Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Israel News

Shul Artifacts Grace Christie’s

actor Edward G. Robinson and artist Ben Shahn gracing its pews, according to Roberta Brandes Gratz, a writer on historic preservation who founded the Eldridge Street Project. Eddie Cantor lived across the street, and the Gershwin family lived at the end of the block.

“[People think] the Lower East Side is just something from a Barbra Streisand movie,” said Zar, who used to work at Christie’s. “[But] you have a very large and important remnant of the Jewish community that was there in the 19th century.”

At the turn of the century, the synagogue boasted nearly 1,000 members, but the numbers dwindled so much by the 1950s that services were moved from the main sanctuary to a small room downstairs. Today, membership stands at only some 30 families.

Troubled by the synagogue’s deterioration, Gratz founded the Eldridge Street Project in 1986 to spearhead restoration efforts. And while work on the building may be completed as early as 2007, the Christie’s exhibit celebrates the history already uncovered by the renovations.

Highlights include Yiddish signs from the turn-of-the-century advertising a variety of synagogue activities, as well as ceramic spittoons, which were installed to discourage members from spitting on the synagogue floor.

Gratz’s favorite find is a small glass container that holds a pile of ashes. “When we found the jar I said, ‘Oh my goodness, what could this possibly be?’” she recalled. “It was really bizarre.”

The ashes, it turned out, are the remains of the congregation’s mortgage. Archival papers from meetings of the synagogue board make reference to a celebration in honor of paying off the debt, and the mortgage apparently was burned at the party.

“That the Congregation celebrated the fact that they finally owned the building, and that they kept [the mortgage] just charmed me,” Gratz said.

Charmed is how members of the Eldridge Street Project hope visitors will feel after seeing the exhibit at Christie’s. The group hopes that the unusual venue will help attract a new group to the Lower East Side.

“Often people will remark that they’ve been to the great synagogues in the great capitals of Europe,” said Amy Waterman, director of the Eldridge Street Project, who emphasized that the synagogue currently hosts a variety of educational and artistic programs as well as an active congregation. “One of the things that makes this different from a museum is this unbroken thread.”

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.