Remember the scene in Woody Allen’s 2011 film Midnight in Paris? Owen Wilson, as Gil, is sitting on a Paris street corner at midnight. The clock bells chime and he’s transported back to an earlier era. Same corner, same street, same city, only now, he’s in the city of his dreams: Paris in the 1920s.

How many times have I wished to do exactly that here in New York City? Stroll along Riverside Drive when it was lined with mansions; climb the stairs of the Eldridge Street Synagogue in its heyday; walk into a photograph of old New York and just keep on going.

Where’s Woody Allen when you need him?

This wonderful photograph, taken in 1928 just minutes from the Eldridge Street Synagogue, is a favorite of mine. Here at the crossroads of Essex, Canal, East Broadway, and Division Streets was the heart of the Jewish Lower East Side, and for hundreds of thousands of Jewish immigrants, the heartland of their America.

Walk here today – as you will on our October 14th Nosh and Stroll – and you’ll see streets that look remarkably the same. Long gone are the soapbox preachers, Yiddish speakers, and newsboys, but neighborhood landmarks endure. Seward Park, here in the middle of the photo, the Seward Park Library, just above, the Educational Alliance across the street – all remain in form and function. The tall building on the right of the photo also still stands, though only its landmark façade is the same. In 1928 this was the Jewish Daily Forward building. Today it’s a condominium and unlikely that anyone inside still uses a typewriter.

But just imagine.

Imagine a split second after this moment was captured. Pedestrians frozen mid-stride take another step … and keep on walking. Cars move and honk, city sounds and smells (more on those smells in a moment!) fill the air, black and white is infused with color and we’re in. In the photo and it’s nearly a century ago.

Now, the sound of clattering typewriter keys is surely spilling from the windows of the sixteen-year-old Forward building. Chances are Abraham Cahan, the founding and impassioned editor of the paper, is inside. Perhaps he is editing his famous advice column, the “Bintel Brief” at this moment. Yiddish for “Bundle of Letters”, each letter was a story, each column a nuanced portrait of immigrant life.

“Dear Editor,” the letters would begin.

As Columbus Day approaches we are thinking about the immigrants who later made the journey across the ocean to find a better life. Many – probably most – of the early congregants of the Eldridge Street Synagogue were new Americans, including Gussie Dubrin, who was interviewed by Judy Tenney for the Museum (then the Eldridge Street Project) in 1991 for our oral history archive.

Gussie was born somewhere near Minsk, Russia, in 1903. “There were pogroms there,” she said, explaining her parents’ decision to come to the United States. They were afraid for their lives, she recalled. “You would sit in your house and, before you knew it, the coassacks came. They broke in and broke everything in your house.”

Gussie came to the United States in 1906 with her mother and five brothers and sisters. They landed at Ellis Island, where immigration officials placed a big cross on the apron worn by one of Gussie’s sisters. The mark indicated that the girl had poor eyesight and should be sent back. But Gussie’s mother acted quickly, taking off the little girl’s apron and reversing it so that the cross could not be seen. The whole family was admitted.

Gussie’s father, Morris Dubrin, had come in 1904, and another sister had made the journey alone shortly after. She was just 13. “She was lost for a couple of months,” Gussie recalled matter-of-factly. “They didn’t know where she was. They said somebody stole her passport. But finally she got here. It took her about three months, I think.”

Morris found an apartment for the family at 11 Rutgers Street, near East Broadway. “It was a small apartment,” Gussie remembered. “My mother hated it. She was used to the country and fresh air. But we managed.”

Their new home was just a few blocks from the Eldridge Street Synagogue, where Morris had found work as the shammes, or caretaker. “He devoted his whole life to the synagogue,” Gussie said proudly. “As far as I know, he had no other job.”

Gussie described her father. “He was a tall man. We’re all short and he was tall. He had a small beard, no moustache…He was nice looking. When he walked into a room, everybody looked at him. He was outstanding. I thought so anyhow. When he put on his high hat [a top hat worn during services], then he was really something.”

“He was the shammes of the shul, but he conducted all the services of the shul. There was morning service and evening service. He never missed. Twice a day, he went to the shul. He was a ba’al k’riah [Torah reader]. He was the one who conducted all the services. Even on the High Holidays, when they had a rabbi and a cantor and a choir, my father did most of the service because he had a beautiful voice.”

Gussie went to services with her mother for the High Holidays. “She had the best seat. My mother had the first seat in the balcony. So she could see all over.”

