Originally appeared in Traces, Fall 2024, 48-54. Want to know more? You can research the Syrian Ladies Aid Society collection at the IU Indianapolis Library.

Established in 1918 in Michigan City, Indiana, the Syrian Ladies Aid Society (SLAS) was a self-defined charitable organization that rendered mutual aid and supported the life of Syrian-Lebanese Christian communities in Michigan City. Its members were among the 1,460 Hoosiers who identified themselves in the 1920 U.S. Census as people of Syrian descent. Hundreds of them lived in Michigan City. 

The majority of these immigrants were Christian. They were mainly Antiochian Orthodox, Melkites (Greek Catholics), Maronites, and Roman Catholics, with just a smattering of Protestants. Unlike Terre Haute, Indianapolis, and Fort Wayne, however, Michigan City also had a sizable number of Muslims who established Indiana’s longest continuously-operating mosque by 1931. In Michigan City, Arab Christians and Muslims both cooperated and competed with one another and among themselves. 

All of these religious communities shared a common culture. Over half a million Arabic speakers arrived in the Americas before 1920, with most of them landing in Latin America and the Caribbean. They generally called themselves Syrians, meaning that they came from Greater Syria. After the Ottoman Empire lost in World War I, the region from which they had emigrated was divided into the French mandates of Syria and of Lebanon, the British mandate of Palestine, and the British protectorate of Transjordan. The majority of these immigrants actually traced their roots to what came to be known as Lebanon, but many of them also continued to call themselves Syrian—as in the “Syrian” Ladies Aid Society. 

The reason so many migrated to Michigan City was, above all, the Haskell-Barker railroad car manufacturing company, at one time Indiana’s largest employer. In 1922, Haskell Barker became part of the Pullman Car and Manufacturing Company. The close relationship between these immigrants and the Pullman factory could be seen in the location of SLAS meetings. These Syrian women met at the Young Men’s Syrian Christians Society Hall, a wood-frame 14-foot wide building located at 901 West 7^th Street just steps away from Pullman’s colossal complex. The single-story hall, though modest, had a coal-burning furnace and electricity. 

Though the SLAS was founded in 1918, the first extant meeting minutes in the group’s archive are from January 1, 1926. The hand-written, cursive minutes from those days, recorded by Selma Sawaya, were terse. In some of the entries, the secretary simply says, “nothing of importance was discussed.” 

Like members of other lodges and clubs, popular among most ethnic and racial groups in U.S. history, members were sworn to obey the club rules and to keep club discussions secret, partly to protect the identities of the people to whom the club decided to grant philanthropic donations or other aid. A password was issued to each member in order to attend meetings. Within two years, the club had already amassed $250 in their bank account, about $4,000 in 2024 dollars. They donated to the building of the Syrian Men’s Hall, where they would meet for decades. 

In 1926, monthly dues of 25 cents were officially increased to 50 cents, but the SLAS could not sustain the growth. By 1935, in the middle of the Great Depression, dues would be reduced to 10 cents. Financial records indicate that the organization was still active throughout this period, but by 1929, their number had been reduced to 15. In 1933, the secretary noted large absences of 12 or more members at a given meeting. Several members had left the organization, often because they had left town. Among the many places they moved was Dearborn, home of Henry Ford’s River Rouge plant. Some of Michigan City’s railroad car workers became Dearborn’s auto workers. 

Faced with the challenge of maintaining their charitable commitments, the club turned to legal gambling to support its work. In the early 1930s, funds were raised by holding a successful Bunco, or dice, party, yielding $13.45. There may have been hard times during the Roosevelt Recession of 1937, but not for SLAS, at least as an organization. A March, 1937, penny social–a fundraiser generally involving raffles–made $53.85; one in May, 1937, generated $64.44; one in June, 1938, brought in $32.65; and another in October produced $36. In one raffle giving away an 80-cent sack of sugar, the society earned $54.20 (September 7, 1937). 

During the 1920s and 1930s, most of the money was sent to sick members, paid for funerals, was used to buy coal for the Men’s Hall, or purchased flowers for Sacred Heart (Roman Catholic) church. Though the SLAS had Melkite and Orthodox Christian members, they often went to church at Sacred Heart, according to community historian Thomas Tadros. In 1937, some funds were sent to the “Sisters in the Old Country” (Oct. 31, 1937). Even with changes in leadership, bad attendance, and organizational shrink, the sick committee of the society remained active, always visiting members who were ill. 

By 1938, the club discussed joining the Midwest Federation of Syrian American Clubs, a regional organization established in Indianapolis in 1936. Delegates from the club were chosen for the federation’s convention on June 1, 1938. The club also commissioned member Rose Joseph to write the history of the Ladies Syrian Aid Society for the Midwest Federation convention—it had been two decades since the society was founded. Nellie Sawaya was appointed the reporter to the Midwest Federation (Oct. 2, 1938). 

In 1939, Rose Joseph changed the way minutes were written in the organization, and produced the model that was followed until 1992. There was now more extensive discussion of what actually took place. Meetings, she wrote, both opened and closed with Christian prayer. “Roll call was taken and the minutes were read and approved,” she penned on Jan. 22, 1939. The treasurer’s report was included–the balance in the account was $144. The by-laws were to be revised, the minutes showed. Fixed amounts of money given to sick or bereaved members ($3) and their families ($2) were put in place. 

On November 12, 1939, the club discussed what it described as the “Arab-Jewish strife in Palestine.” It was decided that the group would write to the “president of the United States stating our indifference.” This is an important datum in understanding Arab American solidarity with the Palestinian cause. Despite the advocacy of thousands of Syrian-Lebanese people part of well-organized campaigns in towns and cities across the Midwest, the SLAS members were not apparently enthusiastic supporters of Palestinian self-determination. At least not at that meeting. 

