Eldridge Street Synagogue in Chinatown

Tucked away in lower Manhattan, in the middle of the hustle and bustle of Chinatown, there is a beautiful synagogue that served the large Jewish community that came from Europe in the 19th century.
The Eldridge Street Synagogue is one of the first synagogues erected in the United States by Eastern European Jews. Between 1880 and 1924, two and a half million East European Jews came to the United States.

Close to 85 percent of them came to New York City, and approximately 75 percent of those settled initially on the Lower East Side. The Eldridge Street Synagogue opened its doors at 12 Eldridge Street on September 4, 1887, just in time for the Jewish High Holidays.
Hundreds of newly arrived immigrants from Russia and Poland gathered here to pray, socialize and build a community. It was the first time in America that Jews of Eastern Europe had built a synagogue from the ground up. The synagogue was built with the support of successful Eastern European immigrants who could afford major contributions to its initial $92,000 cost.

The synagogue even paid for the distinguished Russian cantor to move to New York and lead the congregation. The synagogue’s architects were two little-known German brothers named Herter, who also built tenements and lofts in the neighborhood. 
The building reflects a mix of Moorish, Romanesque, and Gothic influences, with 70-foot vaulted ceilings, stained-glass windows, intricate carvings, and trompe l’oei murals. "Trompe l’oei " is French word for “trick the eye,” used to mimic the appearance of something three-dimensional.

Faux finishes were used to make walls and columns look like marble. For almost forty years, the synagogue flourished. Men and women came in their finery, and mounted policemen patrolled the crowds. By 1910 the neighborhood of the Eldridge Street Synagogue contained half a million Jews, one of the largest Jewish populations of any city in the world. 
 Immigration Act of 1924 was signed into law on May 26, 1924. The act established a quota system that limited immigration from southern and eastern Europe (primarily Jewish and Slavic). By the 1920’s, nearly one-third of the American population consisted of immigrants and their families. 

Between 1880 and 1924, approximately two million European Jews entered the country. In the year after passage of the new immigration law, fewer than 10,000 European Jews were able to enter on an annual basis. This act and a Great Depression affected the congregation’s fortunes. From the 1940s on, the main sanctuary was used less and less.
  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 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 disrepair.

Hoping to preserve and ultimately restore the building, the journalist and preservationist Roberta Brandes Gratz and attorney William Josephson incorporated the not-for-profit, Eldridge Street Project (renamed the Museum at Eldridge Street). 

The Museum completed the Eldridge Street Synagogue restoration in December 2007, the synagogue’s 120th anniversary. in 1997 the Synagogue reopened after a restoration that took 20 years and cost $20 million. A radiantly modern east rose window was installed in 2010. A Rose window, the gothic architectural feature, usually associated with Christian cathedrals, is a very uncommon element of synagogue. 


It was borrowed by the synagogue’s architects, recent German immigrants. Today the Eldridge Street Synagogue is home to the Museum at Eldridge Street, which welcomes people from around the world for tours, school programs, concerts, lectures, festivals and other cultural events. The small Orthodox congregation of this Synagogue has never missed a Saturday or holiday service in the more than 120 years since the synagogue first opened.  The museum now receives 40,000 or so visitors a year. Museum works Sunday – Thursday from 10 am to 5 pm, and on Friday from 10 am to 3 pm. Synagogue tours are offered on the hour (10, 11, 12, 1, 2, 3 & 4). Monday is a free day to visit the museum.

Synagoge, Pope and Soviet Jews

In  1890, the Orthodox synagogue at East 67, designed by German-born architects Ernst Schneider and Henry Herter, opened its doors. Over the door way engraved in granite and written in Hebrew is a verse from Psalm 100. "Enter into His Gates with Thanksgiving and into His courts with praise."

The orange-brick and terra-cotta Moorish Revival building  has a magnificent rose window  and bulbous cupolas set at   different  levels. 

Moorish architecture is a variation of Islamic architecture. It  is named after the Moors, North African people who conquered the Iberian Peninsula in the 700s. The Moors controlled what is now Spain, Portugal, and the Pyrenees region of France for hundreds of years. The Moorish style evoked a high point in Jewish life in 11th century Spain when Jews, Christians and Muslims lived peaceably together. It was a time when Jewish intellectual and spiritual life flourished.   

