H eadlines
Educator Brings Past to Present with Tours
L O CAL
SELAH MAYA ZIGHELBOIM | JE STAFF
MICHAEL SCHATZ’S LOVE
for Jewish education has taken
him to working at Gratz
College, serving as president of
the Jewish Educators Assembly
and running Philadelphia
Jewish History Tours.

Schatz, an Elkins Park res-
ident whose family has lived
in the Philadelphia area for
generations, has taken groups
on walking and bus tours of
Philadelphia’s Jewish history
for about three years. The tours
are an offshoot of his work as a
Jewish educator.

“As an educator, to look at
history and living history and
teaching people — not in a
classroom — in a different kind
of a format was an exciting
sideline to what I am typically
doing,” Schatz said.

Schatz works at a few dif-
ferent synagogues, as well as
for a private company called
Hebrew Helpers. This past
year, he was awarded an hon-
orary degree from the Jewish
Theological Seminary.

He mostly does group tours
— with students, senior adults,
sisterhoods and others — but
has also done a tour open to
individuals and a family tour.

He is interested in expanding,
for example by taking National
Museum of American Jewish
History (NMAJH) visitors to
places they have learned about
at the museum.

Schatz leads the groups on
different paths through the
old Jewish Quarter of Society
Hill and Queen Village,
or Wynnefield and West
Philadelphia, or the Northeast
and Elkins Park and more.

Teenagers, Schatz said, like
the walking tour of Society
Hill and Queen Village, while
older adults love to go back to
the neighborhoods where they
or their parents grew up.

The tours can take partici-
JEWISHEXPONENT.COM pants as far back as the 1740s —
when Jewish immigrants began
establishing a community in
Philadelphia — with visits to
the Mikveh Israel Cemetery,
the oldest Jewish cemetery in
Philadelphia. He shows partici-
pants the places where the com-
munity’s synagogues, schools,
kosher eateries and recreation
centers used to be.

Schatz often learns more about
Philadelphia’s Jewish history from
his own tour participants.

Once, when Schatz took
a tour group to Temple Beth
Hillel-Beth El, a man in the
group happened to have been
instrumental in the merger of
the two synagogues and told
Schatz that story in great detail.

Another time, while tour-
ing a church that used to be
a synagogue with a group of
seniors from Golden Slipper
Gems on the Main Line, one
man said that he had been Bar
Mitzvahed there.

Moriah SimonHazani, the
director of Golden Slipper
Gems on the Main Line,
said she took two groups of
older adults on the tours with
Schatz. He previously taught
a course at Golden Slipper,
which SimonHazani said res-
onated with the older adults
who attended. She said Golden
Slipper Gems was interested
in organizing more tours with
Schatz in the future.

“He’s very important to
both preserving the history of
Jewish Philadelphia but also
projecting to the next genera-
tion,” SimonHazani said.

The history of Jewish
Philadelphia begins with immi-
gration from London and
Amsterdam when the city was
still young.

As different migratory
waves of Jews came from dif-
ferent countries throughout
the centuries, they spread out.

When German Jews began
arriving in the 19th century,
they clustered to the north near
Franklin Square, then later into
Michael Schatz in front on Society Hill
Synagogue Northern Liberties. As Russian
Jews settled around South
Street, Marshall Street and
Port Richmond, the German
Jews spread north toward
Elkins Park, Schatz said.

It wasn’t until the ’60s and
’70 that Jews began moving
into the suburbs in substantial
numbers, Schatz said.

Nowadays, as people prior-
itize living closer to work over
living near other Jewish peo-
ple, the population has spread
across Greater Philadelphia.

“Today is really different,”
Schatz said. “The community is
so spread out and so suburban,
and there’s a lot of people moving
back into the city, young people
and empty nesters moving back
into Center City, so there still
is a vibrant Jewish community,
but you can’t say that there’s a
Jewish neighborhood.”
Schatz has always been
interested in history. As a child,
stories from his grandparents
about the neighborhoods they
grew up in fascinated him,
and his Jewish education at
Beth Sholom Congregation
cemented that interest.

JEWISH EXPONENT
Tour group visits Vilna Congregation.

Photos provided
His training ground for
being a Jewish educator was
Camp Ramah, where he spent
every summer from the age of
17 to 25 as a counselor. He also
participated in Gratz College’s
program for high schoolers.

After high school, he
attended Vassar College, where
he studied pre-med for a bit
before changing his major to
Jewish studies. Vassar didn’t
have a Jewish studies program
at the time, so he designed his
own curriculum, taking classes
in religion and history.

“My father’s a doctor,” Schatz
said. “It’s not that they pushed
me into [pre-med], but I guess
that’s what a lot of kids see —
what their parents do — and
they figure that’s what they’re
going to do, until they realize
they can be their own person.”
After college, he worked for
United Synagogue Youth as
a regional director, then got
a master’s in education from
Arcadia University and started
working at Gratz.

“I love being Jewish,” Schatz
said. “I loved the study and the rit-
ual and synagogue and the culture
of the Jewish people and Israel,
and imparting that to young peo-
ple and also to interested learning
adults and my own children and,
beyond that, my students. It is
what I wanted to do.” l
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