‘Sickle and Hammer’ was the delightful newsletter of a Umpartayishe Yidisher Kinder Shuln published, written, and illustrated by the children of the Hirsch Lekert Children’s School Number 1 at 9148 Oakland Avenue in Detroit, Michigan. The left-wing school for the children of Yiddish speaking radicals and workers, was named after Hirsch Leckert avenging Jewish socialist, martyr executed for the attempted assassination of the pogromist governor of Vilnius in 1902. The news letters of full of poems, drawings, stories, and essays. A few examples; stories about airplanes and pets, essays about sharecroppers, a sketch of writer Y.L. Peretz, happenings in Palestine, the Lieibknecht club, Lenin Land, Diary of a Striker, etc. Many of these schools would soon affiliated to the International Workers Order and are a now lost, but potent reminder of the rich tradition of Jewish Communism in the city, and the country.

The International Workers Order was a left-wing, politically active mutual aid society tied to, but much broader than, the Communist Party and culture of Jewish labor. Founded in 1929, but with a long history in Der Arbeter Ring, the Jewish Workmen’s Circles, the center of Jewish working class social life. The IWO quickly grew, incorporating much of the old Bund and soon have 15 language sections, the largest of which was the Jewish section, about a third of its membership. The organization would become truly mass, reaching over 200,000 members at the end of the 30s. The IWO was forced to disband in 1954 during Red Scare repression..

The IWO made a concerted effort to attract Black workers, long refused acceptance into non-Black insurance companies as well as providing integrated recreation facilities, including summer camps. An English section was established as well as the Hungarian Workmen’s Sick, Benevolent, and Educational Federation; the Ukrainian-American Fraternal Union; the Carpatho-Russian National Society; the Cervantes Society Mutualista Obrera Puertorriqueña; the Garibaldi American Fraternal Society; the Hellenic-American Brotherhood; the Serbian-American Federation; the Russian American Mutual Aid Society; the Slovak Workers Society; the Polonia Society; the Rumanian American Fraternal Society; the Czech Workers Society and the Finnish American Mutual Aid Society. Many of its sections would continue on, most notably the Jewish People’s Fraternal Order.

PDFs of all issues above see: https://digital.library.cornell.edu/catalog?f%5Bagent_tesim%5D%5B%5D=Hirsh+Lekert+Schools&search_field=all_fields