The Shechinah Moves Downtown

The Stanton Street battle, 9/11 and the new Lower East Side: A meditation on why the eccentric, and magical, old neighborhood is worth preserving.

photograph BY michael datikash

by Freema Gottlieb
Special To The Jewish Week

As soon as I moved downtown from the teeming Jewish life of the Upper West Side 16 years ago, I invited Brother Shlomo, aka Shlomo Carlebach, and all my old friends from uptown to the hanukkat habayit (house warming) of my new home. Raised in a Scottish rabbinical household of Holocaust survivors, I found the dvar Torah Shlomo gave while fixing the mezuzah to the doorpost especially poignant. The root of the word mezuzah, he said, was zaz, “to move.” Paradoxically, the Jewish way of being is not to be “fixed” but to move constantly, to progress and ascend to ever-greater heights.
As Jews, we tend to move about; our horizons are varied; yet there is a counter pull for some “little Jerusalem,” a place

where we can feel at home. For me that meant making the exodus from the taller buildings and more imposing institutions of the Upper West Side to something on a more human scale.
My new home on Prince Street was at least half a mile from any shul. This means more than simply having to walk farther on Shabbat. Kosher products, for example, cannot be taken for granted, and demands placed on the individual are increased. But for someone like me, coming from Scotland, and for a Jew from anywhere but the main centers, that is nothing new.
It wasn’t long before I was drawn to Congregation Bnai Jacob Anschei Brzezan, on Stanton Street, one of the last tenement synagogues on the Lower East Side, its homeliness reminiscent of the beit midrash in my father’s synagogue in Glasgow. I soon found myself enthralled by its spiritual leader, the late Rabbi Joseph Singer, whose community of colorful Old World characters were equally under his spell. I could be in shul, fruitlessly trying to concentrate on davening, when the mere glimpse of the small, childlike figure, clad in his tallit, bobbing about in a corner, would serve as reassurance of God’s presence in life.
Stanton Street’s members at the time included an accomplished artist whose portrait of Bill Clinton graced the National Gallery; an ex–vaudeville performer; various Yiddish-speaking factory workers; an ancient resistance fighter who claimed to have turned his gun sights on the pogromists in Kielce; and a monkey who was once glimpsed wiping cream cheese delicately from his mustache with a napkin. A few congregants, including children, who were mentally challenged found a true haven at Stanton Street.
As Rabbi Singer put it, “The voices of the innocent go right up, raising all our prayers to heaven.” In precisely such a human atmosphere I felt I too could make contributions — something improbable in the more formal communities I had previously attended.
What transpired at Stanton Street — a fierce fight over the sale of the synagogue — would both test and reinforce the human atmosphere that sets the Lower East Side apart.
Before the fight commenced, we had magical times with our rebbe. I was infinitely flattered when he invited me to stand between the separate seating in the beit midrash during a kiddush that consisted of herring and potatonik to give a weekly dvar Torah. Sometime after, tired of hearing only my own voice, I introduced an entire dvar Torah program in which other people could be heard and everyone become involved in learning. The program I had started at Stanton Street soon overflowed around the corner to the Orensanz Art Foundation, where an interactive discussion of the weekly parashah, “Shabbos Shmooze,” was held in a small room that later would serve as a bridal chamber.
Built by German Reform Jews around 1850 to resemble Cologne Cathedral, the Orensanz Art Foundation is housed in the oldest standing synagogue building in New York City and the fourth oldest in the United States. Al Orensanz, who with his brother, Angel, had rescued the structure from demolition in 1979 and converted it to an art gallery, was an ardent supporter of the Shabbos Shmooze, as were several others—traditional Lower East Siders, lawyers, artists, all yearning for attachment to something Jewish but on their wavelength. Under the soaring labyrinthine vaults of the Orensanz Center, with the shimmering drapery, gauzes and special lighting effects that would enhance the weddings and artistic pageants that took place there, I felt part of some magical phantasmagoria and was in a continual state of wonder.
In the shadow of these two unique, eccentric institutions, to which I had retreated from the mass Jewish singles dating scene, enjoying time in the company of people with a median age of 80, I had the opportunity to deepen my relationship with the most supportive and reliable of the many interesting drop-ins, whom I subsequently married.
In the summer of 2000, while away on one of my stints teaching midrash in Prague’s Jewish Old Town, I got the message from David, my husband, that our little shul was being sold, by none other than our beloved rebbe and his family.
