e thousand women a season—enjoyed a respite from their ordinary routine amid the “cheery hospitality” of the society’s two vacation homes, one in Bellport, Long Island, and the other in the Adirondacks. At these facilities, staffed and inhabited entirely by women, the “Jewish working girl enjoys all the advantages of mountain air or seashore.... Here her health and her pleasures are studied, her comfort provided for and her social well-being considered.” A proven success, the Jewish Working Girls’ Vacation Society inspired the formation of similar societies throughout the country. The Welcome House Vacation Home in Long Branch, New Jersey, for example, catered to the recently arrived immigrant woman. “These girls feel happier among themselves rather than being with English-speaking girls,” explained Carrie Wise, its director. In Chicago, the local chapter of the National Council of Jewish Women maintained a summer sewing school in which students capped their education with a two-week group vacation. The Philadelphia Vacation Home for Jewish Working Girls sought to acquaint city-bred girls with the beauties of botany, giving them “a glimpse into the wonders of mother nature.” Frolicking in the surf or catching butterflies, formerly fatigued, downtrodden young women reemerged as “care-free, merry-hearted sprites.” Small wonder, then, that contemporary observers likened the Jewish Working Girls’ Vacation Society to a “truly American fairy tale.”
Several philanthropic organizations helped the underprivileged find respite from “sultry” city streets by exposing them to the cooling breezes of “marine ozone” or mountain air. “Summer Outings for the Jewish Poor,” explained the National Conference of Jewish Charities in 1904, “form an especially valuable branch of what is technically known as ‘preventive’ charity.” Claiming that “Jewish faults and failings can be traced to their being cooped up in towns,” conference officials argued for programmatically acquainting tenement residents with the joys of rural life. “You cannot pitch forth the Ghetto dweller into the country. You must lead him there by his own desire, and summer outings are one of the most effective methods of inducement.”
The “worn and fragile mother” of the ghettos came in for special consideration. “If preventive charity is to have a chance ... here is the opportunity,” settlement house workers were told. Remove the tired mother, “overburdened with care, with drudgery, with discouragement,” together with her children, to restful surroundings, and within a week, one would witness a marked physical and social improvement. “Too tired to take the journey on Monday morning ... they return home on Saturday night, rested and bright and hopeful.” Heartened by such empirically based evidence of success and convinced that there was “probably no means by which so much happiness can be conveyed for so small expenditure,” dozens of Jewish welfare organizations such as the Educational Alliance and the Henry Street Settlement sponsored a steady round of harbor excursions, picnics in the park, and week-long trips to the country or the seashore for the urban poor.
Many of these philanthropically inspired facilities, attentive to the ritual requirements of their clientele, made sure a “truly Jewish spirit” reigned at their resorts. The New York Jewish Working Girls’ Vacation Society insisted that its strictly kosher meals be opened with a “short Hebrew grace” and closed with a “benediction.” Others, like Philadelphia’s Vacation Home for Jewish Working Girls, placed a premium on Friday evening services. “The festive air of lighted candles and best gowns,” an eyewitness related, “set Friday evening apart as something altogether different from the other evenings.” Elsewhere, however, the familiar rhythms of Jewish life were sharply interrupted as many summering Jews appeared to take a vacation from God as well. “Out for a holiday time,” Jews have “thrown off all restraints of religion and of Jewish self-respect and deport themselves as though no tie bound them to race or religion,” obs