The Gindi Family

Before Brooklyn, there was Aleppo. The Jewish community of Aleppo ranks among the oldest and most venerated in the Oriental world; tradition traces it back to the time of King David, and its epithet of Aram Ṣova refers to the biblical confines of Syria. For centuries, it was the guardian of a scriptural treasure of the first order: the Keter Aram Ṣova, the famous Aleppo Codex, a tenth-century Masoretic manuscript held as the most authoritative reference for the biblical text. The piety of Aleppine Jews, their scrupulous adherence to halakha, their sung liturgy with melodies (maqāmat) inherited from the Arab-Muslim world made this community a beacon of faithfulness to the Law that the entire Jewish tradition has recognized.

It is from this soil that the Gindi families emerged. Cloth merchants, money changers, peddlers, craftsmen—the Jews of Aleppo lived by commerce, a natural position in a crossroads city linking the Mediterranean to Persia. This knowledge of trade, passed down from father to son like a second language, constitutes one of the secular virtues that the lineage would carry intact to America: not the hunger for gain, but the art of measure, of credit and one's word kept, which in Jewish commercial ethics belongs to emunah, reliability. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, then the decline of caravan routes and the convulsions of the late Ottoman Empire hastened the departure of Aleppo's Jews toward Egypt, Latin America, France, and, massively, toward the United States. The Gindi lineage belongs to this diaspora within the diaspora.

The arrival of Syrian Jews in New York, between the years 1900 and 1924 — the year when quota laws brutally closed the door to immigration — first settled them in the Lower East Side, at the margins of the great Yiddish world. The encounter was harsh: Arabic-speaking Sephardim among Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazim, the Halabim had to assert their own identity, founding their own synagogues, their mutual aid societies and their ritual butcher shops. The portrait of New York as a nascent Jewish metropolis, drawn for the period 1840-1920 [Polland, 2012], sets the scene for this integration.

Here, the archival item and family memory answer one another without always coinciding. The oral tradition of the Gindi preserves, like so many Sephardic families, the account of the first arrival, of the fabric shop opened in Manhattan, of the sacrifices made to bring brothers and cousins. The archive, for its part, yields only fragments: immigration registers, commercial directories, naturalization papers. We hold it for probable, without being able to document it piece by piece, that the founding generation worked in textiles and haberdashery, like virtually all the Aleppine families of its cohort. In this first American exile manifests a virtue that Jewish tradition holds in high esteem: the care given to the other, these networks of mutual aid by which the first settlers housed and employed the newcomers, transforming clan solidarity into communal institution.

The twentieth-century New York Jewish experience involved a vast movement from urban poverty toward middle-class life in peripheral neighborhoods. The second generation of New York Jews sought to build a home in America [Dash Moore, 1981], leaving the tenements for Brooklyn and the Bronx. The Syrian community followed this path with particular intensity, concentrating around Bensonhurst and then, further south, around Gravesend, Ocean Parkway and Flatbush, along the SY community that would become one of the most cohesive Sephardic groups in the West.

This period was one of shared hardships. The Great Depression left New York Jews with an uncertain promise [Wenger, 1996], and Syrian merchants, dependent on textiles and retail, felt its effects deeply. Then came, in the postwar period, the great urban reorganization that historiography has described as the decline of urban ethnicity among New York Jews between 1950 and 1970 [Lederhendler, 2001]. Where many Ashkenazi families dispersed into the suburbs and assimilated, the Syrian community made the opposite choice: tightening their ranks, building their schools and synagogues, retaining their youth. The Gindi lineage belongs fully to this community that made collective cohesion — the refusal of dilution — a cardinal value, prolonging in the New World the spirit of the am, the people that wishes to be one.

It is to commerce that the Gindi family owes its renown. In 1961, the Century 21 store opened in Brooklyn; it would become one of the most famous off-price department stores in New York, renowned for selling brand-name and luxury items at discounted prices. Long directed by the Gindi family — brothers Sonny and Al Gindi, then the next generation — the enterprise made the Cortlandt Street store, in the shadow of the World Trade Center, an institution of the city. Damaged in the attacks of September 11, 2001, the flagship store reopened, a symbol of the commercial resilience of Lower Manhattan, before the enterprise ceased operations in 2020 and later attempted a relaunching.

