Eldridge and Plum streets - a tale of two temples

In 1896, a community of Jews, recent immigrants to New York City from Eastern Europe, purchased three lots on Eldgridge Street on the lower East Side. They wanted to have their own congregation, separate from those of the German and Sephardic Jews who had arrived earlier. Eighteen months later, after a total expenditure of $19,000, they had built their own synagogue, using two local brothers, Christian gentlemen, as the architects.

The synagogue was a glorious space in which to spend time. Indeed, for most of its members, who generally lived in the tenement buildings of the surrounding neighborhood, Manhattan's Lower East Side, it was the most beautiful place they had access to on a regular basis, and better yet, it was all theirs. The upper balcony, separate and shielded as it was from the men below, must have been a wonderful haven for local wives and mothers to sit in splendor and comfort, relieved for a while from the stuffy, cramped environments of their apartments, happy for the chance to visit, rest and connect with other women in the community. Their early lives in New York were very hard. So difficult was it to makes ends meet that these new American Jews found it impossible to keep the Sabbath, in terms of refraining from work from sundown Friday until after sundown on Saturday, so the Shabbat service had to be held very early in the morning on Saturday before everyone headed out to work for the rest of the day.

Eventually, as members of the congregation established themselves, flourished and became successful, they moved out of the crowded tenement neighborhood know as Jew Town and into other areas, including the outer boroughs of the city, making it impossible to continue worshipping together. By 1950, the small group of more loyal or less successful congregants who were left could not afford to heat the entire building, so they locked up the main sanctuary and used just the smaller chapel to one side. A quarter century later, in 1975, a visiting professor unlocked the door to the main sanctuary and decided to restore it to its original splendor. The goal was to keep as many of the original elements of the synagogue as possible, which required a very painstaking process of careful and precise restoration. So began a long and laborious restoration project which cost over $18 million and was not complete until 2007.

My father and my husband had separately visited the Eldridge Street Synagogue in the early 1980's before the restoratiuon work began. It was full of rubble, then, the walls and ceilings had fallen in chunks of plaster to the ground, the pews all lay upended. Something worse than abandonment had occurred in the place, and it was then forbidden for anyone to enter for fear of their being injured. Still, both of these men were curious enough, as surely many others also were, to cross the barriers and peer inside this once grand, then crumbled bit of our collective past, as descendants of Jewish immigrants who had fled Eastern Europe and come to live in New York City.

Today, you may enter the street level chapel, which had remined in use through the 1950's, 1960's and 1970's, and where you can now, every day but Saturday, pay a museum vistor's fee, learn the history of the congregation and visit the main sanctuary with a historian as your guide. The guide who escorted my father, sister and me a week ago Sunday had recently immigrated to New York from Romania. Just a little bit of personal conversation revealed that she currently lived on precisely the same block of Brooklyn, by Avenue M and Ocean Boulevard, where my grandparents lived when my mother and aunt were little girls.

The massive, round, stained-glass window created by artist Kiki Smith is the first thing to command our attention on this sunny winter afternoon as we enter the main sanctuary. It hangs above the ark, a huge, dynamic swirl of blue adorned with many golden stars. We are told that this work was the last piece of the restoration to be completed. It is entirely unlike the original window that was blown out by a hurricane, and also, completely different from the brightly colored gothic style window that is opposite it, at the Western side of the sanctuary. Our guide points out that although the synagogue architects were Christian, they were very sensitive to the purpose for which this space was being created. Accordingly, they designed the stained glass windows into twelve parts forming a circle, to represent symbolically the twelve tribes of Israel. The arches of modest glass block that had been used to let light into the original sanctuary have been moved to create a tribute wall honoring the many donors who made the restoration possible.

In Cincinnati, we have a temple that was built by German immigrants in 1865-66. Once called the Jewish church, the Plum Street Temple is an histoic landmark, and considered one of the crowning jewels of Cincinnati's historic architecture. It was one of the first places I was taken to visit in Cincinnati, even before I decided to move here. I realize that I am now, once again, standing in another rare example of a beautifully preserved Moorish Revival building from the 19th century. Both temples have been lovingly restored and both show evidence of the strong influence of Moorish design on temples of that era. Only in Florence (Firenze) Italy have I stood in synagogue similar to these two, and that one was restored, after destructive floods swept through it, by the largesse of the Ferragamo family.

I find it interesting that the two cities in which I have now spent the greatest chunks of my life each have one of these temples, one built by German Jews, and the other by immigrants from Eastern Europe. The greatest difference I notice between them is that the temple in Cincinnati marked the birth of the Reform movement, so that the pews hold men and women sitting together. There is consequently no balcony level in the Plum Street temple other than the one built in the rear to hold musicians, who according to traditional Jewish practice, were forbidden from playing during the holidays. Also, the front of the sanctuary in Plum Street temple widens so that some pews are sitauted facing the bimah from the right and the left sides, instead of all of them facing on one direction, facing east.

In addition, I notice that the interior of one temple is predominantly red and the other is mainly decorated in shades of blue, which is oddly reflective both of the colors associated with the cities' respective premiere professional baseball temas, the Reds and the Yankees, as well as the contrast in the political leanings of the two cities' residents, Republican versus Democrat. Perhaps I should end my personal observations here. If you want to see inside either historic synagogue, tours can be arranged of both, although significantly more planning is required to see Plum Street. The congregation which owns it, K.K. B'nai Yeshurun, currently uses the historic building only for Bar Mitzvahs, weddings and high holiday services. Its main meeting place nowadays is a mid-20th century building located closer to where the Jewish population has migrated over the years, several miles north of Plum Street which is in the heart of downtown.

As for the Jews of New York's Lower East Side, well, it seems that some of their descendants have migrated as far away as Cincinnati, Ohio.