The stories of the many immigrants who called Kingston's Rondout neighborhood home during the 19th and 20th centuries are literally baked into the walls of the Reher Center for Immigrant Culture and History.

The museum’s in a historic building at 101 Broadway that was home to the legendary Reher Bakery, which was started by Frank Reher, a Jewish immigrant who came to the Hudson Valley from Krakow in Eastern Europe in the late 1890s. The Rehers, museum director Sarah Litvin said, ran the bakery there between 1908 and 1980, living upstairs and renting out to the top floor to Irish, German, Russian, Austrian and Italian tenants through the years.

"What is amazing is we know that at least 10 different families from five different countries lived in the building between 1877 and 2004, when the Reher Family donated it," Litvin said.

The neighborhood was also home to a large Black population who moved to Kingston from the Jim Crow South during the Great Migration northward in the 20th century.

Part of the Reher Center's mission is to tell the story of this building and the working-class immigrant families who lived, worked and shopped here. That story helps paint a picture of the immigrant and social history of Kingston and the Hudson Valley.

"We start with this specific building and these families and tell stories that are more broadly applicable," Litvin said. "Immigration, community, work and bread, we explore those themes and expand out from the story of Reher's Bakery to look at other immigrant groups and other people's experiences to see how we can connect to each other and the immigrant experience."

Starting in July, the Reher Center will host tours that invite guests to step into the bakery as it looked in 1959 and discover the community of the family's customers and the family's experience of running their business and living upstairs.

Litvin imagined standing inside the bakery late on a Sunday morning, greeting customers who came to the bakery for breakfast after Sunday services. They came from churches like St. Peter's Lutheran Church, which served mostly German parishioners, or St. Mary's Roman Catholic Church which catered to Irish and later Italian parishioners or the now-shuttered Immaculate Conception Catholic Church, once a center of the Polish community. "They'd all pick up rolls from this Jewish bakery,” she said.

The Rondout once boasted 12 houses of worship, including three synagogues, all of which were anchors for the many immigrants who called this neighborhood home and worked at places like the Delaware and Hudson Canal or later the many factories in Midtown, she said.

Many residents also shopped at Yallum's, a clothing and shoe store once at the corner of the Strand and Broadway, Litvin said. "Everybody talks about it — they'd go there to get a school uniform."

The Rondout area was decimated by urban renewal in the 1960s when large swaths of century-old (or even older) buildings were torn down, she said. "Many of the stories we're telling and the stories we're recovering are from families displaced in urban renewal," Litvin said.

Called off last year because of the pandemic, the Ninth Annual Kingston Multicultural Festival will return on June 13, 20 and 27 in TR Gallo Park adjacent to the Waterfront Farmer's Market.

Highlights of the festival include a program with Andrea Del Cid, telling the story of Guatemalan Worry Dolls, an ancient Mayan legend.

"She has created a story around this ancient legend," she said. The program, created in partnership with Cornell Creative Arts Center, invites visitors of all ages to hear the story and to make their own Worry Dolls out of popsicle sticks.

Litvin said this spring they're bringing the project into 33 classes in area elementary schools.

"We're going to have English, Spanish, and Q’eqchi’, an indigenous language," Litvin said. (Many recent immigrants to Kingston have Q’eqchi’ as their first language.) "I'm so excited for the kids in schools who came here from Guatemala. Their culture is celebrated and held up.”

The museum is partnering with Kingston Catholic School, Rhinebeck High School and Ulster County BOCES on a free outdoor collaborative exhibition called "Stiched Together" that opens in the museum's courtyard on June 3.

The exhibit explores the stories of nine women who worked at F. Jacobson and Sons Shirt Factory on Cornell Street in 1918, she said. It's a bit of a history and a historical fiction show. Today that building is a mixed-used building called The Shirt Factory.

"We learned as much as we could using census records and newspapers," Litvin said. "We partnered with the Ulster County Archives with the Kingston Catholic kids doing that research."

Rhinebeck High students created diary entries and fleshed out these women's stories through creative writing, Litvin said.

Maria Cabrera helped create a pattern for reproduction blouses based on those worn by employees in 1918 photos, which were reproduced to be displayed, Litvin said. Then Ulster BOCES students pitched in adding embroidery, lace and dyeing to represent each individual woman, she added.

The museum also hopes to open an additional exhibition of the history and contemporary stories of the garment industry in Kingston with a focus on immigrant women's roles in the past titled "Sewing in Kingston" this fall.

The new exhibit will be housed in space that is part of the museum's “Grow Our Gallery, Build our Bathrooms” renovation program that will expand the museum's exhibition space along with adding public bathrooms. She said the State Historic Preservation Office has approved the project and fundraising for the effort has begun.

On the Spring Street side of the museum is new signage that offers a people's history of the Rondout including immigrant and working-class history, the history of enslaved people in the Hudson Valley and the story of Lenape people, who were living here when the Dutch arrived in the 17th century.

All of these efforts are part of a larger project to expand the center, founded by Geoff Miller, Barbara Cohen and Barbara Blas from an all-volunteer group within the Ulster County Jewish Federation.

Litvin, who previously worked in the Tenement Museum in Manhattan, came to the Reher Center in 2017 as a consultant with the goal of opening the building for public programming. In 2018 it hosted a few open house tours to bring the community in. By 2019 when she became director upon the recommendation of board member Ward Mintz, they were offering regular Saturday tours of the bakery from July to October.

When the pandemic hit, the museum shifted to focus on different programs like a community mural project and a community quilt project that, said Litvin, helped engage families and kids in a socially distanced manner while building community.

All our efforts come down to uplifting stories of ordinary people from the past to help people understand these stories and realize their culture is important, she said. That draws in people who normally don’t like museums.

Plus, celebrating the differences that make us special is very important, especially at a time when racially motivated attacks and hate crimes are on the rise, she said.

"Hate comes from a fear of difference, our mission is to teach about the difference," Litvin said. "This gives us an opportunity to share our own culture, and have other people learn about it. That does combat hate."