For two generations, Bilker's Fine Foods was a mainstay of Jewish community life in Roselawn. The delicatessen sold smoked whitefish and kosher wine from a squat storefront on Reading Road, where neighborhood grandmothers shopped alongside rural Jews stocking up for Passover.
Then in May, after 44 years at the same location, the delicatessen moved to a Blue Ash strip mall. The gefilte fish and matzo ball mix stayed; the selection of teas and gourmet ice cream expanded. For owner Sol Blatt, it was a simple solution to an obvious problem.
''We moved for only one reason and one reason only,'' Mr. Blatt said. ''Our customers moved. When your customers move, you have to move, too.''
The delicatessen is not alone. Since 1994, at least eight pillars of Jewish community life have begun or completed moves northeast from the Roselawn area, including the Jewish Federation, Pilder's Deli, Congregation Ohav Shalom and Jewish Family Service. In July, the Jewish Community Center in Roselawn - which hosts social, educational and cultural programs for the entire community - announced that it, too, was looking to move to Blue Ash.
They are institutions chasing their customers, the Jewish community once centered in the Roselawn neighborhood. Though individual families have been leaving for two decades, many of the businesses stayed. Until recently, those who wanted to stay connected to Jewish life had frequent reasons to travel back to Roselawn.
This is not the first time the center of Cincinnati's Jewish community has shifted. From downtown to Avondale and later to Roselawn, large numbers of Jewish families have moved every 30 years or so, and the institutions have always been close behind.
But this latest move is different, more of a dispersion than a transplant. Just as the Jewish population is now scattering throughout the Tristate - to Anderson Township and West Chester and Florence - so are the institutions dispersing to Blue Ash and Mason and Sycamore Township.
The result is that there will likely never be another predominantly Jewish neighborhood - a mix of businesses, homes and agencies serving one community - in the area. Roselawns here and across the country have gone the way of Irish, Italian and Polish neighborhoods - places that everyone misses but no one wants to inhabit.
''I don't see the kind of place that Roselawn used to be developing. We're too spread out. There aren't enough of us in any one place,'' said Roger Selya, a University of Cincinnati geography professor who has written about the shifts in Cincinnati Jewish neighborhoods. ''And the Orthodox ultimately are the only ones who care in today's world whether there is a clearly defined geographic Jewish neighborhood.''
Superstores go kosher
The end of predominantly Jewish neighborhoods like Roselawn stems partly from individual choices by families and partly from the economics of consumer competition.
When Dan Pilder's grandfather Charles opened shop downtown in 1928, there were 34 kosher butchers in Cincinnati. After World War II, when Pilder's had moved to Avondale, there were 12. Now in Dillonvale, the store is the only kosher butcher within a hundred miles.
As many kosher bakeries, dairies and other stores catering to Jewish dietary laws disappeared, Jewish-oriented businesses began to compete with superstores and megamalls. Kroger's and Bigg's stock kosher food alongside tortillas and Asian noodles. The Jewish Community Center's recreational facilities compete with health clubs for members. Bookstores carry entire sections on Judaism and Jewish culture, making a Jewish bookstore unnecessary.
Other factors hastened the downfall of distinctly ethnic neighborhoods. Suburban sprawl multiplied the size of metropolitan areas, giving people three and four times as many places to move to. Driving supplanted walking as the most common way of getting around, making neighborhood stores unnecessary.
The result is that by the 1970s, young Jewish families were bypassing Roselawn. Mr. Selya said the Jewish Federation found that real estate agents were steering them to more modern homes in new suburbs.
''There was that whole syndrome of, 'You can do better.' When we found out, we were furious,'' said Mr. Selya, who was active in community affairs at the time. ''We persuaded the real estate agents to at least distribute a brochure that we put together extolling the virtues of Roselawn, but the trend had started.''
Immigrants up, out
But what happened in Roselawn had already happened in Avondale and the West End, and in South Fairmount and Over-the-Rhine with other ethnic groups. It is a familiar story in the history of American immigration: successive generations moving up and out as they establish themselves.
''We're in the third generation now of exurbia,'' said Aubrey Herman, executive vice president of the Jewish Federation of Cincinnati, which moved its offices from Roselawn to Blue Ash in 1994. ''So exurbia is moving out to the outer reaches, and I think we're just following normal population trends. Although Jews will tend to want to be together, closer in, that is not as much a critical priority as it was in the 1950s.''
At first, many Jews moved from Roselawn to neighboring Golf Manor and Amberley Village, and in 1980, the three communities - which share the 45237 ZIP code - were home to 35 percent of the area's Jewish population, according to federation statistics. That number has dropped steadily and now stands at under 20 percent.
In the same period of time, the percentage of the Jewish population living in the northeast suburbs has risen from about 6 percent to nearly 20 percent. The total Jewish population of Greater Cincinnati is estimated at 23,000 people.
''The conclusion is very clear: The bulk of the Jewish population is moving toward the northeast corridor,'' Mr. Herman said. But it ''is scattering simultaneously, so where you would have no Jews in Anderson Township 15 years ago, now you have pockets of population; where you had no Jews in West Chester, now you have pockets of population.''
As with Avondale, Roselawn's African-American population grew as its Jewish population declined. In 1970, the neighborhood was 6.8 percent black; in 1980, it was 23.8 percent black; and in 1990, it was 55 percent black, with an estimated 1 percent increase every year since.
The transition has been mostly peaceful, punctuated by occasional tension and even a few violent incidents. New Hope Congregation's synagogue was vandalized five years ago. Two Jews were assaulted two years ago by four teens who admitted the victims were targeted because of their religion. And in the most recent incident, a rabbi was beaten Friday by three African-Americans, though police did not know whether the rabbi was targeted be-cause he is Jewish.
