Eldridge Street Synagogue

The first great synagogue built in America by immigrants from Eastern Europe

Local name: Eldridge Street Synagogue

Collection: The Lower East Side and Chinatown · USA · Open in OpenStreetMap

The synagogue’s facade on Eldridge Street · ajay_suresh, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons

The story

Before you is the Eldridge Street Synagogue. It was dedicated on the fourth of September 1887. It was the first great synagogue built in America by immigrants from Eastern Europe. Before it, such congregations prayed in rented halls, in stores and even in former churches. It was designed by the brothers Peter and Francis William Herter, German Catholics who had never built a synagogue before. The result is a Moorish Revival building with Gothic touches: towers, arches and a huge round rose window. Stars of David were set on the towers and carved into the wooden doors. Between 1880 and 1924 more than two and a half million Jews came to the United States. About eighty-five percent of the Jews from Eastern Europe landed in New York, and three quarters of them settled here, on the Lower East Side. Its congregants came from many countries of Eastern Europe. In 1924 immigration to America was sharply restricted, and congregants began moving to other neighborhoods. In the 1940s the small congregation could no longer keep up the great sanctuary and moved downstairs. The main hall was closed off and decayed for decades: pigeons roosted in the balconies, and dust covered the benches. But, according to the museum, the congregation never missed a Sabbath service. In 1986 the preservationist Roberta Brandes Gratz founded a project to save the synagogue. The restoration took almost twenty years and was completed in December 2007. Today the building is a museum, and the congregation still worships here.

Visiting

12 Eldridge Street, between Canal Street and Division Street. The museum is open Sunday to Friday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and closed on Saturday. Admission is paid; on Mondays and Fridays it is pay what you wish. Groups of ten or more must book ahead. Photos are allowed without flash.