Columbia.

The seminary’s exterior and interior architecture still preserve some of the school’s original early 20^th century structures. Film scouts look for the particular appearance of a gothic revival style found in doorways, long narrow hallways, gigantic windows, or cloisters (the rectangular open space with walkway borders, forming a quadrangle garden). Scouts have promoted use of its dorm rooms and the courtyards, which resemble those of an upper-crust private school.

Film scout Carr said the seminary has something else going for it, too. “They are film friendly and always willing to work with the directors,” he said. “We don’t like to be anywhere we’re not welcomed.”

The process of choosing a film location can take months, and according to Carr, the general cost to use a location for filming runs $5,000 to $10,000 per day in New York, though some places -– like well-known restaurants -– charge more.

Wade Bennett, director of communications and marketing at the seminary, said directors who want to film at the school negotiate contracts with Michael Orzechowski, the director of housing and campus services. Bennett referred all further questions to Orzechowski, who said he would not be available to talk about the seminary and its use by filmmakers until January.

Carr is currently working with creator David Chase, of the HBO series “The Sopranos,” and his new film “Twylight Zones,” about a group of friends in a rock band growing up in New Jersey in the 1960s. A dorm room at the seminary was used in a scene in the movie.

Carr also used the seminary backdrop for the new detective drama “Unforgettable,” about a former police detective diagnosed with hyperthymesia, a condition that allows her to remember almost everything that has ever happened to her; she uses this rarity to help solve crimes.

Another plus for the seminary is that the building, wrapped around a courtyard, is relatively isolated from neighbors who might complain about noise or other disruption.

And unlike venues that get overfilmed -– and thus are so familiar directors don’t want to shoot there any more — Union Theological Seminary’s visual diversity means it should remain popular, said film scouts Carr and Rohn.

“Sometimes directors will say ‘I want to shoot at a location no one has ever seen.’” Carr said. Though Union Theological is popular, it hides its identity well, making it seem fresh with every appearance in another film or TV series.

This article was updated Dec. 19 to correct several errors. The seminary building was built in 1908, not 1836, making it the 20th century. The last name of the director of housing and campus services was corrected to Orzechowski, and the director of communications and marketing at the seminary is Wade Bennett, not James Kempster. And the spelling of “Spider-Man 3″ was corrected.

The Dominican community of Washington Heights was dismayed by the news that a plot to bomb post offices and other targets in New York City was being hatched in its midst. Police charges that the alleged bomber was one of their own have been equally shocking to a community so rooted in this part of northern Manhattan. Morgan Radford went to Washington Heights, to gauge reaction to Saturday’s arrest of 27-year-old Jose Pimentel.

Jose Pimentel, accused of plotting to bomb New York City, in court. Photo by Jefferson Siegel/AP

While downtown officials revealed more details today about the investigation that led to Saturday’s arrest of a Dominican Northattan resident on terrorism charges, uptowners worried about how the arrest might affect two of the city’s large minority populations: Dominicans and Muslims.

“I’m his mother, how do you think I’m feeling right now?” sobbed Carmen Sosa, the distressed mother of Jose Pimentel, whom police have charged with plotting to bomb city post offices and police stations, as well as soldiers returning from war.

Sosa was addressing the media circus camped in front of her son’s apartment in Hamilton Heights early Monday morning. “I would like to apologize to the city,” said Sosa.  “I love New York, I’ve been here, since 1987. I’m very disappointed with what my son’s doing. I did not raise my son that way.

Pimentel, originally from Dominican Republic, is a naturalized U.S. citizen who recently converted to Islam, according to police. Officials in Northattan today praised the police investigation that led to his arrest. Among them was State Senator Adriano Espaillat, who commended the actions of the New York Police Department for “their swift and rapid response” to Pimentel’s alleged bombing plans that threatened the lives of city residents.

Ebenzer Smith, district manager of Community Board 12, joined in the praise, suggesting that the Pimentel case might help the community overcome some of its longstanding hostility toward police.

“We need to be vigilant in our neighborhood and work with the police department and give them any tips,” said Smith. “Not only terrorist but any criminal action cannot be tolerated in this community.”

Police allege that Pimentel planned to build bombs that can be easily made at home, with simple ingredients such as powder, Christmas lights and flashlights. The powder was made from scraped material off of match heads and used Christmas lights as the detonator. Pimentel bought the ingredients from a Home Depot on Exterior Street in the Bronx according to The New York Times.  Amelia Belucci, an employee at the store, said today that the allegations against Pimentel made her nervous.

