On Wednesday, March 21 the Museum will exhibit work from Liana Finck’s graphic novel-in progress based on the Bintel Brief, the beloved Yiddish advice column of The Forverts newspaper. When I first saw Finck’s drawings I was taken with the range of emotions she was able to express with her beautiful drawings and text. Also, I am struck by the continued resonance of this century-old column, which was launched in 1906 by The Forverts editor Abraham Cahan and so poignantly (and, at times, humorously!) captured the condition of the Jewish immigrant on the Lower East Side.  The letters continue to speak to readers today. Here Liana Finck shares her thoughts on the project.

Liana Finck with a panel of her Bintel Brief graphic novel at Eldridge Street

What led you to the Bintel Brief?
My Grandma Helen had a copy of the collection of letters edited by Isaac Metzker. I found the book two years ago on a trip home from Belgium, where I was living, and loved it immediately.

What is it about the Bintel Brief that made you want to undertake this project?
The simplicity of the letters moved me. I have very specific taste in narrative: I like books and movies that are simple, full of emotion, and also told with a bit of distance and understatement. I think my taste comes from having loved poetry before I learned to love books or movies or art. The Bintel Brief letters touched me immediately, and this was especially wonderful because art usually seems to me like an escape from the ‘real world,’ specifically, in my case, from New York; from Judaism, from mundane life…these letters felt deeply familiar, but they had the special wildness and strangeness I usually look to art for.

Why the graphic novel and not another medium?
I’m not sure. I never liked to read graphic novels until very recently, and the discipline required to be a graphic novelist is something I’ve had to struggle to teach myself. It’s a slow and arduous medium and I still feel in over my head a lot when I’m working. Still… Here is why I chose to make graphic novels:

A page from Liana Finck's "A Bintel Brief"

When I was a teenager I developed a passion for books, but I’d been drawing obsessively since I was a baby, and I knew that drawing was my natural ‘language,’ much more than written and spoken words. I thought of drawing as a responsibility that I had to hold onto, even if I wanted to become a writer. I never loved graphic novels, but I did relate more than anything to cartoonists and illustrators who seemed to have figured out how to ‘write’ with pictures. Some of my favorites were Maira Kalman, Roz Chast and Saul Steinberg. I decided to be a graphic novelist instead of a cartoonist or illustrator because it’s an exciting time to be a graphic novelist: the medium has suddenly become somewhat popular and very interesting in America. It’s also a relatively unexplored medium: there’s much more room to break ground today as a graphic novelist than as a writer or an artist. This sounds a little crazy but I do believe it. Somewhat, at least. And I deeply enjoy the challenge of using drawing -which comes naturally to me- in a way that does not come naturally.

How do you feel about exhibiting your work at the Eldridge Street Synagogue?
So excited and honored. The building is so beautiful, comforting and also awe-inspiring–such a perfect mixture of art and Jewish history, like the Bintel Brief letters. I feel so calm and glad whenever I go there. It’s also right in the neighborhood where most of the Bintel Brief letters were written – the Lower East Side – and is a stone’s throw from the old Forverts building on East Broadway. The synagogue has felt like the center of the Lower East Side to me since I first went into the sanctuary a few months ago.

Liana Finck’s A Bintel Brief opens on March 21 an 7pm and will be on view at the Museum at Eldridge Street through May 31, 2012.

Maybe something can be done about the weather…

As the Museum’s archivist, it has been a treat to be able to look at each item in our collection.  What are my favorites?  It’s so hard to say, but this sign, from the Museum’s sizable collection of Hebrew and Yiddish signs collected from around our Lower East Side neighborhood, is on my list.

It’s small, about the size of a standard sheet of paper.  Its frame is nicked and worn, and the sign itself is stained.  Why do I like this so much?  I like how it looks, its authentic patina of age.  But the deal was sealed when I found out what it says.

The Hebrew writing is the beginning of the Blessing for Dew:  “V’ten Tal u’Matar“; in English, “And give rain and dew.”  This sign signals that this blessing should be added to daily prayers, and it would be hung on the synagogue’s bimah during the dry season in Israel, roughly from fall through early spring.

I was curious about why the sign had clearly gotten wet — its letters are blurred and its hanger is rusted.  I wanted to think that it had hung outside and that its instructions had produced results — that it had worked and brought rain.  But probably, like so much else at the Eldridge Street Synagogue, it fell victim to the elements when the main sanctuary was shut in the 1950s.  Still, I love that the cycles of nature are part of prayer and faith, and that asking for rain would be a community aspiration.

As this brutal winter drags on, maybe we should organize a collective prayer for an early Spring!

Written by Nancy Johnson, Museum Archivist

An artisan from Evergreene Studios works on the building

Our building tours offer visitors a peek into the workings of the historic Eldridge Street Synagogue, and we’ve been busy adding new themes and tours to our lineup. You can now experience Eldridge through the lens of immigration, ritual practice, or architecture and preservation.

On Beyond the Facade: Architecture and Preservation, we break out the flashlights and turn our visitors  into forensic architects. What were the choices made by the founders of the Eldridge Street Synagogue 123 years ago? How did this building, the first synagogue built from the ground up by Eastern European Jews, reflect the aspirations of an immigrant community? What techniques and materials were used in its original construction? Which buildings, religious and secular, inspired the architecture of this space?

But this building is more than just an ossified architectural relic, and on the tour visitors also explore the 20-year, 19 million-dollar restoration of this space. What was the preservation philosophy at Eldridge Street? Where can you find the unrestored elements of the building, and why were they left alone? How does a new contemporary window, designed by Kiki Smith and Deborah Gans,  fit into a high Victorian space? And my favorite: which bug produces the laquer used on the benches?

So next time you’re in the neighborhood, make sure to stop by and experience Eldridge as never before. Offered daily at 11:30, 1:30 and 3:30. Whet your appetite for architecture with this restoration video, which offers insight into the process of restoring this century-old building.

When I first envisioned a Chinese Jewish Festival more than ten years ago, I thought it would be good for the neighborhood and for our mission to tell the story of the immigrants who made and make our neighborhood special. I imagined Chinese and Jewish artists and musicians sitting side by side informing the public about their traditions. What I did not expect, but experienced starting at our very first festival back in 2000, is the deep feeling of community and joy that emanates from all the participants and festival goers – this is a New York Moment.

Walking south on Eldridge Street from the B Train on Grand Street, you are in Chinatown: dumpling shops and markets sell more than 20 varieties of soy sauce and all sorts of dried foods in bins, fish so fresh that it still moves and store signs in Chinese with auspicious names like Prosperity Dumplings or Good Lock Locksmith; there is a Buddhist temple, too. However, if you look closely, you might notice Harris Levy Fine Linens and remember that your bubbe went there to buy her wedding linens; or you might see a tenement with Moorish windows and a faded Star of David on the façade – a sign that the building was once a synagogue.

If you’ve been lucky enough to visit us on the first Sunday in June over the past 10 years, you might have thought you had stumbled into a whole other wonderful world. You hear strains of klezmer music and see folks dancing a hora. If you stay a bit longer, the strains of Ray Musike’s Romania Romania slowly change into a Chinese folk song led by bandmaster Mr. Hoy and members of the Qi Shu Feng Peking Opera transform themselves into monkey kings and tigers and flip through the air. You shake your head twice, no three times, and enter the 1887 landmark Eldridge Street Synagogue. Sitting side by side is a Hebrew scribe, demonstrating this sacred art, with a Chinese calligrapher. A bit deeper into the sanctuary there is a tefillin maker, a most holy man who so loves his work that you, too become intrigued by his story and his ritual objects and you feel that you might have just stepped into a shop in Jerusalem.

