The Sanctuary That Slept for Fifty Years

On your left stands a limestone and terracotta facade unlike anything else on this block, with a great rose window and horseshoe arches borrowed from Moorish Spain. When it was dedicated in September of eighteen eighty seven, this was one of the first synagogues built from the ground up in America by Eastern European Jewish immigrants, raised by a congregation that had started decades earlier as a small prayer group called Beth Hamedrash. At its peak, between around eighteen ninety and nineteen fifteen, roughly eight hundred families filled these pews, lawyers and peddlers and garment workers sitting side by side.

Then the doors to America began closing. Immigration quotas passed in the nineteen twenties cut off the flow of newcomers who once filled the Lower East Side, and families who could afford to started moving to the outer boroughs. The congregation here shrank year after year until it could no longer heat or fill its own main sanctuary. Sometime in the nineteen fifties, the remaining members sealed off the grand upstairs hall and moved their services down into the basement chapel, where a tiny congregation kept praying for decades while the room above them went dark.

By the nineteen eighties, that upstairs sanctuary was close to ruin. Pigeons roosted in the balconies, dust coated the benches, and the stained glass had warped in its frames. It took a restoration effort that ran from nineteen eighty nine to two thousand seven, and roughly twenty million dollars, to bring the space back. When the work was finished in December of two thousand seven, the building reopened as the Museum at Eldridge Street, its sanctuary filled with light again after half a century of silence just one floor below.