Two Americans Stars on the Lower East Side

Eldridge Street Synagogue"Where do you see a five-pointed star in America?” the teacher asked the group of third graders, happy to be on a field trip.  “On the flag!” They scream out happily, even though they are in a place of worship.  “And how many points do you see on the stars in here?  Look up!”  “Five!”  “Six!”  “Five!”  Six!”

“That’s right, both kinds,” she said. “Welcome to the Eldridge Street Synagogue.”

The Jews who build this remarkable five-story Gothic, Romanesque, Moorish revival building in 1886 had escaped the pogroms of Eastern Europe in search of a new homes and work, and for the freedom to worship.  On New York’s Lower East Side, at that time the most crowded community in the world, they were forced to live in dark multi-family tenement buildings and struggle to find work and food.  But they pooled money and labor, bought three lots so there could be light and windows on all sides, and built the first synagogue in the US for Eastern European Jews. (Rhode Island’s Touro Synagogue is the oldest in the US, 1763, built by Sephardic Jews from the West Indies.  That’s worth a visit also.) 

Unlike the dark and filthy crowdedness of their daily life, their synagogue was, and is, light, colorful, grand, exotic, beautiful, and ornate.  It proudly proclaims their faith and culture in a city and country that did not always want to see those six pointed stars boldly placed in the center of the western rose window and atop the ornate towers, for all to see from the street.

Eldridge Street Synagogue InteriorBut it was five pointed stars they painted on the deep blue ceiling; it’s like a night sky, and like the American flag they now honored alongside their faith.  One can learn many moving, sad and happy stories of these families here on Eldridge St. and at the nearby Tenement Museum.  There one visits an apartment in a five-story walk-up building where lived first Jews, then Irish, Italians, Dominicans and now, next-door, Chinese immigrants.

One thing immigrants do is move, from their native land to a new one, and if they can, from a hard life to a better life.  The Jewish immigrants to the Lower East Side eventually moved on and up, to homes uptown and in Brooklyn and Queens, with indoor lighting and plumbing and fire safety laws absent from those tenements.  And they left behind their synagogue.  Some came back for Sabbath, but by 1948 the congregation had dwindled, and the building was shuttered and left to deteriorate. A small Orthodox congregation continued to meet on the lower level, not the sanctuary, never missing a Sabbath.

In 1980 some folks walked into the nearly abandoned synagogue and found decay, leaks, pigeons, the central chandelier hanging, they realized, “by a string from heaven.”  Twenty years and $20 million later they reopened as a museum, a cultural center, a family history research center, a place for bar and bat mitzvahs and weddings, and where that small congregation still worships.  Check out their website for the history of the buildings, its restoration, a great film about the new east window they installed 3 years ago. 

I visited the synagogue this past week, after a sudden family trip to Pennsylvania for a family matriarch’s funeral.  With five generations of my aunt’s relatives from all over the nation, I heard many stories and ate favorite family foods; an emotional reunion.  We celebrated Lillian Carpenter Streeter Lucas Chance at a 300-year-old Welsh Anglican (and now Episcopal) rural Pennsylvania church, and partied at the family farm where she lived for 65 years and raised 8 kids.

Egg Rolls and Egg CreamsAnother American family, the Jews of Eldridge St. also continue to gather and eat and tell old stories.  Not only to school groups like the one I overheard, and probably funerals as well.  But also with public events for the neighborhood, which is now the largest Chinatown in the US.  Their most popular event is an annual street fair called “Egg Rolls and Egg Creams,” a reference to Chinese food and a traditional New York Jewish milky drink.  Thousands of families come for klezmer music, Chinese opera, Yiddish and Chinese language lessons, mah jongg, scribal arts, food and folk art demos, crafts, and synagogue tours. 

The former and current residents of Eldridge St., come together to mark and celebrate their cultures, just two of many different pointed stars on the American flag.

Copyright © 2013 Deborah Streeter