In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

1 Shoshana and Yoel Borgenicht believe deeply in the promises that New York City offers young Jews in the twenty-first century. They feel comfortable in their safe and secure neighborhood, where they are earning their livelihoods, raising their children, and living among Jews while sharing with others the best the metropolis has to offer. Their successful search for such a wholesome environment began in 2006 when they embarked on the quintessential Jewish New York journey, a common quest by families dating back generations, to find the right place to live in close proximity to the city’s major financial, commercial, and cultural centers. Initially the couple resided in a cramped Midtown Manhattan apartment, but they desired a home with a backyard along streets where their youngsters might eventually play. As they contemplated their move, Shoshana was pregnant with their first child. They found their dream house, at 341 West 122nd Street, between Manhattan and Morningside Avenues in the western reaches of Harlem, just one block from Morningside Park, down the hill from Morningside Heights and Columbia University. They quickly closed the deal. Their aging three-story brownstone, built in 1889 at the cost of $16,000, was originally an elegant single-family dwelling, a well-appointed abode with hand-carved wood-paneled walls, polished grained floors, beveled glass mirrors , ornate fireplaces and fancy crown molding, a receiving room and a formal dining room, and servants’ quarters set aside for its live-in help. The house and its surroundings remained quite the stylish location during Harlem’s pre– World War I heyday as a predominantly Jewish community. That section of uptown was especially attractive to upwardly mobile eastern Europeans. Rising Prologue: Neighborhood Dreams and Urban Promises 2 ■ j e w s i n g o t h a m out of the poverty of the Lower East Side, they melded with the well-established German American Christians and Jews who had migrated uptown in the early 1880s. After World War I, the building, like the larger neighborhood, declined. Harlem became the metropolis’s first and most famous black slum. As of the 1960s, comparable buildings on that block were valued at $10,000, less even than the 1889 market value without adjustments for inflation. For close to sixty years, 341 West 122nd Street was a single-room-occupancy rooming house, home to the poor and transient. As late as the 1990s, some ten people shared the living space. The Borgenichts retained, for a while, one artifact of 341’s prior history, a pair of lights outside of the brownstone house that when illuminated had told potential customers that rooms were available. When the Borgenichts moved in, they worked hard to make the residence livable according to twentyfirst -century middle-class standards, including updating the hundred-year-old plumbing and constructing a modern kitchen. