A group of Hasidic rabbis were among those who turned out to greet the President Franklin Roosevelt for the dedication of Sara Delano Roosevelt Park on the Lower East Side.

Lower East Side women gather in this 1941 photo as Miss Kassel explained how to make gefilte fish in a City-sponsored demonstration at the new indoor Essex Market, which had opened the previous year. They were instructed to use saltwater fish like mackerel and haddock in preparing the dish since the freshwater fish traditionally used for gefilte fish “cost eight times as much as their salty brothers.” A decade later, the Forward published its Jewish American Cookbook by Regina Frishwasser, who ran recipe contests at the newspaper. Advertisements advised readers that the book is “your key to successful meals.” Needless to say, it included a recipe for gefilte fish, but called for freshwater fish: winter carp, yellow pike and whitefish.

Just five months after the 1929 stock market crash that signaled the start of the Great Depression, thousands lined up to get matzohs for Passover from a store at 225 East Broadway, an alternative, according to the Forward, to a breadline. A headline on the front page the same day described a “Matzoh Riot” as up to 5,000 people stood in the cold outside another Lower East Side synagogue, then, frozen and furious, tried to break into the synagogue’s basement. Four local beat cops called for back-up to help quell the uprising.