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Everyone’s Lower East Side Shul 
One of the restored jewel-like stained-glass windows, above. At right, the grandly conceived main sanctuary, with its 70-foot-high vaulted ceiling and elegant upstairs women's gallery. by Diane Cole Twenty years on, the restoration of the Eldridge Street Synagogue is finally complete. A look back at a painstaking labor of love for a building drenched in Jewish history. Diane Cole It’s tempting to compare the Eldridge Street Synagogue’s 20-year-long renovation project, whose completion will be celebrated on Sunday, to that famous 40-year desert trek undertaken by the ancient Israelites. After all, in addition to mammoth time commitments, “I didn’t expect this to take so long, and if I had known I probably would have been too daunted to start,” admits Roberta Brandes Gratz, the urban historian and author who in 1986 founded the Eldridge Street Project to preserve the 
landmark. In its heyday, the synagogue represented a Promised Land of its own — America, with its open, golden doors — to the Jewish immigrants who had left Eastern Europe, landed at Ellis Island, and then built this soaring place to worship amid the crowded tenements where they lived. But that’s not the only story of Jewish migration the synagogue chronicles. It’s also the tale of a community whose growing prosperity led it on upwardly mobile moves to the Bronx, Brooklyn and the suburbs, leaving their old neighborhood increasingly devoid of its once-vibrant Jewish flavor — and its synagogues with ever-fewer congregants and meager resources to maintain such splendid structures as Eldridge Street. Indeed, by the l980s, repairs had been deferred so long that the synagogue’s roof leaked, an interior stairway had collapsed, pigeons roosted in the sanctuary and mold and cobwebs predominated. To be sure, a few dozen congregants continued to meet regularly for Shabbat and holidays in the synagogue’s basement chapel, but the future was as uncertain as the roof was unstable. Gratz was determined to find a way to preserve the building. She saw the Eldridge Street Synagogue as an important artifact of the history of not just the Eastern European immigrants who landed in New York, but of the city of New York where they settled, of the American Jewish community of which they formed a significant percentage and of the history of America and the many immigrant groups of which our country is composed. It was a compelling argument, but the synagogue’s dilapidated condition, combined with its location in a neighborhood that Jewish memory as well as history seemed to have left behind, at first made it a tough sell when it came to convincing potential donors to open their checkbooks. But in time Gratz not only succeeded in raising awareness of the synagogue’s historic and cultural importance — it has been designated as both a National and New York City Historic Landmark — she helped galvanize funds and grants from private as well as city, state and federal sources, and some 18,000 individual donors. Now, Sunday’s rededication and reopening mark the building’s next phase: as the newly renamed Museum at Eldridge Street, where visitors will be able to tour the magnificently restored building and view exhibitions and displays about the Lower East Side’s history and heritage (see sidebar). And if you’re in the neighborhood on Shabbat or a Jewish holiday, you can stop by for services in the refurbished Beit Hamidrash chapel downstairs, where the small but loyal congregation has never missed a Shabbat or holiday service. Talk about continuity. The synagogue’s journey dates back to its construction in 1887. Its ornate design — from its Moorish-Gothic terracotta finials outside to the array of jewel-like stained glass windows inside — was the first major house of worship built by the teeming masses of Eastern European Jewish immigrants who arrived on these shores in the late-19th and early-20th centuries. And for decades it flourished. The grandly conceived main sanctuary, with its 70-foot-high vaulted ceiling and elegant upstairs women’s gallery, allowed more than 1,000 congregants to pray together comfortably, and it echoed every Shabbat with the davening of sweatshop workers and the voices of American-made success stories, including celebrities like Eddie Cantor and Edward G. Robinson. Even as late as 1949, Max Fuchs, now a retired cantor but then an aspiring apprentice, recalls leading High Holy Day services in the sanctuary to a full house. “After Selichot, Jackie Mason came up and told me he enjoyed hearing me,” he says. Those glory years are long gone, to be sure. But thanks to the painstaking, detailed work of leading historic preservation architects Walter Sedovic and Jill Gotthelf of Walter Sedovic Architects, a visit to the restored building makes it possible to conjure that past. The monumental brass and crystal chandelier illuminates the exquisitely hand-carved ark and bima below, and light gleams through the restored panes of the stained-glass windows. The trompe l’oeil murals, faux-marble pillars, extensive floral wall-stencil patterns, and ceiling paintings that depict a starry sky are all there, once more. The goal, says Sedovic, is to