Remembering the Future
When my father’s family fled Russia in 1905, they lived for a time in Manhattan’s Lower East Side in a tenement on Hester Street. This is a narrative many of our families share the story of thousands upon thousands of Russian and Ukrainian Jews who fled pogroms and made it to New York to start new lives. A few years earlier, the Lower East Side they landed in had been home to a large German immigrant community, a neighborhood with over a hundred little breweries and beer gardens. The Germans had mostly moved uptown or to other boroughs when the flood of Jewish immigrants arrived. These crowded blocks were the only places most could afford to live, cramming into five or six floors apartment buildings, with four small apartments per floor without toilets or running water. Somehow, they managed to create a vibrant urban shtetl, showing uncanny resourcefulness and persistence, so that the Lower East Side still strongly shapes what it means to be an American Jew. For many Jews of my generation, the Lower East Side is the “old country,” a romantic, warm, terrifying, dirty place that everyone wanted to leave, but everyone misses like a hole in their soul. Even if our families have no connection to it, so much of what we think of as an American Jewish culture originates there.
When I was in rabbinical school, I would often walk down there and get a pastrami sandwich at Katz’s or a knish at Yonah Schimmel’s and then duck into one of the old synagogues that were still functioning. My favorite was the Bialystoker Synagogue; a photo of it hangs over my desk. Those prayers with a small group of alterkochers are among the most meaningful Jewish experiences of my life, and my life has been rich in Jewish experiences. It had the magical, surreal quality of being in two times at once, like it was 100 years ago and dreamlike, but also very real and present.
Besides the Bialystoker Synagogue and the Orchard Street Synagogue, I remember another neo-Moorish synagogue on the outside but falling apart. Chunks of the façade were missing, and lots of the glass was broken. It was on Eldridge Street, and since the neighborhood wasn’t mostly Jewish anymore, I figured it would just be torn down, but then I read that a foundation was raising money to restore it. I never thought much about it, but when Tim and I were recently visiting a dear friend in Brooklyn, it popped into my head, and I looked it up. It turns out that the restoration was finished in 2007, and it was now a small museum. We decided to visit. WOW!
The Eldridge Street Synagogue is now one of the most beautiful sacred spaces I have ever been blessed to witness. The narrow staircases creak as they likely did when those immigrants first arrived and made their way up to the sanctuary. Imagine coming from your crowded tenement, slogging through smelly mucky crowded streets to turn into this synagogue and step into a world of order, calm and ethereal beauty. The floors still show the footsteps of generation after generation of worshippers. The pews show that children were bored in synagogue then as they often are now; only these kids had carving knives.
There is rich painted decoration and exquisite traditional stained glass on the walls and in the large rosette window above the women’s balcony. All that has been meticulously restored, and it is beautiful. Still, it is the new window over the ark that blew my mind. It is celestial, transcendent, and bathes the entire sanctuary in a divine glow. It is clearly modern, yet somehow, rather than distract from the restored sanctuary, the two enhance and elevate each other to create something sublime.
It is the perfect visual expression of being in two time periods at once. I also saw it as a visual expression of the power of memory in our tradition, and the Jewish obligation to remember the past is always done with an eye to the future. We remember leaving Egypt so that our children and our children’s children would know that their ancestors were slaves in Egypt.
Jews have a special talent or skill for living simultaneously in multiple periods. We pray as modern people with prayers from thousands of years ago. We visit Israel as a modern nation, but we also feel the history of our people there with each step. As a Jew, I can meditate to be in the present, but what is more central to Jewish spirituality is the skill of being in the past, present, and future all at once, to see ourselves as beings in which the past and future come together. Our prayers reach back and forward. Our rituals do as well. This synagogue on Eldridge Street was one of the most powerful embodiments of this I have witnessed.
So, if you are down in New York and stopping by Katz’ for hot pastrami, take the time to see this jewel of our history and commune with our past even as we bath in the glow of today’s light.