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Yearbooks bring two religions together

Project started by cataloging Jewish residents in Michigan

DETROIT (AP) – What’s the Jewish Historical Society of Michigan doing with several dozen Catholic school yearbooks?

Among its collection of 1,800 yearbooks, the Jewish Historical Society has amassed tomes that chronicle the surge of Jewish students who heavily populated Detroit high schools such as Central, Mumford and Henry Ford High during the last century.

But the society, which strives to acquire yearbooks from Michigan schools attended by even one student of Jewish extraction, also has acquired dozens of Catholic school yearbooks through donations from collectors or bequests.

Recently, the Jewish group donated several dozen Catholic school yearbooks to the Bishop Michael J. Gallagher Society, which is spearheading the Detroit Catholic School Heritage Project to collect, showcase and digitize memorabilia from long-gone and current metro Detroit Catholic schools.

The donation came about because Jewish Historical Society Chairman Chuck Domstein read a Detroit Free Press article about the Catholic group’s plans to open a museum with the Catholic schools artifacts near all-girls Catholic Ladywood High School in Livonia

“I was totally shocked when they called us,” said Michael Butler, a Livonia lawyer and president of the Catholic group.

“These six cases of yearbooks from the Jewish Historical Society represent the largest single donation made by any person or institution in the four years that the Detroit Catholic School Heritage project has been in existence,” said Butler, a 1971 graduate of Detroit Catholic Central High.

The Catholic school project has digitized about 70 old Catholic school yearbooks and plans to do more, Butler said.

The group has amassed about 200 items, including letter sweaters, trophies, sports programs and, most recently, the time capsule from the now-demolished St. Bede Elementary School and parish in Southfield and class photos from long-closed St. Rita High School in Detroit.

Of the Jewish society’s yearbook collection, “a couple of hundred of them were my own,” said Domstein, a longtime educator. His résumé includes schools that long-served the area’s Jewish community.

“Every year I was at a school, I made sure I took a yearbook to remind me of my students,” said Domstein, who currently is an adjunct professor of education at Detroit’s Marygrove College, a Catholic institution.

“Many times we’ll get requests ... and they’ll want to know something about their parents and grandparents or other relatives,” Domstein said, and the society can help. The society has begun digitizing its collection. Its website offers a yearbook database that lists schools and class years at www.michjewishhistory.org.

Gerald Cook, a lawyer and past president of the Jewish Historical Society, said the group began collecting yearbooks in 1999 to round out a collection that could have just focused on the famous and accomplished.

“We thought that we ought to be about every Jew,” said Cook, Oak Park High Class of 1960. “Where can you find every Jew and where can you find them looking the best that they knew how – the picture that they chose out of all the other pictures, and that’s the yearbook.”

The collection serves to bridge the present to the past, said Cook, “because many people couldn’t afford to buy a yearbook. They didn’t have the money. Or it was in the basement and a flood came by.”

They also acquired donations over the years from people, said Cook, “who treasure these books and want to know that they’re being taken care of.”

The society wants to preserve the history of Jewish immigration and settlements throughout the state. Its collection includes yearbooks and class photos from elementary schools through college. Many yearbooks in the donation to the Catholic group include yearbooks from the law and dental schools affiliated with what is now University of Detroit Mercy.

“The Jews went where there was economic opportunity” throughout Michigan, said Cook.

Jewish merchants established themselves in the Upper Peninsula and northern Lower Peninsula in areas where mining or lumber camps flourished. The pattern of Jewish settlement began on the east side of Woodward in what is now downtown in the 19th and early part of the 20th century.

The community then migrated along a northwest route through the Dexter-Davison neighborhood and northwest Detroit, and then beginning in the 1950s into Oak Park and Huntington Woods, and later Southfield, the Farmington area and West Bloomfield.

“We want books from those places if we don’t have them yet,” said Cook, as well as more recent yearbooks from generations attending schools in places such as Walled Lake, Commerce and Troy, said Cook.

At the offices of the Jewish Historical Society, on the grounds of the Jewish Community Center in West Bloomfield, volunteers delicately handle their treasures.

In their collection is the Detroit Northern High 1932 Viking yearbook, and pressed between pages 34-35 is a corsage with an ivory satiny ribbon.

“What’s rare and special is when yearbooks have personal mementos inside them – a corsage from a dance,” said Domstein, “or a note that a boy wrote a girl.”



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