The Eldridge Street Synagogue: Orthodox Jewish Immigrants on New York's Lower East Side

At the Eldridge Street Synagogue in New York City, the members of Congregation Kahal Adath Jeshurun built a community from a shared faith and many cultures. Most were immigrants from Russia and Eastern Europe — present-day Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine, Romania and Russia — united by Orthodox Judaism. In 1887 they celebrated their new synagogue on Eldridge Street on the Lower East Side. Its history tells the story of the neighborhood's Orthodox Jewish communities from the 1880s to the early 1920s.

Orthodox Jews on the Lower East Side

In the mid-nineteenth century, a small community of Orthodox Jews, mostly from Russia, lived on the Lower East Side, many worshiping in small congregations of people from the same town or region. The Beth Hamedrash congregation, formed in 1852, drew members from many countries, whose customs differed. One dispute — the balance between religious and lay authority — split it in 1859: one group followed Rabbi Joseph Abraham Ash as Beth Hamedrash Hagodol; the group that followed the lay leadership later became Kahal Adath Jeshurun.

The congregation grew fast in the 1880s, as millions of Jews fled persecution and violent attacks — pogroms — in Russia and Eastern Europe. Some moved on from New York, but most Orthodox immigrants stayed, settling on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

A grand new synagogue

By the mid-1880s the congregation had outgrown its building: it had merged with another congregation, Holkhe Yosher Vizaner, new immigrants kept joining, and the city planned an elevated railway right beside the old synagogue.

• Completed in September 1887, the Eldridge Street Synagogue was one of the first grand synagogues built by Eastern European Orthodox Jews in the United States — a powerful statement of Orthodox Judaism's vitality on the Lower East Side, and a central institution for the city's Orthodox communities.
• In 1896, Orthodox congregations met there to create a national organization that two years later became the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations.
• German-born brothers Peter and William Francis Herter designed it, blending influences: horseshoe arches of the Moorish Revival style, popular for synagogues (as at New York's Central Synagogue of 1872, built for a Reform congregation and a National Historic Landmark since 1975); stained glass with the Star of David; and a Gothic-style rose window more usual in American churches — a building that fused the traditions of the congregation's faith and homelands with their new home.

Decline

• 1909: Congregation Anshe Lubz joined.
• Two years later, Eastern European Jewish immigration to the U.S. peaked; it fell after World War I began in 1914.
• 1924: the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act set quotas by country of origin, severely limiting Jewish immigration. Jewish residents were also moving to Harlem, the Bronx and Brooklyn.
• 1930s: with fewer members, services moved to the study room (bes medresh) in the basement; the main sanctuary was used only for special services.
• Mid-1950s: the main sanctuary was sealed shut.

Preservation

When the sanctuary doors were opened again in the early 1970s, they revealed fine woodwork and plasterwork — a wooden ark, domed ceilings, an elaborate chandelier — intact, but damaged by water and insects.

• March 29, 1980: listed in the National Register of Historic Places.
• 1986: grassroots efforts formed the non-profit Eldridge Street Project, led by Roberta Brandes Gratz, which raised funds for a full restoration, inside and out.
• June 19, 1996: designated a National Historic Landmark.
• 2007: restoration completed.

Today the Museum at Eldridge Street tells the history of the Lower East Side and its synagogues, with tours, exhibitions and cultural programs.

Sources

Based on "Eldridge Street Synagogue in New York's Lower East Side," National Register and National Historic Landmarks Celebrate Jewish Heritage Month, National Park Service, drawing on the 1995 National Historic Landmark nomination and works by Jeffrey S. Gurock, Annie Polland, and Gerard R. Wolfe and others; a work of the United States government in the public domain.