250 Mooney. The Workman's Circle even opened soup kitchens during large strikes. There were also socialist organizations in the Jewish community, such as the Labor Zionist organization the Histadrut, with its distinct local and international traditions and concerns, but with a membership that overlapped with that of the Socialist Party. And beyond and below these institutions was the network of landsmanshftn, or local neighborhood mutual benefit associations, often based on kinship or ties of regional origin, that functioned as an infrastructure for the communalist and collectivist values of the Jewish community. But the institutions that were the central carriers of socialist ideology in the Jewish community were neither officially socialist, nor entirely Jewish: the trade unions with large Jewish memberships, particularly the industrial unions/5 Most garment workers in the city were Eastern European Jews, so it is not accidental that the garment workers unions, including the International Ladies Garment Workers Union and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union, were the most socialistically-inclined unions in Baltimore. Nor was it accidental that many of the locals of the garment unions were virtual Jewish community institutions. Of the garment workers unions, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers (ACW) was by far the largest. It was, in fact, at that time the city's most important industrial union and among its most militant; the ACWs multitude of locals were headquartered by its powerful Joint Board, a center of labor radicalism. Many of the locals of the ACW tended to be dominated by a one or another white ethnic group, and its Jewish locals, their meetings often conducted in Yiddish, were infused with the culture of Eastern European Jewish community and with socialistic sentiment. Of course, socialistic currents ran in other white ethnic proletarian communities in Baltimore - the Finnish community, for example, or the Italian community. Also, there were other ethnicities in the more militant industrial unions. The ACW had a large Italian minority in the union, which was largely contained in overwhelmingly Italian locals that conducted their meetings in Italian;