Call Number:

SCRC 44

Repository:

Temple University Libraries: Special Collections Research Center

Extent:

• 11 linear feet (9 boxes)
• 0.017 gigabytes (1 .rtf file)

Language:

English

Preferred Citation:

[Description and date of item], [Box/folder number], Noyma Appelbaum Papers and Collection on Communism, SCRC 44, Special Collections Research Center, Temple University Libraries, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Date:

1922-2023, undated (inclusive)

Creator:

Appelbaum, Noyma, 1928-2023

Form:

Administrative records, Books, Born digital, Broadsides (notices), Clippings, Correspondence, Printed ephemera, Legal documents, Manuscripts, Newsletters, Pamphlets, Periodicals, Petitions, Photocopies, Photographs, Poems, Publications (documents), Reports, School records, and Speeches (documents)

Abstract:

Noyma Appelbaum was born in 1928 in Philadelphia to Meyer Appelbaum and Esther Kaminsky. Meyer immigrated to the United States from Lithuania as a child and worked in several professions, beginning as an apprentice to a carriage maker at only nine years old. Meyer was heavily involved in labor movements and the Communist Party. Esther worked in the garment industry like many Jewish immigrants in the beginning of the 20th century, and in the 1920s became involved in the women's labor movement as well as feminist movements. Noyma began his lifelong career as a labor organizer and political activist as a child when he joined the Young Pioneers of America, a children's organization affiliated with the Communist Party of the United States. Noyma detailed in an article for People's World—formerly the Daily Worker—that the family's communist affiliation led to their eviction in 1934.

Noyma stayed in Philadelphia into adulthood and attended Temple University as a journalism major. He wrote many papers on the impacts of unions on the labor force and on United States politics, and on the Communist Party's role in the United States. After he graduated with his bachelor's degree, he worked in Philadelphia and New York with the intention of unionizing the workers, including working for shipyards and as a steel worker. In 1955, he became the editor-in-chief of The Daily Worker's Pennsylvania edition, continuing to write about communist and labor causes. He then returned to Temple University and earned his Doctor of Education in 1972 and worked until his retirement as a teacher and principal, returning to lecture at his alma mater on occasion.

Noyma met his wife, Ellen Tecosky, at a Communist Party meeting. The couple raised their three children in Trevose, Pennsylvania, and Ellen ran a restaurant in the Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia in the 1980s. Because of their open affiliation with the Communist Party of the United States, the FBI kept close records on both through the Red Scare of the 1950s and 1960s. Noyma passed away on May 21, 2023, at 95 years old.

This collection contains the personal and professional papers of Noyma Appelbaum, as well as his collection of published material relating to communism, which includes pamphlets, newsletters and magazines, and articles.