Jewish life in America started downtown on the Lower East Side, and the Stanton Street Shul, we felt, was a part of that heritage. Yet this was a time when the Lower East Side Jewish community was waning; many older Jews were passing on or going into nursing homes; it was also a time when sale caps were lifted from the lower-income co-ops on Grand Street, prompting many to sell and leave. Little wonder, then, that at the time, the community, made up mostly of the frail and elderly, was paralyzed. Under the spell of our tzadik, we felt that to speak out against him amounted to betrayal.
On one occasion Rabbi Singer departed from his usual custom and stumbled through a dvar Torah in shul to the effect that when the Temple was destroyed, the Divine Presence fell back from Jerusalem and followed the rabbis to Yavneh. To which I countered with another midrash, that never did the Shechinah depart from the ruins of the destroyed sanctuary. The Shechinah, taken by some to mean the consensus of the Jewish community, would continue to daven in our accustomed place.
We wanted desperately to save the shul. I remember phoning the United Jewish Council of the Lower East Side to remind them of their mandate to protect weaker communities.
But our mission to save our shul was called into question by the demographics. Should we really hold on to something small and personally valuable, or become part of a larger, more anonymous community?
At that point the community began to muster politically. I located the state attorney general’s charities bureau, which again postponed the sale. We continued to daven in the synagogue as if under siege, and the Singers took us to court.
It was just at this point in our collective melodrama that the global apocalypse of 9/11 imploded on our personal lives. In our neighborhood — the first zone above Ground Zero not to be evacuated — the lights went out at first in the aftermath. Our small courtyard and the whole area was covered in white ash until the end of November. Visitors stayed away from the area, and small stores ran out of provisions and closed their doors. There was a general feeling of isolation and paranoia, from which one could break out only through some kind of communal effort. David and I gave water and warm socks to the rescue workers going down to Ground Zero.
Miraculously, as time went by after 9/11, the lights went back on twice as bright as before as money and investment poured into downtown. Jewish institutions opened up, catering mainly to an influx into the area of young professionals, some of whom rallied to the cause of Stanton Street, undertaking outreach and fundraising
efforts. (The victory finally came in court in October 2002.) Meanwhile, I brought uptown closer to downtown by contacting the most liberal of the Orthodox yeshivot, Chovevei Torah, which has since furnished the shul with a series of rabbinical interns and finally a full-time rabbi.
To my joy, the YIVO archives and Yeshiva University Museum have opened up on 16th Street in the Center for Jewish History together with a convenient kosher café. While Makor has marched downtown, and the Jewish Community Project and various progressive prayer centers to attract singles and couples with young families have sprung up, the neighborhood has recently experienced a loss in the closure a few months ago of Hebrew Union College’s wonderful New York Kollel, with which I was very much involved. Kollel provided Jewish education for adults, offering a full range of cultural interests, affording them a way into our ancient, intensely rich, and mature heritage.
David and I have moved on to the Civic Center Synagogue, also known as the Synagogue for the Arts, an evocative example of 1960s “floating architecture.” Under the dynamic leadership of Rabbi Jonathan Glass, it houses a gallery for contemporary downtown artists and features some forward-looking cultural programs not normally associated with an Orthodox shul: classical music, cabaret, yoga, t’ai chi, as well as a learners’ and family service during High Holy Days.
At White Street there reigns an atmosphere conducive to the coming together of an eclectic group of people, from traditional and secular backgrounds: a pilot who flew for Israel during one of her wars; the 82-year-old winner of the Poetry Foundation Award for Neglected Masters; a talented French designer; a Scots playwright; the engineer of a new computer program allowing cars to park themselves, and more low-key but equally interesting people can come in contact with Jewishness in a warm, nonjudgmental atmosphere.
“Downtown” for me is a place where, despite the incursions of high-rise buildings and the vagaries of real estate development, one can still be Jewish in a human way, where one can meet and interact with other Jews, make small contributions, and grow. For those sensitive to the pulse of a Jewish heart center, the Shechinah still dwells in downtown, and perhaps now more than ever. n
Freema Gottlieb is the author of “The Lamp of God: A Jewish Book of Light” (Jason Aronson) and teaches at the Skirball Institute for Adult Jewish Learning.

Westchester Jewish Conference

Westchester’s Jewish Community Relations Organization