Background
David Blaustein was born in Lida, Province of Vilna, Russian Poland (now Belarus), the youngest son of Isaiah and Sarah Natzkovsky Blaustein.
David Blaustein was born in Lida, Province of Vilna, Russian Poland (now Belarus), the youngest son of Isaiah and Sarah Natzkovsky Blaustein.
David received his early education in the Hebrew school of his native town, but, longing for larger opportunities, he ran away from home at the age of seventeen, and, crossing the Prussian frontier, entered the Hebrew academy at Memel. After a brief sojourn in this border town he settled in Schwerin, the capital of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, where he attended a teachers' preparatory school. His stay here terminated in 1886 when Bismarck promulgated the decree forbidding Russian Jews to live in Germany. He emigrated to the United States and landed at Boston. He matriculated at Harvard College in 1889 and graduated with the degree of B. A. in 1893. He received the degree of M. A. from Brown in 1898.
Blaustein’s career as an educator began shortly after his arrival when he established a German and Hebrew school. While attending Harvard, he founded the Sheltering Home for Immigrants, his earliest service to the immigrant Jews, to whose welfare he devoted much thought and time throughout his life. In 1892 he was elected rabbi of the congregation of Sons of Israel and David at Providence, Rhode Island, and for a number of years taught at Brown University as assistant professor of Semitic languages. Iin 1898 he resigned as rabbi to accept the superintendency of the Educational Alliance of New York City. This proved the beginning of his real work.
The Educational Alliance was the educational and social center of New York's East Side ghetto. His selection for the post was unwelcome to many of the East Side leaders, and to allay their fears he determined to institute no definite policy until he had studied the situation. As the first step toward this end he undertook a survey of the neighborhood and with it as a guide set himself to fit the activities of the Alliance to the needs of the people. The Americanization of the immigrant had been the chief purpose of the founders of the Alliance, but other problems, serious and complicated, enlisted the attention of the superintendent, among them the constantly widening breach between the older and the younger generation. He was unable to satisfy the ultra-radical group who in 1901 founded a new institution, known as the Educational League, with an absolutely free platform, as a protest against what this group considered Blaustein's reactionary policy. Largely because of this dissension Blaustein resigned his position in 1907.
A year later he went to Chicago to assume the superintendency of the Chicago Hebrew Institute. Here too he fell into disfavor with the radical element, who boycotted the institution when he refused to let Emma Goldman speak in its hall. After he resigned the superintendency in 1910 he devoted the remaining two years of his life to social studies. During a five-months tour of the country, from October 1911 to February 1912, he made studies of the immigrant Jewish problem and the Jewish situation generally.
On September 18, 1911, Blaustein married Miriam Umstadter of Norfolk, Virginia.