Sep
27
2011
Our Program Director Hanna Griff-Sleven not only cooks up great programs but is a wonderful chef. (Yes, excuse our terrible pun!) Here she shares some delicious dessert recipes that will make your holiday sweet and memorable.
Hanna is a great hostess, whether at home or at Eldridge Street. She loves this photo because, "I look so much like my mother."
Apple Cake for a Sweet New Year
This apple cake, adapted from Joan Nathan’s holiday cookbook, is a yummy one, using orange juice – my mother’s favorite flavoring for Rosh Hashanah. (She basted turkeys with it, used it in pie crusts instead of water and made many a chicken dish with it). This cake is easy and pareve and fills the house with the heimish smells of fall.
Ingredients:
- 3 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- 1 tablespoon baking powder
- 6 small Rome, Granny Smith, Yellow Delicious, or other low-moisture apples
- Juice of 1/2 lemon
- 4 large eggs
- 1 cup vegetable oil
- 2 cups sugar
- 1 tablespoon vanilla extract
- 1/2 cup orange juice
- 1 teaspoon cinnamon
Recipe:
- Preheat the oven to 350°. Grease and flour a 9-inch springform pan.
- Mix the flour, wheat germ, salt, and baking powder in a bowl and set aside.
- Peel, core, and slice the apples into eighths and place in another bowl. Sprinkle with lemon juice.
- In a third bowl, beat the eggs until foamy. Add the vegetable oil and 1 3/4 cups of the sugar; beat well. Stir in the vanilla.
- To the egg mixture; alternately add the dry ingredients and the orange juice. Pour half the batter into the prepared pan. Cover with half the sliced apples.
- In a small bowl, mix the remaining 1/4 cup sugar with the cinnamon and sprinkle half over the apples. Cover with the remaining batter.
- Starting at the outside of the pan, neatly place the remaining apple slices in overlapping concentric circles. Sprinkle with the remaining cinnamon sugar mixture.
- Put some aluminum foil on the bottom of the oven in case the batter leaks. Bake the cake on the middle rack for 1 1/4 hours, or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Cool on a rack before you carefully remove the cake from the pan.
Bessie Griff’s Hermits for a Spicy New Year
My mother, in addition to making many apple pies for Rosh Hashanah, also made a selection of cookies for the many guests and relatives that made their way to our house. Hermits was one of those cookies, a sort of spicy biscotti that is a New England favorite. September holiday cooking made the house cozy and helped us ease into the back-to school mode.
Ingredients:
- 3/4 c. shortening
- 1 1/2 cups white sugar
- 1/4 c. mollasses
- 2 T water
- 2 eggs
- 1 t baking soda
- 1 t cinnamon
- 1 t ginger
- 1/2 t cloves
- 1/2 t salt
- 3 c. flour
- 1 c. raisins (optional)
Recipe:
- Cream shortening and sugar.
- Add molasses and water.
- Add beaten eggs.
- Add remaining ingredients.
- Bake in logs at 350 degrees for 20 minutes in a greases cookie pan. When cool, cut into smaller pieces.
Sep
22
2011
This Sunday, September 18, the Museum celebrated the publication of ”Beyond the Facade: A Synagogue, A Restoration, A Legacy.” The book, published just in time for the synagogue’s 125th anniversary year lovingly chronicles the founding, decline and glorious renewal of the Eldridge Street Synagogue. At the event, author Larry Bortniker shared his memories of the Lower East Side, which are excerpted here.
The last time I addressed a large group of people from a bimah was at my bar mitzvah, so it’s taken me a while for a return engagement. Like then, I’ll be reading selections from a book, in this case, one I wrote, my first one, in fact, so today qualifies as another rite of passage for me.
Beyond the Facade chronicles the history and award-winning restoration of the 1887 Eldridge Street Synagogue
I first came to the magnificent Eldridge Street Synagogue back in the 1960s, when I was a kid and the synagogue was not so magnificent. My father Ben owned a store in Hoboken that sold what used to be called dry goods—which meant everything from women’s bloomers to painters pants to table cloths to army/navy surplus. Every Sunday Ben, my brother Brucie and I would drive through the Holland Tunnel in dad’s green Plymouth to buy wholesale on the Lower East Side. We shopped at places like Motel’s on Ludlow, a walk-down hovel with hundreds of enormous shipping boxes torn open so as to display the merchandise inside. One enormous box might contain 500 men’s solid cardigan sweaters; another might be packed with 1000 summer muumuus. Brucie and I were small enough to climb into the boxes and search for sizes and colors. And let me tell you– that was wholesale! Then we were off to Preger and Werthenthal on Delancey for underwear and socks; then to Max Penchina on Canal for curtains and bedspreads. For lunch we ate at the Garden Cafeteria, a vegetarian factory where everything was boiled, or at Isaac Gellis or Mark’s for the much tastier assortment of triglycerides.
On two rare occasions, the lunar calendar contrived that my father’s yahrzeit for his parents should fall on a Sunday with an early sunset. So Ben brought us here, to the Eldridge Street Synagogue, where he said kaddish, before we headed back home to Jersey. We never stepped foot into this breathtaking sanctuary because it was boarded up at the time and looked less than its best. Rather, we took the dark stairs down to the dark bes medresh below. It would please my father greatly to see the Eldridge Street Synagogue still standing and looking so grand and bright, even though the Lower East Side he knew no longer exists. And that is the miracle of this place, which we’ve chronicled in Beyond the Façade. I know my father would feel honored to have his name mentioned here today, and it’s for his memory that I read this selection from our book.
Sep
05
2011
With the synagogue so beautifully restored, sometimes we forget how easily it could have been lost. This photograph here, taken by Kate Milford, is a reminder of that precarious time.
Pre-restoration interior, Eldridge Street Synagogue Photo: Kate Milford
With holes in the roof, a collapsed stairwell, and peeling-away paint, “the synagogue was held up by strings to heaven,” according to Roberta Brandes Gratz, founder of the Eldridge Street Project, the non-profit organization that restored the synagogue and was a precursor to the Museum.
“When I got to the vestibule on the main floor, I found the doors of the sanctuary warped shut. I pulled them open and stepped inside, and my hair stood on end. It was like the Twilight Zone. There were prayer shawls strewn about, and ceramic spittoons on the floor. The prayer books dated from 1909 and had been printed in Vilnius.” So describes Dr. Gerard Wolfe in a New Yorker article dated September 26, 1988. Dr. Wolfe was the first to “re-discover” the main sanctuary after it had been sealed shut for many years.
Today thousands of people visit Eldridge Street to connect with history and heritage, school children learn about Jewish history and culture, and a small congregation continues to meet every Sabbath and on holidays, in a tradition unbroken since 1887. As we begin preparations for the synagogue’s 125th anniversary, I think of the long life of this beautiful building and the future that is in store.
