''After years of spiraling real estate prices, fears of long protracted war prodded thousands of New York Jews to withdraw money from their local banks during the summer of 1914. For years these "banks" had not only kept immigrant Jews' small deposits, but also helped them buy ship tickets for their loved ones in Europe and transfer money back there. Unable to return depositors' funds, New York State's Bank Superintendent forced one of the largest banks on New York's Lower East side, Alexander, aka Sender, Jarmulowsky's bank, founded in 1873 and claiming over 60,000 depositors, to shutter its doors.
On August 30, 1914, the largest financially-driven riot in New York City history to date broke out in front of Jarmulovsky's bank. Demanding the bank return their deposits, the enraged crowd of East European Jews paraded to City Hall where they attacked clerks, forcing police to arrest nine and use clubs to quell rest. The riot frightened city officials, who assigned the city's revered judge, Learned Hand, to settle the claims.
Judge Hand soon uncovered that the bank's assets were all tied up in real estate speculation in East Harlem. The incident provoked a myriad of court cases, Hand to write precedent-setting judicial decisions and city officials to craft new banking legislation to protect New York from becoming infected with "speculitis," a disease all agreed was transforming not only New York but America itself.
While few today recognize the name Jarmulowsky or can identify this family's bank - nicknamed "the Temple of Capitalism," the building still stands on the corner of Canal street and East Broadway. This bank and its failure highlight a fascinating aspect of the American economy in the early-twentieth century: while East European Jews occupied marginal (and often disreputable) niches in the businesses of shipping and banking and invited suspicion from large portions of society, they nonetheless were able to move into the mainstream sectors of the economy in a comparatively brief time span by acquiring substantial capital through their risky ventures.'' Rebecca Kobrin, University of Pennsylvania, Katz Judaic Center
NY TIMES: Sender Jarmulowsky arrived in the
It was, with its rusticated limestone lower section and a terra-cotta upper part, no barebones loft building. The entrance to the ground-floor bank at the curved corner is surmounted by two reclining figures in classical style flanking a clock. Period photographs of the banking floor show a conventional work of marble and bronze; it could have been any well-known uptown bank.
Sender Jarmulowsky died in 1912 as his building neared completion; The Times noted he left "only $501,053" as an estate, apparently expecting much more. His sons Harry and Louis continued the business. 
In 1917, as depositors withdrew nearly $3 million to send to overseas relatives caught in the war, the State Banking Department took over Sender Jarmulowsky's bank. It had liabilities of $1.25 million and assets of only $600,000. Over 5,000 depositors crowded around the branch and Harry and Louis Jarmulowsky were indicted for banking fraud later in the year. The bank never reopened and the building was sold at a bankruptcy auction in 1920.
In 1873 prominent philanthropist and Russian immigrant Sender Jarmulowsky founded a bank on the Lower East Side. Through his astute business sense and community connections the bank grew, and in 1912 Jarmulowsky erected a structure at Orchard and Canal Streets magnificent enough for his successful company.
Unfortunately, Jarmulowsky died less than a month after the building was completed. Even more unfortunately, his bank failed only two years later, leaving thousands of its depositors penniless. Jarmulowsky himself had little to do with the bank's downfall. His seemingly risky business practices - granting loans to clients based on personality rather than financial standing - proved successful.
It was two of Jarmulowsky's sons who caused trouble, making bad real estate investments and mismanaging the institution they had inherited from their father. As World War I raged in Europe, crowds of Lower East Siders rushed to withdraw money for family across the Atlantic. Having squandered the bank's funds, the Jarmulovskys couldn't make good on their clients' deposits.
Two thousand people demonstrated in front of the bank. Five hundred people stormed the house where son Meyer lived, forcing him and his family to flee over the rooftops. Shortly after the State took over the bank in May 1917, the Jarmulowsky sons were indicted for banking fraud and the bank closed. The building, however, still remains.
Over the Rooftops
Below is a 1914 NY Times article chronicling Meyer Jarmulowsky's escape from a mob of angry depositors. A brief summary: crowds gathered around the banker's home on Fort Washington Avenue, demanding their money. Fearing for his safety, Jarmulowsky scampered from his rooftop onto a neighboring apartment house, descended into the building's basement, and dashed across the street into a waiting cab, narrowly avoiding capture by the protestors.
