Rooted in Woodbine

NEWS & VIEWS > PEOPLE

By Carole Mattessich

Add Comment | Comments: 0 | Posted Dec. 16, 2009

After a 21-year career helping put WMGM-TV on the map, Jane Stark took on a new assignment: Executive director of the Sam Azeez Museum of Woodbine Heritage (Cape May County). She described for us a welcoming place where the worst about mankind is discussed, even as the best is celebrated. The museum is housed in a synagogue built by Woodbine’s settlers in 1893. A national historic landmark, the structure still is used for services and events — and is well worth a holiday visit.

You were a pioneer with WMGM-TV.

I started in sales when the station was on air only four months, then spent 21 years working my way through every management position. Ultimately, I became one of only 17 female general managers in the NBC affiliate network. We started with little except hope and potential, but we became viable with both viewers and advertisers.

Southern New Jersey was ripe for growth in the late ’70s.

Exactly. With the casino industry, and the influx of casino workers, the socio-economic face of our area changed. It was challenging, but lots of fun — a wonderful time of growth for the station and for Atlantic City, and even for the mainland with all those new bedroom communities. Actually, at the same time we were growing, AC Weekly was doing the same — though it was called Whoot! then. [Lew], Herb and Marcia Steiner were pioneers, too, bringing another new source of information to the community.

What led you to the museum?

I once chaired a committee that brought the Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel to the community, and the Azeez family sponsored that program. Sam Azeez passed away suddenly nine years ago, but, after I retired from Channel 40, I got a call from his son, Michael. The museum was only about four months old — just like the TV station years before. Michael wanted to bring awareness of the museum to the greater community, and it was a full-speed-ahead project.

What’s special about Woodbine’s heritage?

Woodbine was incorporated in 1891 by a group of 50 Russian Jewish settlers brought to America by the Baron deHirsch Fund. DeHirsch was a German Jewish philanthropist who helped rescue Russian Jews from the pogroms and inscription into the czar’s army. Everyone looked at America as the golden mecca, and deHirsch bought land for settlers in odd places here — North Dakota, South Dakota, and northwest Cape May County.

And once immigrants arrived?

They had to become farmers. DeHirsch believed learning how to raise crops and cows and chickens was the way out of their oppressed status. Well, the project burgeoned. From 1891 to around 1911, almost 2,000 people immigrated or migrated here — from Russia, Austria, Germany, Poland, or other places where they’d already settled in the United States. Italians and African-Americans came, too. Woodbine had cranberry bogs and beach plum farms and a few large egg farms, as well as five dairies. Once the farms began to take hold, they built factories — at its peak Woodbine had 11 factories, which were successful because the settlers connected to nearby train tracks and could transport goods to Philadelphia and New York. Woodbine was considered a “wide open space,” and, when I’ve conducted oral histories with children of original Woodbine settlers, they’ve always used terms like “welcoming” and “safe haven” when they reminisce.

So other groups joined the Jewish settlers?

That’s why the museum exists today — to reinforce the experience of those first settlers and the whole vision of a harmonious environment in what really was a melting pot. It was that great migration when a lot of our great-grandparents came to America for the same reasons: religious freedom, economic freedom, an opportunity to educate children and build a good life.

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