When Ida Katz died earlier this month, a few days shy of her 100th birthday, her son, Dr. Morton I. Katz, a retired Pikesville orthodontist, said his mother had spent her early years living with her family at Yaazor, the Hebrew Colonial Society of Maryland's 351-acre commune that was on the border of Baltimore and Howard counties.
Her death stills yet another voice from what has to be a dwindling band of survivors who can recall what daily life was like at Yaazor, because no trace of the community now exists.
The lost colony of Yaazor, which in Hebrew means "He will help," was established about 1903 by Russian-Jewish immigrants who spoke only Russian and Yiddish.
Where houses, farms and a one-room school once stood along Johnnycake Road and the Patapsco River, trucks and cars now whiz by on the Beltway and Interstate 70.
Beneath the concrete highways, houses and Security Square Mall, which occupy the site today, lies the fertile earth once tilled by its 200 residents.
In a 1975 reminiscence for the Jewish Historical Society, Benjamin Szold Levin described the commune as "a kind of Fiddler on the Roof shtetl [village] in America."
"The Baltimore County recorded plat of Yaazor shows that all the individual lots were long and narrow and were also bent, like boomerangs, to give everybody a road frontage and river frontage," John W. McGrain Jr., retired Baltimore County historian and author, said the other day.
McGrain said that in the 1950s when he was hiking in the area with a friend, they discovered a mailbox with a Jewish family name marked on it. A local resident told him that a Jewish town had once been there, he recalled.
In a 1906 article in The Sun, a reporter wrote, "Within half an hour's ride of the city is a settlement wherein not a word of English is spoken and all the habits and customs of the people are completely foreign to their surroundings."
Baron Maurice de Hirsch, a Jewish activist, millionaire and philanthropist, bankrolled a fund that bore his name in order to establish Jewish agricultural colonies for immigrants in America and other countries.
Yaazor, which was also known as Yiddishe Kolonye, came into being when several individuals and their leader, Rabbi Toblas Goodman, borrowed money from the Hebrew Colonial Society of Maryland, which Hirsch had endowed in order to purchase the site.