“Nothing in the world is safe,” said Belucci. “What happened on 9/11 can happen anywhere. He’s not there in his head. Maybe he wants to hurt somebody,” she said.

Simon Islam, a software engineer who just moved to New York from Texas, lives a floor below Pimentel’s uncle’s apartment on 137^th Street in Hamilton Heights.  According to police, Pimentel was living with his uncle at the time of his arrest.

“We always saw him in the corner smoking all the time, like maybe late nights, at 1 or 2 in the morning,” said Islam, who – like police – described Pimentel as a loner. “He’s always standing and smoking,” he said.

Pimentel’s mother said that after his conversion to Islam, her son worshipped at the Islamic Cultural Center of New York, the city’s largest mosque at 96^th Street and Third Avenue.

The imam there, Omar S. Abu Namous, worried today that Pimentel’s actions could raise a new wave of  “Islamophobia.”

“People don’t understand Islam,” said Namous. “We should not judge a person from their religion. You could be anything: Religion is one thing, and your character is another thing,“ he said.

Simon Islam, a fellow Muslim, said he also worried that the allegations against Pimentel could hurt Muslims.

“Islam is not about all of this. Definitely not,” he said. “Nowhere is Islam telling people to go do jihad on people who are innocent and not involved with anything.”

Equally distressed today were many Dominicans, who make up the majority in Washington Heights, and who wonder if now they will be objects of suspicion, as Muslims were after the 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington.

While there was no real evidence of an anti-Dominican backlash, there was plenty of bewilderment among the Dominicans of Washington Heights.

“I never heard of a Dominican bomber before,” said 15-year-old Ariel Sanchez.

“That guy is crazy,” said Johnny de Jesus. “I don’t think any Hispanic does something like that.”

Pimentel is being held without bail, and his lawyer was not available for comment.

Photo by Alessandra Tarantino/AP Photo.

In February 2007, the Our Lady Queen of Angels Church in East Harlem was closed against the protests of many parishioners. Back then, six women were arrested for staging a sit-in. But that didn’t stop them: Now, nearly five years later, a hardcore group continues to hold weekly Mass on the sidewalk – come rain or shine. Frederick Bernas reports.

Maria Davis promoting safe sex at a Harlem nightclub. Photo by Ingrid Rojas/Northattan.

Maria Davis is a vibrant, 51-year-old African-American music promoter living with AIDS. She contracted the virus in 1995 through a heterosexual relationship and was devastated when she found out, “Nobody wants to know they have a life-threatening illness.”

Davis’s road to accepting the disease wasn’t easy, but she found comfort in an unlikely yet familiar place, the church. The pastor at First Corinthian Baptist Church “was preaching to me. ‘It’s time to move on and grow,’ he said.” Inspired by his words, Davis took action and created an HIV/AIDS Ministry at the church in 2006.

Davis’ belief in getting the word out extends to her life outside the ministry – she distributes condoms and talks about HIV infection at music events she produces as well. “I became the cause,” she says, “I decided to fight back for those that don’t have a voice.”

Like First Corinthian, some of Harlem’s most prominent churches have created HIV/AIDS ministries in the last 10 years, even though sex and sexuality is not their favorite subject. As the epidemic becomes harder to ignore, the black church is stepping up. An estimated one in 37 people in Harlem has HIV, among the highest number of infection cases according to the New York City Department of Health.

In 2004 Rev. Calvin Butts, the powerful pastor of Abyssinian Baptist Church, one of Harlem’s most revered institutions, formed the HIV/AIDS Ministry in an effort to tackle the epidemic in his own backyard. Leatrice Wactor, the ministry’s president, says she’s convinced of the importance of the black church’s role in the fight against HIV/AIDS. “Every major social change movement, from the Underground Railroad to the Civil Rights movement, has come from the black church. It’s the best place to talk about the disease.”

National Black Leadership Commission on AIDS offices in Harlem. Photo by Ingrid Rojas/Northattan.

The HIV/AIDS Ministries at First Corinthian and Abyssinian are funded by grants from the New York City Council and from the National Black Leadership Commission on AIDS. NBLCA funds HIV/AIDS ministries in 63 churches around the five boroughs, 17 of those in Harlem. African-Americans accounted for half of the new HIV diagnoses in 2009, according to the New York City Department of Health, even though they make up only 26 percent of New York City’s population.