“I remember the synagogue was always crowded. There were no empty seats. I remember that the women came all dressed up in their best finery. There were a lot of rich people there…They wore fur pieces and hats with feathers or plumes and big diamonds – which my mother didn’t have.”

“The whole balcony was filled. Then the children would stand around in back.”

“The services were very impressive for the holidays. There was a warmth. You knew it was a holiday.”

After Morris Dubrin died in 1933, the family moved to the Bronx, but as an adult, Gussie “started becoming interested in the shul.” She and her cousin would often make the trip downtown to Eldridge Street. “That was the purpose of going down,” she said, “to visit the synagogue and leave some money for them.” Gussie Dubrin died in 1997 at the age of 93, more than nine decades after she made the voyage across the ocean to America.

Spring is in the air,
and Seward Park is a favorite Lower East Side destination.

Old and young find their way to historic Seward Park, located just a few blocks from the Museum at Eldridge Street. A space to relax on a bench, practice tai chi aside vibrant pink tulips or to challenge your friends to a race across the monkey bars, Seward Park is – and always was – a refuge from the crowded city streets.

Yet, public parks and green spaces have not always been part of the Lower East Side’s landscape. Seward Park opened on October 17, 1903 and was the first permanent city-funded playground in the United States. Prior to the park’s opening, people living on the Lower East Side were without an outdoor public recreation space, making the transition for new immigrants coming from steitel life in rural Eastern Europe even more challenging.

The following excerpt from Hungry Hearts, a collection of stories written by Polish-American author Anzia Yezierska, whose own family immigrated to the Lower East Side around the turn of the 20th century, gives us some insight:

“I looked about the narrow streets of squeezed-in stores and houses, ragged clothes, dirty bedding oozing out of the windows, ash-cans and garbage-cans cluttering the sidewalks. A vague sadness pressed down my heart – the first doubt of America.

‘Where are the green fields and open spaces in America?’ cried my heart. ‘Where is the golden country of my dreams?’ … All about me was the hardness of brick and stone, the stinking smells of crowded poverty… ‘Oi veh!’ my mother cried in dismay. ‘Where’s the sunshine in America?’”

Seward Park provided the community with a place to escape the tenements and changed the lives of thousands of families and children growing up on the Lower East Side. Like the neighborhood, Seward Park has undergone transformations with the changing times, but one thing has stayed constant: the laughter and bustle of kids and families enjoying the space.

Jungle Gym in Seward Park - April 2012

Click here to visit the City of New York Parks and Recreation site and learn more about the history of public parks and playgrounds in the five boroughs.

We’d love to hear your favorite spring-time spots in the city!

For 125 years, the Eldridge Street Synagogue has been collecting stories: memories of life in a faraway country, the struggle of moving to America, the heyday of the Jewish Lower East Side and even life in the neighborhood today. These stories are what give meaning to the building, stories that are literally told by the walls, the windows and worn grooves in the floors. Today it is the docents who translate the synagogue’s history into spoken word and truly give the Eldridge Street Synagogue a voice. It is one of these docents who we are putting in the spotlight today: Herb Kass.

Herb celebrates his one-year anniversary as a docent this month. He became a tour-guide at the museum with the hope of reconnecting with his Jewish roots. I had the pleasure of speaking with Herb about his year as a docent, and during our conversation he explained that one of his favorite things about the museum is having the opportunity to meet visitors from all over the United States and the world. Herb has been able to connect with fascinating individuals, one of his fondest memories involving a family that had come from Turkey.

The family, Herb explained, brought to the museum their own family’s immigration story. Their ancestors emigrated from Spain 500 years earlier, and today the family still speaks Ladino, the traditional language of Sephardic Jews. The family was celebrating their son’s bar mitzvah, and despite a limited knowledge of English, they were still able to connect over the beauty of the space and shared traditions. Herb’s own paternal grandparents immigrated to the United States from Grodno (modern day Belarus) in the late 1800’s during the largest wave of Eastern European Jews to pass through Ellis Island. They, like many of the founders of the Eldridge Street Synagogue, lived on the Lower East Side before they moved out to Williamsburg, and eventually East New York and Queens where Herb grew up.

Like the story of the Turkish family, each tour Herb gives is an opportunity for individuals to come together in a space in which people have found meaning for over a century. The Museum at Eldridge Street does more that provide Jewish history, it encourages visitors to explore and share the experiences of their own families. As I was writing this entry, it hit me. I truly became aware of the space’s role as a catalyst in forging connections, even between complete strangers. This is truly the magic of the Museum at Eldridge Street.

