Card Players at the Hebrew Home
At New York’s Hebrew Home for the Aged in January 1932, elderly residents sit at a card table: men in yarmulkes deal and argue while women in headscarves watch from behind.
British Pathé, “THE SUPER FORCING SYSTEM” (1932; asset 64645; Film ID 1046.12; canister PT 096). Pathétones sound item, about 86 seconds. Pathé’s issue date is 26 January 1932.
At the card table
January 1932, in a sitting room at New York’s Hebrew Home for the Aged in Harlem, four elderly Jewish men sit at a card table and deal, argue, and study their hands: two in long white beards, one with a cigar, another studying his cards with a pipe, while women in tied headscarves and other bearded residents watch from behind, under an American flag and a large framed portrait of a bearded Jew in a yarmulke.
The reel opens with match-official banter about card “systems,” then a quarrel Pathé’s own catalog says may be staged. Pathétones (Pathé’s early sound newsreel series) sold the item under the gag title “The ‘super’ forcing system!”, a joke on bridge jargon. The catalog names none of the men.
West 105th Street
Hebrew Home for the Aged (Harlem campus)
West 105th Street (about 114, 121), Manhattan
40.7993, -73.9685
Map pin near West 105th Street, Harlem. Pathé names “New York’s Hebrew Home for Aged”; contemporary records place that home on this block. The reel shows no exterior street sign.
Timeline
- January 1932
- Pathétones films residents at a card table in New York’s Hebrew Home for the Aged, Harlem, West 105th Street.
- 26 January 1932
- Pathé issues the item under the catalog title “THE SUPER FORCING SYSTEM.”