Each church conducts a range of services from educational workshops to on-site testing, depending on how open each is to talking about HIV and sexuality.

“Some organizations aren’t ready to talk about HIV,” says Wactor. “Some places don’t want distribution of condoms or testing done on site, or they say you can do a workshop on sexually transmitted infections but not about HIV. Inevitably we’re going to talk about HIV if we talk about STIs.” Wactor says she tailors workshops and events within each church’s theological boundaries.

Wactor acknowledges that the black church is doing a lot better in addressing AIDS prevention. “We started with 10 churches and we’ve grown. Right now we have a wait list of churches that want to participate.” So far this year, churches funded by NBLAC have collectively tested about 4,000 people.

But some people say more can be done, and needs to be. Some black churches condemn homosexuality and sex outside of marriage, alienating one of the groups most affected by HIV/AIDS, men who have sex with men. “Gay men have been told that their sexuality is contrary to the teachings of the church,” says Raynal Jabouin, a coordinator at Harlem United Community AIDS Center. That group’s survey among gay black and Latino men, and black women, the groups with highest infection rates, suggested that churches have been slow to respond. Furthermore, Jabouin says, “If there were HIV preventive programs in the church, this community is less likely to participate because of the stigma around being gay.”

Abyssinian Baptist Church, one of the most prominent churches in Harlem. Photo by DennisInAmsterdam/Flickr.

Rev. Vanessa Brown agrees that “there’s more that can be done.” At a World AIDS Day panel on Dec. 1, Brown, pastor of Rivers of Living Water, a nondenominational church in Harlem, said that  “HIV needs to be addressed in sermons. The pastor says ‘He died of pneumonia’ and there’s no mention that in fact he died of AIDS.” Her church, she says, welcomes all sexual orientations and has an active HIV/AIDS ministry.

Another panelist, Jennifer Sussman of Iris House, a center for women living with AIDS, said, “A Baptist organization invited us to do HIV testing, but we couldn’t announce it, and nobody knew about it. Homophobia prevents churches from being open about prevention.”

Despite that, Davis says the church has come a long way in tackling the epidemic. “When I got the virus, a lot of people were dying of AIDS,” she says. “The church wasn’t fighting against it.” She adds that now is the community at large that needs to pick up the cause as well.

A 'Building Available' hangs over the church's entrance. Photo by Kim Chakanetsa/Northattan

Bernard Smith arrived at Harlem’s Mount Moriah Church on Nov. 22, as he had done for the past 20 years. But that week, for the first time, the church’s wooden doors were locked. A notice pasted onto the door said the church’s parishioners would no longer meet at the location where they had gathered for 76 years.

The church was out of money to keep its building. And so, Mount Moriah joined a grim litany of churches across Harlem which have been forced to close in the past three years.

Mount Moriah was a prosperous church. From the late ’60s up until the ’90s, the church arranged regular trips abroad for members to raise money. Puerto Rico, Israel and Canada were some of the places visited. In 1996, the church choir traveled to Brazil where it produced a music CD called “Harlem Sunday.” We did well with it,” recalled Pastor Edward Earl Johnson, who has led the church for the past 35 years.

Through an arrangement with a local agency, the church also says it received up to 300 tourists every Sunday and a donation.  But by the mid 2000s, soaring maintenance costs made it difficult for the church to maintain its upkeep of the handsome Roman Gothic building.

“It was a dwindling congregation,” said Rob Merker of Merker Advisory Services, which owns the property.  Although the church maintained that it had a congregation of 500, Merker disputed the size of the congregation. “It was about 30 to 40 over 70,” he said. Regardless of these disputed attendance figures, the real issue lay in the financial figures.

In 2005, according to Pastor Johnson, Merker, through RLB 2050 Funding, became the mortgage holder after he loaned the church money. Documents later filed with the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York show  that nearly $1.4 million was due Nov. 6, 2006.  On Feb. 16, 2007, after RLB did not receive the full amount due under the agreement RLB took action against Mount Moriah.

What followed between 2007 and 2010 were various attempts at settlement and court proceedings. As of Aug. 3, 2009, the church was said to owe $2,848,617.32, and it declared bankruptcy on March 9 this year.  RLB  foreclosed on the property, seizing it in November.

A sign directing members to an alternative service location is pasted on the church's front doors. Photo by Kim Chakanetsa/Northattan

The shuttering of the church did not come as a complete surprise to all congregants. A member who identified himself as Ozzie said that while he knew of the church’s difficulties, which “had been going on for a little while, I thought we were doing fine.” The final closure of the church caught him unawares, though; he’s the church’s sound engineer, and the changed locks meant that he was unable to retrieve his musical equipment.

For Smith, the closure was unexpected. “My wife started here and she passed away. I kept coming. This is my home. This is where I found the Lord. I put my pot and tithe and all that.” Looking at the bolted doors, Smith added, “When you are closing God’s houses, something wrong.”

God’s house had not completely closed down — that Sunday Mount Moriah’s congregants gathered in a second-floor space in the National Black Theatre, a few blocks down from the church. The mood was surprisingly optimistic. Addressing his displaced congregants, Pastor Johnson said: “Don’t worry about the negative stuff.  Everyone must go through some battles. Victory is on its way.”  Alluding to the difficult environment facing churches in Harlem he said: “Mount Moriah is not the only church in Harlem going through trouble.”

Among some of the churches in Harlem that have closed down in the past three years are Little Flower Baptist Church, Our Lady Queen of Angels Church and Greater Calvary Baptist Church. Johnson says that the majority of his congregation wants to return to 2050 Fifth Ave. “I am trying to find financing. I am hopeful that in the week to come it will come through,” said Johnson.

The Roman Gothic building building was constructed circa 1867. Photo by Kim Chakanetsa/Northattan

The “Welcome to Mount Moriah” sign that previously stood over the church’s wooden doors has been painted over and a replaced with a prominent “Building Available” sign. “The sign may be painted on but it is still Mount Moriah,” Johnson said.  It is uncertain how long it will stay that way. Merker is hoping to sell the building to another church rather than to another real estate developer. Equally uncertain are where Mount Moriah’s congregation will go from here.

On this particular Sunday morning Pastor Johnson took in his new surroundings and was upbeat: “It’s not 2050 but its good enough,” he said to which several congregants responded with a resounding “Amen!”

The wildly popular Broadway musical, “In The Heights,” sets the lives of Dominican-American residents in Manhattan’s Washington Heights neighborhood to song. That play is in its final weeks. And now a new show that tells an older story of the neighborhood is just beginning.

It tells the story of Washington Heights just after World War II, when the neighborhood was home to the world’s largest community of German Jewish refugees – totaling around 25,000.

Today, those numbers have dwindled significantly, and Spanish-speaking immigrants make up the majority of residents. Some German Jews still live in the neighborhood, though, and Northattan asked three of them to tell their stories.

Martin Spier, 85, survived three concentration camps in Europe before coming to Washington Heights. Photo by Robin Respaut/Northattan.

Martin Spier, age 85

Q: What was your life like before you came to Washington Heights in 1946?

A: I was born in Rauischholzhausen, near Marburg, and I lived there in a small town of about 700 people until the war started. My oldest brother was sent into a concentration camp in 1938 on Kristallnacht, and when he was released, my family sent him and my other brother and my sister to England. There, they were picked up off the boat by a Scottish farmer. He wasn’t a Jew. And they worked on his farm during the war.

Me, I stayed with my younger brother, my parents and my grandmother. And in 1941, we were sent to a concentration camp, called Theresienstadt, in the Czech Republic. We worked there for two years, but my grandmother was in her 80s. She died there.

Q: After Theresienstadt, where did you go?

A: In 1943, we were sent to Auschwitz, the death camp. We saw carloads of people coming on the trains from Poland and Hungary. They didn’t see daylight. They just went straight to gas chambers and were killed. I didn’t know my parents would be killed. But they were.

I was picked out of, I don’t know, 10,000 people. They sent us to work at another camp, called Schwarzheide, building military tanks.

I will never forget my parents, walking from the train into the camp. I’m a bad sleeper. I won’t sleep tonight with our talking.

Q: How were you liberated from the concentration camp?

A: In January of 1945, they started the death march. There was about 1,000 young people my age who left. We marched from the camp to Prague until May, when the Russians liberated us. By then, there were only 200 people. The Russians gave us heavy food, like beans and bacon. But we were sick, and another 100 died from the food. I weighed only 70 pounds.

I went back to my hometown, and two weeks later, my brother arrived, too. I didn’t know he was alive, but he was sent to work at another labor camp. We decided to come to America, because there was no future for us in Germany.

Q: What did you think of Washington Heights when you arrived?

A: I was disappointed with America. I thought everyone was rich. But that was not true. I got my first job in White Plains, working with a jeweler. But I left that job a few weeks later and took others. I worked hard to make money. Eventually, I became a house painter and owned my own business. It was called M&M Spier Painting Corp.

I met other German Jews at the Macabi Club House at 158^th and Broadway. People played tennis there. We had our own soccer team. It was a whole group of people. We were all the same.

Edith Rosenbaum, 85, came to Washington Heights as a young girl and has lived in this apartment for 59 years. Photo by Robin Respaut/Northattan.

Edith Rosenbaum, age 85

Q: Why did you decide to leave Germany?

A: My father was sent to a concentration camp in 1938 on Kristallnacht. He was sent to Sachsenhausen in Oranienburg. He was lucky, because he was an athletic person – a healthy person. Many of the Jews in the camps couldn’t do the things they were asked to do. He was released three months later with the condition that he leave Germany. My mother saw to it that he would get out immediately after his release. And he had to go without us because of the affidavit. So my father moved to New York in February of 1938. We came that summer, just before the war started.

Q: What was New York like for you?

A: We first moved to the Bronx then quickly relocated to Washington Heights, where I’ve lived ever since. I’ve lived in this apartment building for 59 years. What was it like? There were a lot of Jewish people. Our neighbors knew we had no money. Bakers brought us day-old bread. People gave us clothing. My mother bought cans of food ready for the garbage. That way, we could eat. We were not hungry.

Q: How did your family earn an income?

A: My uncle lived with us. He was a tailor and was making money. My father worked for the department store, S. Klein – they took in a lot of German Jews – for $15 a week. My mother knew how to sew and did alterations for money. We had very little money, but we were together. That was good.

Q: What did a life in the United States mean to you?

A: For me, there was a future here. There were other people like ourselves. The language eventually became familiar. We felt that we belonged. I was grateful I was in the United States. I was grateful for everything.

In Germany, we left family behind – my grandparents, everyone on my mother’s side, the children. They were all killed.

Q: What career did you eventually pursue?

A: I attended George Washington High School, where, among other things, I attended a dancing class with a German Jewish teacher. There, I met my husband, another German Jew, who became an engineer. I wanted to become a nurse, but instead, I eventually became an English as a Second Language teacher. I’ve mostly taught immigrants that moved into Washington Heights and speak Spanish.

Q: Did you feel like you could relate to them?

A: They had to relate to me. It was a real adjustment for them to learn English.

Eva Fiest, 91, worked as a maid in order to get out of Germany, before coming to Washington Heights. Photo by Robin Respaut/Northattan.

Eva Fiest, age 91

Q: Why did you decide to move to New York City?

A: My brother and I were the only ones to get out. He got out of Germany very early, and warned us, this was not going to end well. My father said, “I have fought for Germany, and we have always been Germans. I don’t see why we should get out. This will pass.” But it did not. So as things were getting worse, my mother was able to send me to England to live with relatives there.

Soon after, my cousins decided to leave for the United States. I was working as a maid, and I said, “If you go, I go.” So they managed to get me an affidavit almost overnight, and I left with them. It was 1939.

Q: What did you do once you arrived in Washington Heights?

A: I stayed with one of my cousins, and she said, “Now take your time and get used to New York.” But after three days, I had a job. I worked at first at a home for girls on 157^th Street. Later, I became a dietitian at a nursing home, which was more up my alley.

Q: How did you feel about Washington Heights?

A: Most of the refugees lived up here. My cousins lived on 163^rd Street, just off Riverside Drive. Another one lived off Broadway at 179^th Street. It was the place to be. Washington Heights was greatly occupied by German-born refugees.

Q: Washington Heights is different now. How do you feel about that?

A: Now, most of the people are not Jewish. Most of them speak Spanish. As long as they are decent people, I don’t mind. And so far, so good.

Q: Your parents did not escape Germany. What happened to them?

A: My father died before the war. But, my poor mother did not make it out. She was waiting for a visa to go to Israel, and it never came. Instead, I received a letter in German that said my mother had left the town where she was born. The Germans had a special way of writing about what happened to people. So that, to me, was obvious. She was killed.

Q: How often do you think about her?

A: Very often. In those days, I was young, and I’m still blaming myself. Why didn’t I get my mother out? But the only way would have been if she had come as a maid. And the thought that my mother should do that kind of work, it never came to me. You see, if you grow up in a house where you had everything, to think that my mother would have gone on her hands and knees and cleaned the floor like this. I couldn’t see this, at the time. I couldn’t see it.