American and Yiddish newspapers about the Kennedy assassination, the moon landing, and the 1969 New York Mets; a Newsweek magazine about the Entebbe rescue; and obituaries of Torah luminaries like Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson and Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik. These are some of Herb Schonhaut’s historical collections.
Schonhaut has been a gabbai at the Queens Jewish Center since moving to Forest Hills from Flatbush in 1993. He is now Senior Gabbai, supervising four other gabbaim. He coordinates the shul’s daily Daf Yomi shiur and is a frequent baal t’filah. He is also pursuing a Cantorial diploma at Yeshiva University.
At nine years of age, Herb cut out an article from “Newstime,” a publication for young adults, and brought it to his Fifth Grade “Show and Tell” class with Rabbi Spinrad at the Yeshiva of Eastern Parkway.
He said to himself at the time, This is interesting, and I felt like watching the news. The Kennedy assassination was “the first news item that I really saw on TV.” That’s when Schonhaut started saving historical newspapers. He has the New York Post, the Daily News, Look Magazine, and the Yiddish newspaper the Forverts, all documenting Kennedy’s assassination and Lyndon B. Johnson sworn in as President on Air Force One after President Kennedy’s assassination.
Schonhaut’s father worked as a bookbinder, who helped his son paste and make scrapbooks. Schonhaut now has articles organized in binders, folders, and collages.
During the Six-Day War in 1967, Schonhaut was a 14-year-old student at the Mesivta of Eastern Parkway. “We went collecting all the time with pushkes for Israel.” The school assembled at the start of the war to say extra prayers. Schonhaut has newspapers from almost every day of the Six-Day War. He posted a map on the wall in his room showing “where the IDF was each day and how they got to Jerusalem and captured other territories.”
When the Yom Kippur War broke out, Schonhaut was 21 years old, taking Economics, Urban Studies, and Judaic Studies at Brooklyn College. He remembers the Hillel on campus getting people together to say T’hilim and pray. Schonhaut recently put what Rabbi Joseph Grunblatt said about the Yom Kippur War in 1973 into a recent Queens Jewish Center newsletter.
Herb often puts bulletins and pictures from the 1950s, ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s Queens Jewish Center’s newsletters into the shul’s current newsletters. “It’s all saying what happened and what they said, and you’ll compare to what’s going on now.”
He has newspapers from both blackouts in New York City. In 1965, he was on the Church Avenue bus coming back from yeshivah “and everything went dark.” In 1977, he was leaving work in Williamsburg. “I am glad I did not stay late, because they burned down the Bushwick area.”
On 9/11, Schonhaut was on the #4 subway going to work at 2 Broadway for New York City’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority. He managed the Subway Signage Department, doing graphics and signage for subway cars and stations. The train skipped the Fulton Street subway station, announcing “police activity.” He got out at the Bowling Green subway station. His co-workers told him, “You made it on the last train.”
After the Twin Towers fell, “We couldn’t go out because you couldn’t breathe.” After it “dissipated, people were afraid; we didn’t know what was going on out there.” Papers and confetti were still coming down. “Whatever it was that got burned, it smelled terrible, so we had our handkerchiefs in our mouths.”
Schonhaut and co-workers evacuated by walking over the Manhattan Bridge to Jay Street. Subway workers were on the third floor sitting on benches. “All these people were covered in soot because they had been there.” “My pants were covered.”
Because of the toxic material released that day, they all had to register on the World Trade Center Health Registry. “We have to report periodically with forms asking how we are feeling,” said Schonhaut. A number of his colleagues who went to help after the Towers came down later got sick and died.
Herb was tasked with answering questions about transit in The New York Times. He has The New York Times from 9/12/01, Life Magazine, and a lot of publications about the attack on the World Trade Center because “it was just the most impactful [event] in my life.”
Nowadays, Herb gets most of his historical items using online sites like eBay, Pinterest, and Google. Herb also goes antiquing in the Catskills, New Jersey, and in Savannah, Georgia, where his cousins live. He buys and sells items at the National Council for Jewish Women Thrift Store in Lawrence. Anything before 1960 is before his time, so Schonhaut buys the items. As a teenager, he bought a lot of historical newspapers and magazines from the outdoor tables at the Village Art Show and the flea markets in Chelsea. He has items that his father and relatives saved.
Schonhaut has Life and Ken magazines, both profiling Adolf Hitler in 1937; a 1950 Left-wing newspaper, the Daily Compass, discussing the aftermath of World War II; newspapers announcing the opening of the Verrazzano Bridge and new subway lines; and magazines about the 1939 and 1964 World’s Fairs held in Queens.
“I don’t want to sound like I am a hoarder or something, but there’s a lot of stuff, could be a thousand because a lot of them are not an entire newspaper. I cut out an article and throw out the newspaper.” He pastes the articles into a book. “However, if it was a big event, moon landing, or something like that, I might keep the whole paper.”
Schonhaut likes looking back at the primary source to see what the public knew at that time. He found a story of his father’s hometown in Europe being invaded by the Nazis in 1943 and the story “is on page 60 or something, like its way back, not on the front. You actually see this in reality.” By having the primary source, “You could show and prove something.”
By David Schneier