Century 21 illustrates, on an industrial scale, the virtue of commerce inherited from Aleppo: offering quality to the greatest number, at a fair price. In Jewish ethics, honest commerce is not a subordinate activity but a place for the exercise of justice — tsedeq in the balance, exact weights, fair price — which the Talmud elevates to the rank of religious obligation. By making merchandise previously reserved for the wealthy accessible to modest families in Brooklyn, the Gindi house prolonged, in its secular way, this conception of the Law that refuses to separate worldly business from moral duty. It is also through this economic success that the family equipped itself with the means for its future generosity; for in the tradition, wealth is legitimate only insofar as it nourishes the community.

Commercial success was joined by real estate adventure. The Gindi family distinguished itself in property development and construction, notably around the Ashley Park complex, a residential and commercial ensemble that exemplifies the characteristic transition, among Sephardic entrepreneurs in New York, from retail commerce to real estate — this land investment held as the most durable and most transmissible form of family patrimony. Lacking easily accessible published archival records on the details of these operations, we consider the scope and precise chronology of these achievements probable rather than established in detail, without contesting their reality, which is widely attested in community memory.

Building is not, in Jewish sensibility, a simple investment. The construction of homes and living spaces partakes of a form of yishuv ha-olam, the settlement and inhabitation of the world, which tradition counts among the purposes of Creation. In endowing their region with an enduring space, the Gindi inscribed in the soil the inverse movement of exile: after centuries of wandering and packed suitcases, the lineage took root. This rooting, in a family born from the rupture of Aleppo, carries a memorial charge that exceeds mere prosperity: it speaks to the will to endure, to transmit, to no longer start again from nothing.

It is perhaps in patronage that the Gindi lineage most clearly expresses its fidelity to the values of Israel. The Syrian Jewish community of Brooklyn distinguished itself, among all American Jewish communities, by the density of its institutions: a network of religious schools (yeshivot and coeducational schools), synagogues, charitable organizations such as the Sephardic Bikur Holim and the great community federation. Community memory attributes to the Gindi family a role as benefactor of these educational and synagogal institutions — support for schools, endowment of synagogues, financing of mutual aid works.

This role is here, for the most part, a matter of the transmitted: it lives in community recognition, in engraved names and tributes, more than in published scholarly archives. But tradition and social reality answer each other: we know, from historical sources, how much the Syrian community made of tsedaqah — charity as justice, not as alms — the cement of its identity's survival. By financing the school that retains youth and the synagogue that gathers the faithful, a Sephardic patron does not merely make a gift: he buys, for the collective, the time of transmission. The Gindi lineage, in this, embodies two twin virtues that the Memory of Israel has never ceased to associate: charity and engagement in collective life, the idea that no one saves himself alone and that the arevim, guarantors of one another, form the true body of the people.

From the citadel of Aleppo to the avenues of Ocean Parkway, the Gindi lineage will have traveled the exemplary trajectory of an Eastern diaspora family become a pillar of American Sephardic Judaism. It belongs to that great movement described by historiography, that of a Jewish community which, in the age of immigration, made New York a metropolis [Polland, 2012], and which, against the decline of urban ethnicity in the years 1950 to 1970 [Lederhendler, 2001], chose to remain united where others dispersed.

If one had to name, among all virtues, the one this lineage will have best expressed, it would be that of wealth returned to the community — tsedaqah understood not as an isolated gesture but as permanent responsibility. The commerce inherited from Aleppo, brought to the scale of Century 21, and the rooting in the stone of Ashley Park have meaning, in the family narrative, only when related to their destination: to support the schools where the Law is transmitted, the synagogues where the liturgy of Aram Ṣova is sung, the works where care of the other is practiced. In this, the Gindi family participates in a virtue that the Memory of Israel has carried from century to century and from continent to continent: that of the guarantor, of the man who answers for his brother. It is there, more than in fortune, that the true nobility of the lineage resides — and it is through this that a singular History joins the collective Memory of a people.