East European Jews in New York had formed congregations, but before the construction of Eldridge Street, they met in makeshift spaces: rented halls, converted storefronts, renovated churches.

For the tens of thousands of Jewish immigrants already settled on the Lower East Side, as for the hundreds of thousands who would arrive in the coming decades, New York’s first great East European synagogue expressed the hope that the immigrants’ religion and culture would flourish on American soil. Designed by Roman Catholic tenement builders Peter and Francis Herter, the elaborate Star of David patterns, set in terra-cotta bands, carved on the wooden doors, and raised atop the roofline finials proudly announced its sacred function.

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, which by 1890 “bristled with Jews.” (Moses Rischin, The Promised City)

For its first forty years, the synagogue was sustained by a vital Lower East Side community comprised of “lawyers, merchants, artisans, clerks, peddlers and laborers” (Century Magazine, 1892) who gathered to celebrate holidays, mark life-cycle events, and debate communal issues. Pioneer presidents, enterprising women congregants, star-quality cantors, and gifted orators grappled with the challenges of creating a viable Orthodox congregation in a city and a country that both encouraged and threatened traditional customs.

But by the 1920s the congregation, as economically and geographically mobile as earlier immigrants, had dispersed far beyond the Lower East Side, and immigration quotas stemmed the tide of arrivals. 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 instead 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 grave disrepair, with its foundations compromised, a leaky roof, and unsound structure. New York University Professor Gerard Wolfe and Benjamin Markowitz, the congregation's sexton, were the first to re-enter the sealed-off sanctuary. “I cannot forget how my hair stood up and goose pimples arose on my back… There was an immense brass chandelier hanging from the 50-foot ceiling with all its Victorian glass shades intact…Brass crowns adorned the light fixtures on the walls, whose motif doubtless represented one of the three crowns of Jewish tradition.”

Pigeons roosted in the balcony, and dust blanketed the wood and painted surfaces, and the stained-glass windows were grime-coated.

Hoping to preserve and ultimately restore the building, the journalist and preservationist Roberta Brandes Gratz and attorney William Josephson incorporated the not-for-profit nonsectarian Eldridge Street Project (now renamed the Museum at Eldridge Street) in 1986. According to Gratz, "It was as though the synagogue was held up by strings to heaven." Under the auspices of Gratz and Josephson, The Project mounted the largest independent restoration not supported or attached to an institution or government agency in New York City. The Project's earliest supporters included J.M. Kaplan Fund, Joy Ungerleider Mayerson, and the Astor Foundation. In 1991, alongside the ongoing restoration, the Eldridge Street Project launched educational and cultural programming.

In 2007 the Eldridge Street Synagogue became once again the magnificent edifice that had greeted throngs of worshippers 120 years earlier. From Eldridge Street, visitors can survey the same cream façade that immigrants beheld on opening day; inside they can marvel at the fifty-foot barrel-vaulted ceiling, the richly hued stained-glass windows, and the majestic carved-walnut ark, still lined in its original crimson velvet. This restored synagogue is one of the last remaining – and arguably the best preserved – edifices built by the East European immigrants who made the Lower East Side the world’s largest Jewish city around 1900.

The synagogue’s history is perpetuated today in two separate but complementary ways. On the Sabbath and holidays, congregation members, who have, across the generations, never missed a Sabbath service, worship in the Orthodox tradition of their grandparents and great-grandparents. On Sundays and weekdays, the Museum at Eldridge Street explores the context of their worship, explaining to visitors of diverse ages and backgrounds how the immigrant founders and their children lived, worked and prayed on the Lower East Side.

This history is adapted from Dr. Annie Polland's book,
Landmark of the Spirit: The Eldridge Street Synagogue
(Yale University Press, December 2008).
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