Bookstore
A Farmer's Daughter: Bluma
A Farmer’s Daughter: Bluma, tells the story of Bluma Bayuk Rappoport Purmell, daughter of original Alliance Colony settlers Moses and Annette Bayuk. Spanning over a century, this work begins with her parents' escape from Tzarist Russia, chronicles the daily struggles of life on a New Jersey farm, and moves through her years of nursing school, two marriages, and more.
Available through Amazon or by contacting the Alliance Heritage Center at Stockton University.
Growing American: The Alliance Agricultural Colony in South Jersey-A History
The catalog for Growing American is now available. Covering nearly all aspects of the exhibition, the history is 111 pages, with full color images and a complete index. Written by Tom Kinsella, the Elizabeth and Samuel Levin Director of the Alliance Heritage Center, it tells the story of the Alliance Colony, begun in 1882 in southern New Jersey, the first successful Jewish farming community in America.
Available from Amazon or by contacting the Alliance Heritage Center at Stockton University.
Click here to view a photograph collection from this publication.
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This republication pairs Moses Klein’s 1889 essay collection Migdal Zophim, which offers farming in Palestine and South Jersey as the answer to Jewish emigration difficulties, with contemporary reports on life in the colonies of Alliance, Rosenhayn, and Carmel from 1882 to 1907. The compendium provides a detail-filled window into the aspirations and lived realities of the Jews who fled brutal pogroms in Eastern Europe and fought to create communities for themselves in agricultural colonies across South Jersey. With twenty original photographs not printed in the first edition.
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Available from Amazon or by contacting the Alliance Heritage Center.
The Jewish Colonies of South Jersey
This 1901 report by the Bureau of Statistics of New Jersey
offers a rare look at life in the Jewish colonies of Alliance,
Rosenhayn, Carmel, and Woodbine in the decades after their
founding by refugees escaping the pogroms of Eastern Europe.
Author William Stainsby was a longtime New Jersey politician
who served as alderman in Newark and represented Essex
County in the New Jersey Senate before becoming Chief
of the State Bureau of Labor and Statistics. This is a companion to Migdal Zophim & Farming
in the Jewish Colonies of South Jersey.
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Available from Amazon or by contacting the Alliance Heritage Center.
Back to the Land: Alliance Colony to the Ozarks in Four Generations
Ruth Weinstein’s memoir Back to the Land: Alliance Colony to the Ozarks in Four Generations was edited, designed, and published by the Center. The memoir recounts the plight of Russian Jews, pushed out of their homeland by ruthless pogroms; it describes the early life of Alliance settlers; and beautifully reports Weinstein’s own childhood as a “summer kid” visiting Alliance, Norma, and nearby Vineland to see her grandfather, John Levin, as well as extended family and friends. For nearly fifty years, Weinstein and her husband, Joe McShane, have worked their forty-acre homestead in the Arkansas Ozarks, the description of which hearkens back to the experiences of Weinstein’s forebears.
Published in spring 2020, the 225-page paperback is an important contribution to the history of the Alliance Colony. It is available directly from Ruth Weinstein via her PayPal account at stillinthegarden@gmail.com, by contacting the Alliance Heritage Center, or through Amazon.
Adventures in Idealism: The Life of Professor H. L. Sabsoovich, Founder of Woodbine, New Jersey
First published in 1922, Adventures in Idealism is the biography of H. L. Sabsovich, founder of Woodbine, New Jersey, and champion of Jewish farming in America. Driven to leave Russia, Sabsovich arrived in the U.S. with his family and a deep belief in the power of agriculture to provide healthy, meaningful and rewarding lives for Russian Jews. Throughout his career, H. L. Sabsovich was kind and just and compulsively trustworthy. He worked incessantly to build community and to correct social ills where he could. His patriotism, which flowed from opportunities offered by his adopted homeland, was often on display. This is a story of one man's public-spiritedness and his drive to uplift the lives of people in need. Republished with a new foreword, afterword and additional historic photos of early Woodbine.
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Available from Amazon or by contacting the Alliance Heritage Center.