ABSTRACT
Village synagogues which were founded in the ghetto are federated into large congregations in which the distinctions between Old World local ties reach the vanishing-point. The mass migration out of the ghetto is not to be explained merely on the basis of the deterioration of the area and its conversion into an industrial zone. If the near West Side is the home of the first generation immigrant and of the ghetto, then Lawndale is pre-eminently the area of second settlement, of Deutschland. In Lawndale the Jews again came into contact with the Germans and the Irish, whom they had dislodged from the ghetto a generation before. It is almost impossible to gather evidence on the extent to which conversion to Christianity and intermarriage with Christians is going on under the changed circumstances brought about by the disintegration of the ghetto.