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.

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:

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.

On our Gangster, Writer, Rabbi walking tour, we explore the lives–and funeral processions–of three iconic Lower East Side figures: writer Sholem Aleichem, Rabbi Jacob Joseph, and East Side gangster Big Jack Zelig. Though Bugsy Siegel and  Meyer Lansky usually come to mind when thinking of Jewish gangsters, Zelig was a true leader of crime in the neighborhood. As Abraham Schoenfeld, detective for the Kehilla, a Jewish communal organization, wrote: “Men before him – like Kid Twist, Monk Eastman, and others – were as pygmies to a giant. With the passing of Zelig, one of the most ‘nerviest’, strongest, and best men of his kind left us.”

Who was Big Jack Zelig? Born Zelig Harry Lefkowitz, Zelig was the leader of a band of Jewish gangsters in New York City in the early 1900s. Early in 1912, the Zelig gang was hired by corrupt New York City Police Lieutenant Charles Becker who ran a protection racket for the New York gangs to kill another Manhattan gangster named Herman (Beansie) Rosenthal whom Becker thought was an informant. Rosenthal was shot to death on a Manhattan Street on July 16,1912 by four of Big Jack’s men. Police Lieut. Becker was arrested and charged with ordering Rosenthal’s murder and put on trial with Zelig scheduled to testify against him. On Oct. 5,1912, the night before the trial was to begin Big Jack Zelig was shot to death while riding on a Second Ave. trolley car in Manhattan. Police Lieut. Becker was convicted of ordering Rosenthal’s murder and sentenced to death. He was executed in Sing-Sing’s electric chair.

Death may be final, but the story doesn’t end there. Find out how Zelig’s funeral polarized the downtown Jewish community, underscoring tensions between American commericalism and Eastern European traditions. The tour is offered Thursdays July 29  and August 19 at 7pm.

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

In response to my last School Days post about the cheder at the Eldridge Street Synagogue, former Director of Education Annie Polland sent in some enlightening details. Taken from a paper she presented at a conference about the institution of the Bar Mitzvah at the turn of the last century, the following gives us a better understanding of why the congregation’s school lasted only one year:

Why didn’t these congregations start Hebrew schools from the start? We know that the congregation encompassed far more activities in its domain other than merely worship. Politics, building maintenance, charitable activities, and study for adults all took on formal arrangements in the synagogue. Why then, wasn’t there room for formal children’s education? One reason for the hesitancy in building up their own school was that both individuals members and the congregation as a whole was an early and avid supporter of the Machzike Talmud Torah. Given that strong support, they probably reasoned that duplicating their efforts by exerting energy for a school on their premises would only frustrate those already underway. But by 1901, ideas had shifted: The Board of Trustees met on September 30, 1901 and discussed opening a Talmud Torah for its members: “It will be a good thing for Judaism and also a benefit for our congregation.” Several days later, when the trustees brought the proposal “of establish[ing] a school on Shul premises, to provide instruction for the children of members” and that the school should be under the directorship of the conregation” to the general meeting, it was enthusiastically received, as the members not only unanimously accepted it and appointed a committee [David Cohen at head], but opened up their wallets to pledge individual contributions.

A total of $569.25 was raised over two fundraising efforts in the fall of 1901 and summer of 1902. “Cash” contains a section devoted to the “Beit Sefer” and shows the fundraising efforts engaged upon by the members. In several fundraising efforts, starting in October of 1901, August of 1902, individuals pledged money, amounting to the sum of $569.25 , from which teachers were hired, ledgers purchased, and advertisements placed.

At the end of the term in December, the board studied the books and decided to continue the school, which would hold its next session starting July of 1902. Over the next year and half, the board and congregation seemed pleased with the school, continuing to support it and even overseeing construction at the Bes Medrash level for the creation of classrooms. The Cash book shows expenses for teachers, one of them Leib Matlawsky, the secretary. In 1903, there appears to be hesitation, with the congregation pledging their renewed support, but appointing a new school committee (perhaps the former one had become dormant?). The problem seemed to be a loss of funds: “To this end, the following committee is appointed to take care of this matter properly, to be knowledgeable about the finances, so that the congregation will know how much to appropriate when necessary.” In addition to their interest in the financial management of the school, they seemed to think that scholarly nature of the school needed some professionalism, and thus one of the first acts of the committee was to appoint Rav Yosef Fried, who directed much of their adult study sessions and had just published Ohel Yosef, as an advisor.

