Collection

In 2009, archivist Nancy Johnson, working with a collections committee led by Board member Howard Zar, accessioned and cataloged more than 500 items and archival materials that make up the Museum’s permanent collection. Items were removed from storage, examined, tagged with an accession number, measured, described, photographed and categorized. Using a collections software, a unique record was created for each object or archival group, so that we now have an in-house catalog. Using this catalog, we have begun to plan new exhibitions so that these remarkable objects can be shared with the public and used to illuminate the history of the Eldridge Street Synagogue, its congregation and its community.

Favorite Discoveries

Our collection includes 25 Torah mantles, 11 ark curtains and valances, 3 bimah covers, 4 Torah covers, 2 wimpels, 16 prayer shawls, 16 prayer shawl bags, and 13 tefillin bags, not to mention spittoons, Yiddish signs and other secular objects. Here archivist Nancy Johnson shares some of her favorite items.

A Torah Ark Curtain, made with gold silk brocade that might have once been parlor draperies for a fashionable family, tells us something new each time it is examined.  As we deciphered its inscriptions, we were excited to discover that this tattered and patched textile predates the opening of the Eldridge Street Synagogue: it carries a reference to the congregation’s former home on Allen Street, and a date of 1882!  And its measurements fit the Ark now in the synagogue’s lower level, which was carried to Eldridge Street from Allen Street in 1887.

My favorite book among the many in the collection is Harkavy’s American Letter Writer and Speller, published by The Hebrew Publishing Company, 1902. It is more than just a primer for Yiddish speakers learning English grammar and spelling. What makes the book so much fun to read is its collection of letters — written in Yiddish on the right hand page, with the corresponding English on the left — suggesting texts to be used for any business or social occasion. Among them is an impassioned letter from a smitten suitor:  “Dear Tillie:  I have been long in love with you, but afraid to tell you. When I go with you to the theatre or park I am almost like a fool, and altogether unfit for company…. I am well settled in work, and my wages are nine dollars a week.  You and I can live comfortably on that.... I cannot be happy unless you are mine.”

Eldridge Street Museum collection

In February 2009, Adriana Baker and her family donated two remarkable wimpels to the Museum. These long fabric scrolls were traditionally made by German Jewish women after the bris of their sons. My favorite is the colorfully painted wimpel for a boy named David, born in 1803, and inscribed with a blessing that he be raised in the path of Torah and be escorted to the wedding canopy and good deeds. David’s wimpel would have been used again at his Bar Mitzvah to bind the Torah and at his marriage, when it would be draped on the chuppah (marriage canopy), a scene drawn lovingly, if not skillfully, by his mother upon the cloth. This wimpel, now more than 200 years old, traces the path of tradition, belief and Jewish ritual as it followed the boy David throughout his life, and as it was passed down through Ms. Baker’s family, and now to the Museum.

In 2009, major support to survey, conserve, and store the collections was provided by the Lucius N. Littauer Foundation, Susan Malloy, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Reed Foundation, Joanna S. and Daniel Rose Fund, Jane Gural Senders and the Aaron Gural Foundation, and the Sun Hill Foundation.