Click to enlarge 
Family Drama
Sender Jarmulowsky's descendants (at least those that made it into the NY Times' extensive archive on the family) were as prone to scandal as their ancestor was widly successful. Not only were sons Albert and Meyer indicted for fraud after forcing their father's bank to close, but a third son was sent to Bellevue's psych ward. And then there was a grandson who was jailed for stealing $1,625 from a jewelry store manager, and (perhaps the strangest of all) a granddaughter, Bertha Clark, whose elopement to a linen salesman in 1911 dragged her family into a messy lawsuit. When the couple was kept apart for 17 days by Clark's furious parents, the groom demanded $100,000 in retributions.
At the southwest corner of Canal and Orchard streets is the impressive formal entrance to the bank Sender Jarmulowsky founded in 1873 and housed in this neoclassical skyscraper he built around 1895. Jarmulowsky's rise was one of those Horatio Alger stories that dazzled and emboldened the hardworking poor of the old neighborhood.
He began as a pushcart peddler, then moved up to selling goods to steady customers: a fine linen tablecloth for the Sabbath, silverware, perhaps silver candlesticks to replace those stolen at Ellis, furniture. Jarmulowsky extended credit and opened a "passage and exchange" office, where he bought steerage passages in bulk and offered his customers a chance to "pay out" the cost of bringing their relations from the other side "on time," precisely the way they bought bedroom sets. He also exchanged hard-earned greenbacks for the red-backed Russian rubles the toilers of the ghetto remitted back home. Extending credit, operating in the foreign currency markets, branching out to taking deposits, buying mortgages—a banker.
Jarmulowsky's bank, alas, failed in August 1914, when the neighborhood called up all its liquidity to send passage money to relations in the old country before the war trapped them for good.
The western wall of Jarmulowsky's building was for years a display of painted advertisements. Banquet halls and patent medicines predominated, but spinets were advertised as well. Girls from better-off families were expected as apprentice ladies to take piano lessons, so Papa would lay out for an upright. In the division of parental hopes and harassment, legions of ill-tempered boys drew bowstrings over innumerable violins, adding their screeches to those of the neighborhood's thousands of dispossessed and unwanted cats, as their parents prayed that a little virtuoso in the family, like Milstein, Zimbalist, or Heifetz (Yehudi Menuhin was the midget maestro to the generation of the twenties), could be their ticket out of the ghetto, to wealth and the grand world uptown. Irving Berlin, lately Izzy Baline of Cherry Street, sometime busker and singing waiter on the Bowery, began to write tunes; one of his earliest hits, in 1908, "Yidl with Your Fiddle, Play Some Ragtime," speaks volumes on the process called assimilation.
Plus ça change, plus c'est la meme chose. Our Talmud gives us wise advise on how to do honest business dealings. We ignore advice, we speculate, we act with greed, we trust in man and not in God ignoring Psalm 118:8 and we think because we are modern, we know better than our sages, our rabbis, and God Himself. We think that the nature of man has developed, has evolved, has changed. We are the same as we were in Gan Eden. We have a yetzer ha ra and a yetzer tov. Which we decide to listen to, is the free will God has given us. We will have our Korachs, our Jarmulowskys, our Madoffs, and even Rabbis who murder their wives, or walk off with an eighth of a million dollars without a word of teshuvah.
Our job as Jews, now that our task of survival and being accepted in the USA and other Western nations has been accomplished, is to return to the common sense values and ethics and spirituality, via www.JewishSpiritualRenewal.org, via Rabbi Arthur Segal : (001) The Handbook to Jewish Spiritual Renewal A Path of Transformation for the Modern Jew, so that as the Who sings "We Won't Be Fooled Again."
Shavuah tov, Shalom and many blessings,
Rabbi Arthur Segal
Jewish Spiritual Renewal, Jewish Renewal, Jewish Spirituality, Eco Judaism
Hilton Head Island, SC, Bluffton, SC, Savannah, GA
Member Temple Oseh Shalom
Acknowledgements to the Greenwich Village Times, NY Times, Tenement Museum, U of Penn Katz Center, American Heritage, Lower East Side Walking Tours, NY Landmarks Commission