So it is not a surprise that a lot of synagogues all over the world were built in  the  Moorish Revival Style.   

Since 1962, the synagogue's rabbi has been Arthur Schneier. Rabbi   was born in Vienna in 1930.  His family  fled in November 1938 from Vienna to Budapest, where Arthur survived the Holocaust in the Budapest ghetto. In 1947 he moved to the United States.  Schneier became a Rabbi and was awarded an honorary doctorate in theology at Yeshiva University in New York City.

To protest religious repression in the Soviet Union, Rabbi Schneier recruited a group of civil rights leaders, politicians and members of the clergy for an Appeal of Conscience rally. On the synagogue balcony across the street from the Soviet mission to the United Nations, Rabbi Schneier displayed a bronze plaque,     inscribed in English and Hebrew with the biblical phrase, ''Hear the cry of the oppressed. The Jewish community of the Soviet Union '' .    

I wrote about  the Soviet Mission  building  at  the corner of East 67 and Park Avenue in one of my posts.

23 years later, in 1988, rabbi Schneier said that  New York Jews should greet Gorbachev respectfully ''in recognition of the increased opportunity for Jews in the Soviet Union to emigrate and practice their religion and their culture at home.'' The same year Rabbi  visited  Moscow, Russia where he  met with Soviet officials about religious rights.

Twenty years later, in April  2008, Pope Benedict XVI paid a 22-minute visit to the Park East Synagogue   — the first papal trip to a United States synagogue. He presented the synagogue with a replica of a medieval Jewish manuscript from the Vatican library and received three gifts: a seder plate, a Passover haggadah and a box of matzo.  The visit was only the third known visit by a pope to any synagogue. There is also a plaque on the wall of the building memorizing this event.

There is Early Childhood Center and  Lower School, grades kindergarten through grade five at the synagogue. There is also a Sunday Shkola   that   educate Russian Jewish children about their heritage.

 

 

 

 

Temple Emanu-El - the largest synagogue in the world

   Temple Emanu-El in New York City ( 5th Avenue and East 65) is the largest synagogue in the world. It can accommodate 2,500 worshipers - more than St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York. 

Temple is made of the limestone and is designed in the Romanesque architectural style with Moorish and Art Deco elements.

Directly out front of the temple there is an enormous wheel-like window with twelve spokes that represent the twelve tribes of Israel.

Temple Emanu-El is on the site of demolished John Jacob Astor IV mega mansion that had been sitting on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 65th Street from 1895. The house was one of the grandest houses in New York at that time.

    Jack was a great-grandson of John Jacob Astor, the founder of the prominent Astor Family, who arrived from Germany penniless , made fortune with fur trading and made the Astors’ one of the wealthiest families in the America. John Jacob Astor IV went down with Titanic in 1912 after helping his pregnant wife escape into the last lifeboat.

   His son Vincent sold the Astor Mansion to developers for $130,000. The salon, library and all of the painting in the ballroom where bought by the John Ringling for his Italian Renaissance style mansion in Sarasota.

   John Ringling, who is mostly known as a circus showman and promoter, bought massive bronze doors from the Fifth Avenues entrance of the Astor Mansion. These doors now are at the entrance to the Sarasota Art Museum in Florida. He also purchased many of the paintings that were in the great Astor ballroom and complete fittings of several rooms, two of which are re-installed in Museum.

   The temple's first ceremony was in September 1929, a few short weeks before the stock market crash. The Emanu-El congregation was the first Reform congregation established in New York City . It was founded in 1845 by 33 German Jews,  who assembled for in a rented hall in Lower East Side.

   In the end of XIX the mixed seating was adopted, allowing families to sit together, instead of segregating the sexes on opposite sides of a hall. The congregation also eliminated mandatory head-coverings for men. Michael Bloomberg and Eliot Spitzer are the members of the congregation. There is in-house small museum where religious relics, some dating back to the sixteenth-century are kept. Temple Emanu-El also hosts lectures, films, music, symposiums, and other events.