April 28, 1971

Birdie Schackman

Birdie Schackman was born in 1904 into a devout, foreign-born Jewish family that had roots in Russia and Poland. Her father was among the founders of the Agudas Achim congregation, serving for many years as treasurer and neglecting his own business to collect funds for the community. She grew up in North Dallas on the closely knit Jewish streets of Alamo, Highland, and Caroline, in a strictly observant home where the family never wrote, rode, or worked on Shabbos. Her brother Reuben was born in Terrell in 1906, and the family lived there briefly before returning to Dallas.

Married in 1918, Birdie became president of the North Dallas shul sisterhood only a month into her marriage, pointed out and chosen by the women gathered at Mrs. Ben Ablin's home. As families moved south to the area known as the Cedars, she helped organize the Agudas Achim sisterhood, famously conducting an early meeting of nineteen women while seated on a bag of feed in a feed store. She served as sisterhood president for ten years, including through the building of the shul, and remembered cleaning the meeting houses, wiping chairs, and washing dishes before every event.

Much of Birdie's story centers on faith, hard work, and community devotion. She recalled the founders including Ike Friedman, Jake Donsky, Isaac Sewell, Julius Heisegger, and Eli Mosesman; the beloved young Rabbi Abramowitz who arrived in 1925; and the women who picked and koshered as many as 125 chickens by hand for congregational dinners. She described the strictly orthodox services with men and women separated by a curtain, box lunch fundraisers, and long journeys by wagon and jitney to picnics at Bachman's Dam and Kid Springs. She spoke of her sons Harold, Elton, and David and their bar mitzvahs, of the Herzl Heichel building, and of her own lifelong commitment to keeping a kosher home. In 1937 she became the first Jewish family to settle in her North Dallas neighborhood.

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