By the late 1930s, the minutes showed how this local Syrian-Lebanese club had become part of regional and national networks of Syrian-Lebanese Americans as well as those of the Indiana statewide conventions of clubs and the state conventions in Illinois, which was, geographically and economically, very close to Michigan City. Theirs was a civil society of both cooperation and competition. A poignant moment of tension occurred, for example, on March 19, 1947, when a special meeting was held in response to the invitation of the St. Anthony’s Maronite Society of West Eighth Street to fete the executive board of the national Federation of American Syrian-Lebanese Clubs in Michigan City. The delegates of the Young Men’s Syrian Christian Society, the male counterpart of SLAS, “refused to entertain with them therefore we also are declining,” according to the minutes. This decision seemed to reflect the competition that sometimes occurred among Michigan City’s Melkite, Maronite, Roman Catholic, and Orthodox Christians, as suggested to me by Thomas Tadros. As scholars of American religion sometimes argue, such competition is not necessarily a sign of weakness, but can actually galvanize the growth of different organizations. It is part of the landscape of a vibrant civil society.  

As much as we learn about the activities of the SLAS from the minutes, financial ledgers, and other club records, it is not a complete history. One would like to know what really happened at those Bunco parties and penny socials. There are hints. “Laumans [?] report that the darbaki cannot be fixed. Mabel Tadros will [contact] another company about fixing it,” writes Margaret Balady in the minutes on May 19, 1948. The darbuka is a goblet drum that provides foundational rhythms for Levantine music, the beats to which one sings or dances. Why is this drum referred to as “the” darbaki? How was it used by the club? Arab Americans in the late 1940s still regularly danced to and sang Arabic music in their local clubs as well at regional and national mahrajans, or festivals. Is this what they used it for? 

Biodata from the U.S. Census and other government records can help us learn more about the SLAS members. Take club officer Effie (Baccash) Bonahoom, for example. Born anywhere from 1879 to 1883, Effie lived in 1900 with her husband, Najib, and their two children as boarders in a relative’s house in Rock, Wisconsin. By 1913, if not well before, the family had moved to Michigan City, where Najib ran a grocery store on the city’s bustling Michigan Avenue. Effie, twenty years younger than her husband, gave birth to five children, one of whom died immediately after birth in Michigan City in 1916. She joined the SLAS soon after that. Made a widow in 1930, Effy took up sewing. She died just a few years later of heart disease at the age of about 55. Effie’s fellow club members remembered her each November, when the SLAS funded a Catholic mass for all “our deceased members,” a practice that continued throughout its history. 

The club remained busy in the 1950s and 1960s. When SLAS celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 1968, according to an unmarked clipping included in a ledger, Helen Corey offered the keynote. Corey was the state’s most prominent Arab American woman leader and its only statewide office holder, having garnered over 1.1 million votes in 1964 to become the Recorder of the Indiana Supreme and Appellate Courts. Only one charter member of the club, Sadie Ridwin, was still living by this time. 

By the 1970s, members became concerned about where all their organization’s historical documents were being kept. Elaine Shikany noted on June 5, 1974, that “Tootie Muckway returned one of the Min. Books (1929) which she had found at home.” The group decided to take an inventory of all extant historical documents and their locations. On June 20, “Janie Kaliel brought up the bonds that the ladies used to have,” bonds whose serial numbers are recorded in the extant records of the archives. Official inquiries were made, and the U.S. Treasury eventually sent back photocopies of the bonds, which had been redeemed in 1959. 

Despite having lost track of those bonds, knowledge and know-how were passed on from generation to generation in the club. The content and style of the 1980s minutes were incredibly similar to those of the 1930s, full of discussion about the by-laws of the club, plans for fundraisers, visits by the sick committee, thank-you notes received, Christmas parties planned, and masses said in honor of the dead. Donations were still being made to the Young Syrian Christian Men’s Society and Sacred Heart church as well as other charitable causes. The last entry in a ledger is dated August 5, 1992. Jackie Shikany, the secretary, did not indicate that the group was coming to an end, and so it is not clear what happened after that. 

Overall, the SLAS minutes reveal a remarkable effort to establish and sustain a small, but vibrant group of Syrian-Lebanese Christian women devoted to “the cause of doing charity among members of the society and others if able to do so,” as the by-laws stated. For decades, letters of thanks and cards of condolence were constantly exchanged. Gifts to those who married or gave birth to a child, visits to the sick, and donations to the bereaved or those otherwise in need were granted by and to members of the society and their families. This was an affective and ritualized economy of care. It is telling that the obituaries of several Hoosier women who died in the late twentieth and early twentieth centuries listed their participation in the society as an important element of their lives. Those public acknowledgments demonstrate that the SLAS was a part of Indiana, women’s, and Arab American heritage much deserving of further exploration, and a recent donation of the SLAS archive to the Indiana University Indianapolis Libraries will ensure that future historians and community members will be able to continue that important research.

Further Reading

Curtis, Edward E. IV. Arab Indianapolis. Cleveland: Belt Publishing, 2022.  |  Curtis, Edward E. IV. “Michigan City, Indiana, and Syrian Muslim Industrial Workers,” in Muslims of the Heartland: How Syrian Immigrants Made a Home in the American Midwest. New York: New York University Press, 2022.  |  Mueller, RoseAnna. Michigan City. Charleston, S.C.: Arcadia, 2005.