Eldridge Street Synagogue
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The Eldridge Street Synagogue is one of the oldest synagogues in the United States, and was the first one built in the United States by Eastern European Jews, who now make up the vast majority of American Jews. It opened in New York's Lower East side (commonly refrerred to as LoHo )in 1887. When completed in the synagogue was "reviewed" in the local press. Writers marveled at the imposing Moorish-style building, with its 70-foot-high vaulted ceiling, magnificent stained-glass rose windows, elaborate brass fixtures and hand-stenciled walls.
Thousands participated in religious services in the building's heyday (from its opening through the 1920s) - so many that, on High Holidays, police were stationed in the street to control the crowds. Rabbis of the congregation included the famed Rabbi Abraham Aharon Yudelovich, author of many works of Torah scholarship. Throughout these decades the Synagogue functioned not only as a house of worship but as an agency for acculturation, a place to welcome new Americans. Before the settlement houses were established and long afterward, poor people could come to be fed, secure a loan, learn about job and housing opportunities, and make arrangements to care for the sick and the dying. The Synagogue was, in this sense, a mutual aid society.
For fifty years, the Eldridge Street Synagogue flourished. Then membership began to dwindle as members moved to other areas, immigration quotas limited the number of new arrivals, and the Great Depression affected the congregants' fortunes. The exquisite main sanctuary was used less and less from the 1930s on. By the 1950s, with the rain leaking in and inner stairs unsound, the congregants cordoned off the sanctuary.
Without the resources needed to heat and maintain the sanctuary, they chose to worship downstairs, as they continue to do today, in the more intimate house of study (Beth Hamedrash). The sanctuary remained empty for twenty-five years, from approximately 1955 to 1980.
The Eldridge Street Synagogue was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1996, and is currently undergoing a $10 million renovation.
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