Anonymous
Listen Now
My parents moved here from New York, as did many of the other Jewish families here.
And there was lots of textile manufacturing. Men's clothes, women's clothes, pajamas, and my father made bedspreads. And the reason that many of these people from New York came is that the city of New Bedford, this was in the late '30s, wanted to get so many people off the welfare rolls.
They were looking for people that would have jobs available for the community. And so many of the people in the textile industry came because, besides what the city gave them which was very good, so many of the Portuguese women knew how to sew and how to use a machine so that meant that you didn't have to do a tremendous amount of retraining. That was really a plus for, I know, so many of the clothing industries, et cetera, that came here…
