© Vincenzo Aiosa
© Vincenzo Aiosa
Between 1880 and 1910, approximately 1.1 million Jews fled from oppression in Eastern Europe and sought refuge in New York City’s Lower East Side. Amongst them was Alexander “Sender” Jarmulowsky, an entrepreneur from the Russian province of Lomza. Jarmulowsky was ordained as a rabbi, but after marrying Rachel Markels, the daughter of a wealthy merchant, he moved to Hamburg and established a trans-Atlantic shipping firm. In the early 1870s, Jarmulowsky immigrated to New York City, where he founded S Jarmulowsky’s Bank in the Lower East Side. Before long, Sender was known as the “East Side J.P. Morgan.”
A well-respected Talmudic scholar, Sender was an important patron for the Jewish Orthodox community in particular. He was one of the principal investors in the Eldridge Street Synagogue, for which he served as the first president. He also helped to organize the Association of Orthodox Hebrew Congregations, and the Zichron Ephraim Synagogue.
However, Jarmulowsky was no modern Medici. He was both accountable and accessible to his customers. In this pre-regulatory period, small businessmen and low-income laborers were nervous about handing over their meager savings. Indeed Jarmulowsky experienced bank runs in 1886, 1890, 1893 and 1901, and responded by paying one hundred cents on the dollar to each anxious accountholder. He was famously honest and fiscally conservative, and known to grant loans based on personality as much as credit worthiness, a somewhat unconventional, albeit successful, strategy. Equally unusual was his decision to make his wife, Rachel, a partner in the bank. – PLACE MATTERS