provide visitors the sense that, yes, “120 years have passed in life of the synagogue, but it will also feel very robust and beautiful and that it has a great future ahead.” And for some visitors, past, present and future will seem inextricably intermixed. When museum docent Barry Yood begins leading tours on Dec. 4 (he’ll be there every Tuesday), he will proudly point to the large gold Hebrew lettering imprinted on one of the sanctuary walls: a tribute to Rabbi Avroham Aharon Yudelovitch, a famed Talmudic scholar who served as the synagogue’s rabbi from 1918 until his death in 1930 — and who also happened to be Yood’s great-grandfather. (The rabbi’s sons changed the family name to Yood, probably in the 1920s, Yood believes.) Yood waxes enthusiastic when he speaks of his ancestor. “He wrote 18 scholarly books. ... He was quoted in The New York Times. … When he died, thousands of mourners jammed the street outside the synagogue, weeping,” he says. But he readily admits he knew almost nothing about his great-grandfather until, some years ago, when he went with his son to the Lower East Side to buy a tallit for his son’s bar mitzvah. “The owner, an older man, asked my name, and when he heard it, he almost fell down.” Yood’s interest wasn’t fully piqued until two years ago, after he and his wife Nora decided one afternoon to tour the synagogue’s restoration-in-progress. “She looked up and spotted my great-grandfather’s name in Hebrew!” he says. Since then, through the Eldridge Street Museum, he has discovered the existence of three more Yudelovitch family members, whom he hopes to meet at Sunday’s rededication. Naomi Fuchs, who was born 83 years ago a few doors down from the synagogue, at 2 Eldridge St., remembers Rabbi Yudelovich’s name — but she was too little at the time to recall his oratory. More vivid from those days are recollections of sliding down the banister from the women’s gallery. She also remembers how her father, Morris Groob, an active member of the shul until his death in the 1960s, at one point walked from door to door on Division Street and the Bowery raising funds to pay off the building’s mortgage. With that goal achieved, the congregation held a special ceremony to burn the document, then placed the ashes in an urn — an object recovered during the renovation. (It was her father who helped her husband Max get that gig leading High Holy Day services in 1949.) For Tova Bookson, the current president of the congregation, the family connection goes back even further, to the actual opening of the building. Her late husband, Judge Paul Bookson, was the grandson of synagogue founder Kalman Paston. “And I can’t tell you how exciting it was when he walked up the synagogue steps,” she says. Her grandchildren and 2-year-old great-grandchild — all of whom she hopes will join her at the reopening — represent the fifth and sixth generations of the Bookson family to be part of the congregation. “We were always imbued with the hope that our building would be restored and would become vibrant and restored to its magnificence,” Bookson says. “And this is exactly why this is so exciting. This is the apex of our hopes and dreams for us, for the congregation and for generations to come.” But you don’t need an official family lineage to feel connected to Eldridge Street, says Esther Fuchs, daughter of Max and Naomi, and a professor of public policy and political science at Columbia. “What’s wonderful is that in a way this has become everyone’s grandfather or great-grandfather and -mother’s shul, one that belongs to everyone who came through Ellis Island. … I think that’s part of what is fascinating about it and it’s a miracle that it’s still here.” Visiting The New Museum At Eldridge Street Visitors should start by viewing the renovated synagogue and sanctuary; guided tours by docents will walk you through the history of the building and its restoration. Next, check out the museum’s new exhibition and education space: * At the Gural-Rabinowitz Family History Center, on the building’s lower level, visitors can hear oral histories of the people and families associated with the Eldridge Street Synagogue through the years. Access to Internet resources and databases will also be available to assist those interested in researching their own family history. And workshops will be offered on how to create a family oral history. (The first is scheduled for Sunday, Jan. 13, 3-5 p.m.) * The Limud Center, also on the lower level, features interactive kiosks with sophisticated touch-screen computer games and activities that take you on tours of the synagogue and the Lower East Side and invite you to step inside this neighborhood’s life circa 1900 through virtual recreations of such locales as the Forward Building, the Isaac Gellis delicatessen and a typical tenement. * The Lise and Jeffrey Wilks Gallery, located in the upstairs women’s balcony, will feature rotating exhibitions. The premiere show, fittingly enough, focuses on the story of the synagogue’s preservation and renovation. There’s also a gift shop, and the museum space can be rented for special occasions. For more information: (212) 219-0888; www.eldridgestreet.org. — Diane Cole |
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