Historical marker recognizes Jewish resettlement in Pender County

PENDER COUNTY, NC (WWAY) — A historical marker will soon recognize the Jewish families who resettled in Pender County from Nazi Germany.

According to Pender County, the 1939 rescue and resettlement of Jewish families from Germany at Van Eden was nominated by the Jewish American Society for Historic Preservation.

The plaque will read: Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany lived, 1939-46, at agricultural colony founded in 1909 and revived by Alvin Johnson. Two mi. SW.

Only about 12 of 50 families planned for resettlement in Pender County were rescued before the German borders were firmly shut as the government implemented Hitler’s Final Solution of genocide. Eventually, the families moved away. One family moved to Penderlea, where all the children of the colony attended school, and ran a dairy until the early 1950’s.

According to the NC Highway Historical Marker Program, Wilmington’s Hugh MacRae, beginning in 1905, recruited immigrants to southeastern North Carolina for resettlement in six agricultural colonies.

Among MacRae’s advisers was Alvin Johnson, a native of rural Nebraska, an economist, and director of the New School for Social Research in Manhattan. Johnson proposed to MacRae to revive Van Eeden, which had foundered not long after its establishment in 1909.

Johnson created the Alvin Corporation to facilitate the emigration of Jews from Hitler’s Germany, some of them directly from camps at Dachau and Buchenwald. Each family was promised one acre, a cottage, and a cow. Four families joined the community in the fall of 1939 and another four in the spring of 1940. More followed.

Problems emerged soon. Resettlement of urban sophisticates to rural North Carolina did not go smoothly. Max Wolf, the first settler, had a vineyard in Germany but most were professionals. Arthur Flatow was an architect; Hubert Ladenburg held a doctorate in economics. With few agricultural skills their crops suffered. And there were snakes and mosquitoes. They made the best of a bad situation. Children of the settlers walked five miles to the nearest school, at Penderlea.

By 1943 the settlement was abandoned, homesteaders moving to other opportunities in Wilmington as war commenced or to the Northeast.

Pender County’s library director is working with the Pender County Historical Society and members of the Jewish community in Wilmington to coordinate a date and time for the dedication of the marker.

The marker will be located on U.S. 117 between Burgaw and Watha.

As part of the observance, the library’s virtual services librarian will design and host a webpage exhibit on the history of Van Eden. Author and historian Susan Taylor Block has given permission to the library to digitize and make available online her out-of-print book on the Van Eden Jews who she tracked down living in the northeast U.S. and interviewed in the 1990s.