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LANDMARK OF THE SPIRIT

YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Foreword by Bill Moyers........................................ixAcknowledgments................................................xvCHAPTER ONE A Landmark Synagogue..............................1CHAPTER TWO Laying the Cornerstone............................15CHAPTER THREE Opening Day.....................................32CHAPTER FOUR Music and Money..................................49CHAPTER FIVE E Pluribus Unum..................................64CHAPTER SIX Patriarchs and Matriarchs.........................90CHAPTER SEVEN The Burning of the Mortgage.....................114Notes..........................................................135Selected Bibliography..........................................151Index..........................................................157

Chapter One

THE WESTERN SIDE OF Eldridge Street is home to a dizzying array of activities. Workers unload vegetable crates, merchants buy restaurant supplies, residents and tourists visit Chinese bakeries and noodle shops, and Buddhist priests offer sidewalk feasts to the gods. So vibrant is the mix of commerce, social activity, and religion that movie and television crews in search of a New York Chinatown scene often set up their cameras here to capture it on film. But their shots tend to omit the eastern side of the street, for there, in the center of the block, stands a synagogue. Its cream-colored brick, its Moorish finials, and its Star of David ornamentation catch the eye. What is a synagogue doing in the heart of Chinatown?

When it opened in September 1887, in what was the heart of the Jewish Lower East Side, the Eldridge Street Synagogue surprised spectators then, too. New York's east European Jewish population, made up of peddlers and tailors and their families, had worshipped in small, nondescript storefronts, partitioned tenement halls, and churches converted into synagogues. Although they eventually built dozens of synagogues, as well as notable, even palatial secular spaces-banks, newspaper headquarters, and theaters-in 1887 nothing in the neighborhood's architecture announced the Jewish presence as strikingly as the Eldridge Street Synagogue did. Opening just in time for the Jewish High Holidays, the synagogue permanently altered the streetscape and skyline of the Lower East Side, attracting not only downtown and uptown Jews but also reporters from New York City's leading papers, one of whom heralded the "elegant" and "magnificent" synagogue as "one of the finest Hebrew places of worship in the city."

For the tens of thousands of Jewish immigrants already settled on the Lower East Side, as for the hundreds of thousands who would arrive in the coming decades, New York's first great east European synagogue expressed the hope that the immigrants' religion and culture would flourish on American soil. For forty years after the synagogue's dedication, it was sustained by "lawyers, merchants, artisans, clerks, peddlers and laborers" who gathered to celebrate holidays, mark life-cycle events, and debate communal issues. Cantorial concerts and Sabbath sermons drew crowds; daily study sessions attracted a core constituency. When longtime members moved uptown at the turn of the twentieth century, new immigrants replenished the congregation. But by the 1920s the population, as economically and geographically mobile as earlier immigrants, had dispersed far beyond the Lower East Side, and immigration quotas stemmed the tide of arrivals. Still, the members who remained, many of whom operated small neighborhood businesses, kept the congregation going. By the 1950s a depleted but stalwart congregation could no longer afford the repairs needed to maintain the building, or even to heat its sanctuary, and met instead in the street-level chapel.

In the 1970s and 1980s the congregation still prayed in the street-level chapel, but the building itself was in grave disrepair, its cracked foundations, leaky roof, and unsound structure "held up only by strings to heaven." In 1971, New York University professor Gerard Wolfe persuaded Benjamin Markowitz, the sexton, to show him the sealed-off sanctuary. Although pigeons roosted in the balcony, grime covered the stained-glass windows and painted surfaces, and dust blanketed the wooden surfaces, Wolfe was amazed by its beauty, and together both Wolfe and Markowitz began to lead visitors on tours of the sanctuary. Hoping to preserve and ultimately restore the building, the journalist and preservationist Roberta Brandes Gratz and the attorney William Josephson incorporated the not-for-profit nonsectarian Eldridge Street Project (now renamed the Museum at Eldridge Street) in 1986, which mounted the largest independent restoration in New York City not supported by or attached to an institution or government agency. When raising funds and organizing the restoration fostered recognition of the site's potential as an educational and cultural space, the project sought and secured National Historic Landmark status and introduced tours and programs that brought tens of thousands of visitors to the synagogue.

In 2007 the Eldridge Street Synagogue became once again the magnificent edifice that had greeted throngs of worshippers 120 years earlier. From Eldridge Street, visitors can survey the same cream facade that immigrants beheld on opening day; inside, they can marvel at the fifty-foot barrel-vaulted ceiling, the richly hued stained-glass windows, and the majestic carved-walnut ark, still lined with its original crimson velvet. This restored synagogue is one of the last remaining-and arguably the best-preserved-edifices built by the east European immigrants who made the Lower East Side the world's largest Jewish city around 1900. Its history is perpetuated today in two separate but complementary ways. On the Sabbath and holidays, congregation members, who have, across the generations, never missed a Sabbath service, worship in the Orthodox tradition of their grandparents and great-grandparents. On Sundays and weekdays, the Museum at Eldridge Street explores the context of their worship, explaining to visitors of diverse ages and backgrounds how the immigrant founders and their children lived, worked, and prayed on the Lower East Side.

The museum's tours treat the synagogue as a historical artifact. Its architectural elements-the facade, reader's platform, even the lighting fixtures-prompt discourses on the shared history of the congregation and the Lower East Side. The architectural elements work well as prompts because the restorers, with meticulous sensitivity, retained elements and finishes that show the passage of time. The undulations left on the sanctuary's pine floors, formed by worshippers' feet rocking back and forth, are perhaps the most striking reminders of the past. A ring of light bulbs encircling the ark's Ten Commandments was added in 1907, when the congregation installed electricity to attract congregants as some established members moved uptown and new neighborhood synagogues drew others away. On the northern balcony wall, a section of plaster and lathwork interrupts the stenciling and shows where water damage stripped away layers of decorative paint, plaster, and wood during the half-century when both the congregation's membership and the Lower East Side's Jewish population declined. As beautiful as the building is, its real power lies in its ability...