[Teenagers singing Passover songs at a community seder, Educational Alliance, Lower East Side, New York]

The Educational Alliance was founded by progressive German-Jewish philanthropists in 1889 to aid the Lower East Side’s large population of Eastern European Jewish immigrants through classes and programs that emphasized American citizenship, literacy, professional and vocational skills, the arts, and physical education. Vishniac worked as a freelance photographer for the Education Alliance throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s.