As the term continued, the financial difficulties were not resolved, and in April 1903 the general meeting debated the topic, and in May of 1903 decided to end the congregation’s formal administration of the school, instead allowing the two teachers to continue their classes in the shul for the next six months “at their own expense.” Because the Minutes do not go into any details, and the Cash book shows an imbalance between income and expense, it is hard to say what happened beyond financial failure. Around the same time, the Minutes show that the congregation had just started to debate the option of opening an uptown branch. Many of the members of the school committee were among those who were interested in the uptown branch, so it is possible that their energies and interests were simply diverted. If they had moved uptown already, then presumably their children were in school uptown, and they were less motivated to lend the energies needed to establish a new school downtown. Indeed, David Cohen—the leader of the committee and who would emerge as the leader of the uptown contingent, was himself a prime player in the movement to build the Uptown Talmud Torah. So, it is possible that just at this juncture, many of the wealthier members had or were starting to move uptown, thus shifting their educational ambitions northward as opposed to the synagogue.

Thanks, Annie! Stay tuned for more about the local public schools, the foundation of Jewish day schools and education for girls coming up over the next few weeks.

Language is one of the aspects of immigration that we explore through exhibits and education programs at the museum. In our Yiddish newspaper interactive activity, visitors become editors of their very own turn-of-the-century paper, mixing articles from socialist presses with editorials from the Orthodox dailies. The display of Yiddish signs from the neighborhood shows the integration of English words into like “clean” and “fix” into the Yiddish language. A recent article in the New York Times discuss issues of language and immigration, highlighting the ways in which immigration can be a death knell for a rare language.

“Listening to (and Saving) the World’s Languages” explores how New York has become the greatest repository of rare languages:

In addition to dozens of Native American languages, vulnerable foreign languages that researchers say are spoken in New York include Aramaic, Chaldic and Mandaic from the Semitic family; Bukhari (a Bukharian Jewish language, which has more speakers in Queens than in Uzbekistan or Tajikistan); Chamorro (from the Mariana Islands); Irish Gaelic; Kashubian (from Poland); indigenous Mexican languages; Pennsylvania Dutch; Rhaeto-Romanic (spoken in Switzerland); Romany (from the Balkans); and Yiddish.

For many of these languages, there are more speakers in New York than in the area where the language originated .”‘It is the capital of language density in the world,’ said Daniel Kaufman, an adjunct professor of linguistics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. ‘We’re sitting in an endangerment hot spot where we are surrounded by languages that are not going to be around even in 20 or 30 years.’” The City Room blog created a list of the least-commonly spoken languages in New York and how many people are known to speak them. Topping the list is Cayuga, with only 6 speakers! Though the number of Yiddish speakers is considerably higher, it too is vulnerable and on the list of the Endangered Language Alliance. Once the vernacular of the Lower East Side community, it has fallen into a state of near-extinction outside of Hasidic communities.

What was education like for worshipers at the Eldridge Street Synagogue at the turn of the last century? On my walking tours, we often pass a local landmark: Mesivta Tifereth Jerusalem, known in the neighborhood simply as “The Yeshiva.” This local Jewish school, chartered in 1907 and still thriving today, very often has visitors asking: Where did the members of the Eldridge Street Synagogue send their children to school? I’ll explore this question over the next few weeks, showing some of the different options available to the Jewish community of the Lower East Side at the turn of the last century.

Today’s post is about school at the shul. Did the Eldridge Street congregation form a cheder, a school for boys, as many other local synagogues did? I found the following in an index of the congregation’s Yiddish books, discovered in the basement at the start of the restoration:

During the turn of the century Cong. Adath Yeshurun ran a Hebrew School, for how many years is not clear. This book has on the inside cover Beth Haseifer, Congregation 12-16 Eldridge Street, NY, October 13, 1901. Beth Haseifer, is what Hebrew schools were called. This is a ledger book for the Hebrew School. On page 9 the date seems to be Dec. 1902. It reads “Take out door of cellar . 50.” None of the other expenses concern the shul building. This book contains other expenses, etc. of the shul, as well as minutes of the Loan Committee of the shul.

It appears that for at least a year there was indeed a cheder inside the Eldridge Street building. However, it seems that the school was short lived, as this is the only mention of any such school in the entire collection. Why did the school close after only a year? What does that tell us about the members’ desire to educate their children in Bible, Talmud and Jewish law? I’d love to hear your thoughts on this matter.

Next time, we’ll explore the most popular option for LES children: the local public schools.