Jewish History Walking Tour of the North End

While Boston’s North End is famous for being a hub of Italian culture, thousands of Jewish residents once lived and worked in this historic neighborhood in the late 19th century. Composed primarily of immigrants and first-generation Americans, the North End's Jewish community was defined by the languages, religious practices, and social networks originating from Eastern Europe and Russia.

During this walking tour of the North End, we’ll explore the neighborhood’s rich Jewish history. We’ll pay special attention to the years between 1880 and 1920, when many residents were Jewish immigrants or first-generation American Jews. The 90-minute tour will leave from the Paul Revere House at 12:30pm. Carl Kaplan, a certified historical tour guide for Boston By Foot, will lead the tour.

Jewish North Enders started synagogues, Hebrew schools, Torah study groups, charities, mutual aid societies, and a variety of social and recreational clubs. Streets with high concentrations of Jewish residents featured kosher food stores, distilleries, and lunch counters, all closed on the Jewish sabbath; private baths; multilingual publishers and booksellers; and other enterprises that recalled the Eastern European and Russian communities the immigrants had left behind.

At the same time, Jews provided goods and services to the general population, intermingling in this close urban context with people from other countries and cultural backgrounds: Irish, Italian, Polish, Russian, and more. Jewish schoolchildren filled local schools, libraries, and settlement houses; sang and recited American patriotic verses at historic neighborhood sites such as Old North Church; and experienced the tension between old customs, languages, and lifestyles and a modern, secularized society.

Like other urban neighborhoods, the North End has seen "Jewish mobility," leaving behind ghostly traces of a once-thriving Jewish neighborhood. Yet, through history — and with the help of rich online archives — their stories still speak.

This tour is free and open to the public. Please RSVP by selecting the "Get tickets" button. If you so wish, you can choose to make an entirely optional donation to Old North Illuminated, the nonprofit that preserves and interprets Old North Church Historic Site. Your generosity supports our education programs.

About Your Tour Guide

CARL KAPLAN is a certified historical tour guide for the organization Boston By Foot. As a retired engineer for IBM, Carl enjoys researching various topics of Jewish life, especially during the third wave of immigration to the U.S. in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As an amateur genealogist, he is a member of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Greater Boston and a volunteer caseworker for The Together Plan, a non-profit organization that conducts searches in the archives of Belarus.