Hometown society

A Hometown society is a society of immigrants from the same town or region. These aid organizations were established to deal with social, economic, and cultural problems, and provided a social framework for mutual assistance. Among the most common activities was the provision of insurance policies offering sick benefits and burial cost. They regularly owned sections in cemeteries. In the early 1900s there were thousands of Hometown societies in the United States serving every immigrant ethnic group. Jewish hometown societies were known by the Yiddish term landsmanshaft. ^[1][2] There were 20,000 landsmanshaft in the Northeast..^[3]

References

1. To the golden cities: pursuing the American Jewish dream in Miami and L.A., Deborah Dash Moore, Simon and Schuster, 1994, p. 268
2. Filipino Hometown Associations in Hawaii, Jonathan Y. Okamura , Ethnology, Vol. 22, No. 4 (Oct., 1983), pp. 341-353
3. "With Demise of Jewish Burial Societies, Resting Places Are in Turmoil," The New York Times, Aug. 3, 2009 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/03/nyregion/03bury.html