return to Home page About This Cleveland Jewish History Website  

"A people's memory is history; and as a man without a memory, so
 a people without a history cannot grow wiser, better."  I. L. Peretz

Our Mission

The aim of www.ClevelandJewishHistory.net is to present more Cleveland Jewish history to more persons by:

  • Developing web pages to make it easier to find online content.

  • Increasing our web-based history with pages on this site created by myself and other interested persons.

  • Encouraging organizations to present their history on the web, on this site or their own.

This website is a work in progress. It began in 1998 when I was working on my first website, for the wedding of my youngest daughter, who was being married at The Temple at University Circle. This stirred memories of Abba Hillel Silver who had been my rabbi. Soon I was creating a page of links to web pages about him. (To see that page, click here.) In a few years that page had become a 20 page website - the only one on Cleveland's leading Jewish citizen. In January 2007 it became the nucleus of this website which, as we show on How This Website Evolved, has since grown to more than 460 pages and 290,000 page views a year.

Since 2007 the content of many pages has been furnished by others (see our Contributors page). May that trend continue, for so many of us have stories and pictures to share.

Your comments and participation are welcome.

Arnie Berger  

Meet the Editor - Webkeeper -  Arnold Berger
 

A disclosure. To those who ask, after more than 60 years here, "Where did you go to school?" (they mean high school), my high school was Brooklyn Tech, in New York. Despite that, I hope you will think of me as a Clevelander. 

I came here in June 1954, with an Industrial Engineering degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and an MS in Management from MIT's Sloan School.

Why Cleveland? I wanted a career in manufacturing. Most companies had multi-year management training programs that required moving from city to city. But Lincoln Electric, in Euclid, offered me a position without moves. We were then the nation's seventh largest city.

I left Lincoln in 1957 to teach at Case, then left with a PhD in 1963 to teach at the Graduate School of Business at the University of Pittsburgh. I returned in 1966 to work on the federation of Case and Western Reserve to form CWRU, then joined the staff of the Cleveland Commission on Higher Education.

In 1971, after three years as VP of a computer software business, I became an Associate Professor in the College of Business at Cleveland State University. In 1976 I returned to the world of business, founding a software company that served law firms and the Cleveland Foundation. It closed, after 17 years, in 1994.

My website work began in 1998, and has been, as it is with this website, webmaster (creator of pages), author and researcher, and also editor, working with others.

For many years I was an internet activist for my Shaker Square neighborhood, creating websites for the Square, the Ludlow Community Association and the Larchmere Merchants. A 2016 proclamation from Mayor Frank Jackson recognized that service.

My Jewish-themed web work includes sites for Luboml (a vanished shtetl), Congregation Kol HaLev, the Jewish Reconstructionist movement, and Jewish Currents magazine. I wrote the "From the Archive" column in the Cleveland Jewish News for a year, ending in October 2011.

In December 2017 I started an open Facebook group now named Northeast Ohio Jewish History.

Welcome to these pages.

Arnie Berger             

See how this site evolved over the years.