Agencies leave, too
As Jewish families moved out, the businesses and organizations that served them were left with a choice: Stay put and bet on institutional loyalty, or follow the crowds. Throughout the 1980s, Mr. Selya found in his research, the response was mixed.
Some institutions tried to reinforce Roselawn's place as the community's geographical center. The Jewish Community Center underwent an extensive $3.3 million renovation in the mid-1980s; the Jewish Federation moved to Roselawn from downtown; and an Orthodox girls' high school opened on Reading Road.
Other agencies, such as Jewish Family Service, set up branch offices and ran multiple sites, waiting for the community's direction to reveal itself. Still others headed northeast years ago. Yavneh Day School left Roselawn in 1975 for a former public school complex in Kenwood, in Sycamore Township.
Chabad of Southern Ohio opened a separate site in Blue Ash. And two Jewish nursing homes in Roselawn and Bond Hill merged and moved to Mason earlier this year - angering many who thought the site too remote.
The federation owns land in Mason and considered it for the new Jewish Community Center. In the end, there weren't the numbers to justify a move there, but that doesn't mean Blue Ash will be the center's last location.
''There's no 'this is it' anymore,'' Mr. Herman said. ''You're talking a 35- to 40-year life anymore, and any community worth its salt has to be always looking ahead. No matter where and when the center is, we're going to have to be looking ahead.''
The buildings left behind in Roselawn have either been sold to other groups or boarded up. Bilker's and Pilder's sit empty along Reading Road. The two nursing homes are still open, with a non-Jewish clientele. Congregation Ohav Shalom has been sold to a Baptist church. And the community center will likely be sold as it draws nearer to a move.
Some stay put
A Jewish remnant - largely Orthodox - will remain in Roselawn after the community center and the other institutions are gone. Chabad of Southern Ohio has its headquarters, a Russian center and a new facility in the neighborhood, with no plans to close any of them. The girls' high school is there, along with several small Orthodox synagogues.
The area's largest Orthodox synagogue, a Jewish day school and a kosher bakery are all in neighboring Golf Manor, along with a community kollel - a center for Jewish study - that opened two years ago. The Reform and Conservative congregations in northern Amberley Village are easily reached and unlikely to move.
Jews will remain in Roselawn, too, and Rabbi Max Newman is one of them. Rabbi Newman and his wife, Edith, moved their family to Roselawn from Avondale in 1958. For years, he was the rabbi at the Orthodox Roselawn Synagogue, where he still walks to services on the Sabbath.
Although the migration from Roselawn had been going on for decades, the Newmans began to notice it only in the past few years. They have no plans to join it. The are elderly now, and he must remain within walking distance of a synagogue.
Rabbi Newman hopes that the students in the day schools might be able to build another Jewish neighborhood. But even if they don't, he cautions, it's not the end of the world.
''The absence of Jews does not terrorize me. You can still be a good Jew worshiping in your own back yard,'' he said. ''Of course, it's always advantageous to have a quorum for prayer, but if you don't have it, you can always worship at home. The important thing is to worship.''
Robin Hartmann lives in Mount Lookout with her husband and 3-year-old son, Rory, but the family is looking for a home in the northeast suburbs. Rory will be starting school soon, and that changes the way Mrs. Hartmann feels about where she lives.
She wants him to have non-Jewish friends and be familiar with other cultures. But she also wants him to know his own culture and have friends who share it. They didn't limit their search to the Blue Ash area, but the destination seemed to fit their needs.
''For me alone, if it was just us, we'd stay here (in Mount Lookout),'' she said. ''But in terms of going to school, I don't want my son to feel like a minority. I don't want it to be exclusively Jewish - I want him to be introduced to other people, too But I don't want him to feel uncomfortable about holidays.''
Keeping the faith
Geography is not the only way of keeping a community together. In Jewish Cincinnati, there are synagogues, educational programs, camps, cultural activities and a newspaper, all of them aiming to keep members connected. But as the geographical ties have loosened, so have the social forces that used to bind ethnic communities together.
A generation or two ago, ''You really didn't have a choice. You had to be Jewish. The rest of society forced it upon you,'' said Rabbi Arthur Flicker, who leads Congregation Ohav Shalom, the only non-Orthodox synagogue in Roselawn.
''Now you can at least legally live anywhere you want to. That has been a positive thing, and it has brought people together. The down side is that it has hurt the cohesiveness of the Jewish community and it's hurt people's ties to their faith.''
Congregation Ohav Shalom has followed the Cincinnati Jewish community on its slow trek northeast. First downtown, then in the West End, then in Avondale and finally in Roselawn, the synagogue built successive facilities to serve its members.
When Rabbi Flicker arrived nearly five years ago, members were already talking about moving. Their children and grandchildren had left Roselawn, and like the delis, the choice was apparent: Stay and die, or move and grow.
They bought land in Sycamore Township in 1994, becoming the first synagogue to move from Roselawn to the northeast suburbs. They have sold their Roselawn building to Beulah Missionary Baptist Church and are leasing it back until their move. They hope to be in the new building by 1998.
But the work does not end when the Conservative congregation arrives in Sycamore Township. For Rabbi Flicker and other leaders, the challenge is no longer only to fight discrimination, but to articulate positive reasons for a Jewish identity.
''Part of our challenge as rabbis - and as ministers of other faiths - is to make ourselves and our programs attractive enough that people will want to stay with us wherever they may be,'' he said. ''It makes a greater challenge for us as rabbis to show people why their faith still has to be important to them, to better articulate the old reasons.''
