Monumental Framed Membership Roster. Totaling 519 individual portrait photographs of male members of the Minsker Independent Benevolent Association of New York. The name of each member is recorded in manuscript below the photograph.

AUCTION 63 | Thursday, November 13th, 2014 at 1:00
Fine Judaica: Books, Manuscripts, Autograph Letters, Graphic and Ceremonial Art

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Lot 27
(AMERICAN JUDAICA). MINSKER INDEPENDENT BENEVOLENT ASSOCIATION.

Monumental Framed Membership Roster. Totaling 519 individual portrait photographs of male members of the Minsker Independent Benevolent Association of New York. The name of each member is recorded in manuscript below the photograph.

519 individually taken photographs against red satin border set in 27 rows across and 19 rows down (with six additions). Heavy mahogany frame behind glass with beautiful marquetry all around. With plaque below: “Presented by H. Cohen, 1901.” And above, set within a star-form: “MIBA, Dec. 27th, 1892” placed between two American flags. Lower left corner of glass broken. 65.5 x 68 inches.

(New York): 1901

Est: $5,000 - $7,000
The Minsker Independent Benevolent Association (MIBA) was an American landsmanschaft (benefit society) founded in New York on December 27th, 1892. It’s membership was composed of Jewish immigrants from the Russian city of Minsk (today, the capital of Belarus) and surrounding areas. Like many other landsmanschaften, the MIBA aided its members transition from Europe to the United States by providing social structure and support to those who might have arrived in America without the family network or practical skills that had sustained them in their former hometowns. Initially, help was provided in learning English, finding a place to live and work, as well as creating a setting for social-life. As years passed and its membership aged, the organization continued as a way of maintaining a particular lifestyle, but more especially, in extending financial assistance should members become unemployed or ill. Increasingly important was the benefit of subsidized burial for the member and his spouse. By 1975, the raison d’être of the Minsker Independent Benevolent Association was complete. Its membership had all but died, and were of course all appropriately buried in MIBA cemetery plots located in the Washington Cemetery, Brooklyn and Mount Hebron and Mount Lebanon Cemeteries in Queens. The MIBA did not renew itself for a new generation. The consignor has related her family’s feeling that this frame (with its Stars and Stripes prominent) and photographs of a mostly fashionably dressed membership - the younger ones looking particularly Americanized - attest to the social importance of the Minsker organization as a transition into American life. It is speculated that the photographer of these portraits was Herman Mishkin (1871-1948), a Minsk-born American photographer, later known as the foremost portrayer of Golden Era opera singers and for a quarter of a century, chief photographer for New York’s Metropolitan Opera. Provenance: A descendant of the late Philip Sonkin (one of the last surviving board-members of the Minsker Independent Benevolent Association). A comprehensive list of all the names recorded on this frame can be accessed: http://www.jewishgen.org/belarus/minskerindependentbenevolent.htm.