You learn that the synagogue is still a place of worship but just as important that this neighborhood was always an immigrant neighborhood, that just as years ago the shops had Yiddish signs and sold yarmulkes and tallisim and prayer books, now there are Chinese signs and the mamma loshen and lukshen has been transformed to Chinese and pulled noodles and somewhere this odd juxtaposition of Chinese and Jews has turned into a day of mutual respect and sharing. It’s New York after all, where benign indifference can turn into neighborly love, and egg roll meets egg cream for an afternoon of shared delight

-Hanna Griff-Sleven, Director of Programs

Recently, James Cooper’s “Painting in the City” class at the Educational Alliance came to visit Eldridge Street for some watercolor inspiration and exploration. James was kind enough to share some of the students’ work with us.

For more work from different sites, check out the class’ blog here. I couldn’t help but think of this historic photograph while perusing through the class’ pictures, taken of a portrait class at the Educational Alliance in1918. Below is a photograph of Cooper’s class, 92 years later. Who knows how many generations of artists have been inspired by the Eldridge Street Synagogue and other East Side landmarks?

For a 123-year-old, the Eldridge Street Synagogue is pretty hip. A few weeks ago we witnessed the installation of a public art exhibit by artists’ collaborativeIllegal Art called “The Last Word.” The artists behind the exhibit, Otis Kriegel and Michael Devitt, explain:

There are always things left unsaid. The perfect ending to a conversation with a stranger. A clever comeback in a debate with a colleague at work. A farewell bid to a loved one. Let’s face it; life is full of missed opportunities to get in that last word. What do you wish you had said? As the year draws to a close, we …invite you participate in Illegal Art’s newest public art project, “The Last Word.” Write down and deposit your unsaid “last words.” Read what others wish they had said. Take a moment to reflect on past conversations in a space resonant with history.

The Lo-Down has a great interview with Otis and Michael from the opening, which took place at the
Museum on December 6th.

In the last Op-Art piece of 2009, the New York Times featured some choice slips left at the Museum at Eldridge Street, Pratt Institute, the Spring Gallery and the Gay Men’s Health Crisis:

The installation is still up, but only for a few more weeks! Be sure to make it down to Eldridge before your last words remain unspoken forever. For those of you who can’t visit us — what is your last word? Share it here!

What happens when contemporary art and historic architecture combine? Find out at the Museum at Eldridge Street, which has commissioned artist Kiki Smith and architect Deborah Gans to create a new monumental east window for the 1887 Eldridge Street Synagogue. This installation will be completed in Spring 2010. Walking into the grand sanctuary, visitors will get a taste of both 1887 and 2010, Victorian architecture with a modern day interpretation.

Originally, stained glass rose windows at the front and back greeted worshippers at the Eldridge Street Synagogueon opening day. Always unstable, the East Window finally collapsed out of its frame in the late 1930s, leaving the congregation with a gaping hole at the front of the majestic sanctuary. Lacking the funds for a reproduction, the congregation replaced it with a clear tablet-shaped glass-block design in 1944-45, which remains in the wall today.

During the 20-year restoration process, the East Window became a major question: How do we restore an element for which there are no original building plans and no photographs? After an extended decision-making process, we opted for a new commission which would return an inspiring interior and offer a respectful solution to the irreplaceable original.

Smith and Gans’ design, a galaxy of golden stars against an ever-changing blue firmament, recreates in stained-glass the blue and gold star pattern painted on the walls immediately surrounding the new window. According to their statement, “The new stained-glass window will use the features and motifs of the existing synagogue in a new way so that the mind and eye reflects back on the interior space as they are drawn into the space of the window. The wall pattern of five pointed gold stars against a blue sky will be extended across the window.  The ribs of the window will radiate from a Star of David at the center.  In pattern and shape, this window will be similar to the existing ceiling domes of the synagogue and also the trompe-l’oeil windows to either side of the arc. The current technology of flash glass makes it possible to etch the yellow stars into a blue field without any outline or leading so that they will appear as more intense sources of light within the glow of the window.  The translation of the traditional motif of the synagogue with this material and structure will intensify the floating qualities of the synagogue space and surfaces.”

To inaugurate the new East Window and investigate the challenges of restoration, visit the Museum at Eldridge Street every Wednesday at 1 PM for a special preservation tour. Be sure to keep reading for more about our exciting East Window initiative!