The Edith and Carl Marks Jewish Community House of Bensonhurst, known as "the J", was incorporated in 1927 and has helped over one million Jews in the Bensonhurst section of New York City's borough of Brooklyn. It initially served as a community center for Eastern European Jewish immigrants and their children. As the complexion of the Jewish community in Bensonhurst changed, its community center changed in accord. During the 1940s and 1950s, a large influx of Syrian Jews immigrated to the area. It was during this period that Sandy Koufax, the son of Syrian Jewish immigrants, played on the basketball courts of "the J".
In the 1980s, a third wave of immigrants, this time from the former Soviet Union, once again shifted the focus of the community center to that of a settlement house.
Former members include:
- Harvey Fierstein - Tony Award winning writer of Torch Song Trilogy and gay rights activist
- Gary David Goldberg - creator of television series such as Family Ties, Spin City and Brooklyn Bridge
- Sandy Koufax - Baseball Hall of Famer
Famous quotes containing the words edith, carl, marks, jewish, community and/or house:
“What I want to give in the theatre is beauty, that’s what I want to give.”
—Dame Edith Evans (1888–1976)
“The millere was a stout carl for the nones;”
—Geoffrey Chaucer (1340?–1400)
“With the greater part of rich people, the chief enjoyment of riches consists in the parade of riches, which in their eyes is never so complete as when they appear to possess those decisive marks of opulence which nobody can possess but themselves.”
—Adam Smith (1723–1790)
“What was lost in the European cataclysm was not only the Jewish past—the whole life of a civilization—but also a major share of the Jewish future.... [ellipsis in source] It was not only the intellect of a people in its prime that was excised, but the treasure of a people in its potential.”
—Cynthia Ozick (b. 1928)
“Jesus would recommend you to pass the first day of the week rather otherwise than you pass it now, and to seek some other mode of bettering the morals of the community than by constraining each other to look grave on a Sunday, and to consider yourselves more virtuous in proportion to the idleness in which you pass one day in seven.”
—Frances Wright (1795–1852)
“Is not the whole world a vast house of assignation of which the filing system has been lost?”
—Quentin Crisp (b. 1908)