The Sunday List

“The Sunday List Project” is a digital exhibit researched and curated by Sarah Litvin for the Reher Center for Immigrant Culture and History in 2017. It grew out of the research Litvin did as Interpretive Planner for the Reher Center during Summer 2017, and offered a proof of concept for how the institution could use the story of Sunday mornings at the bakery as an interpretive focus for the historic bakery site.

One of the many artifacts left behind when Hymie Reher closed his family’s bakery in the 1980s was a piece of card stock labeled “Sunday List.” It listed the names and standing orders of diverse families in Kingston, NY. Litvin used social media to identify and interview those whose names appeared on the “Sunday List,” and through her interviews, a story emerged: on Sunday mornings from the 1940s through the 1970s, Kingstonians from the German, Irish, Italian, and Polish communities converged at Reher’s Bakery to pick up rolls for breakfast on their way home from church. Litvin designed this digital exhibit to showcase excerpts from her interviews with former Reher’s Bakery customers who describe those trips to Reher’s Bakery and the delicious breads baked by this Jewish family that made their Sunday breakfasts complete. The story of Sundays at the Bakery and several of these oral history clips are now the basis of the weekly “Past, Present, Future Reher’s Bakery Tours” Litvin leads at the Reher Center. In 2019-2020, the Reher Center plans to restore and furnish the Reher’s Bakery retail shop to the era of the “Sunday List.”

Sarah Litvin served as a Humanities New York fellow while earning her doctorate in U.S. History at the The Graduate Center, CUNY where she wrote a dissertation entitled “In Her Own Hands: How Girls and Women Used the Piano to Chart their Futures, Expand Women’s Roles, and Shape Music in America, 1880-1920.”

As a Humanities New York Fellow, Sarah began a project that has since blossomed into a full-time job. Sarah began as an Interpretive Planner and is now the first Director of the Reher Center for Immigrant History and Culture, a new museum and cultural center in Kingston, New York. The mission of the Reher Center for Immigrant Culture and History is to preserve and present stories with universal appeal about immigration, community, work, and bread. It uses its historic bakery building in Kingston’s Rondout neighborhood to forge emotional connections among all peoples through tours and programs. In Sarah’s tenure as Director since June 2018, the Reher Center opened the Reher Center Gallery, the only site in Kingston dedicated to the immigrant stories of the Hudson Valley, past and present; hosted its first on-site education and public programming; and is in the process of incorporating as a 501(c)(3) with a provisional museum charter.

Sarah’s curatorial expertise is digital exhibits; she has developed interactive exhibits for the New-York Historical Society, the National Museum of American Jewish History, and the Lower East Side Tenement Museum and also holds a certificate in Interactive Technology and Pedagogy. Prior to coming to the Reher Center, Sarah was a Pre-Doctoral Fellow at the Women’s HistoryCenter of the New-York Historical Society where she founded the Early Career Workshop in 2017-2018, Researcher and Guide at Turnstile Tours from 2014-2017, and Senior Education Associate at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, where she directed accessibility and living history programming from 2008-2013.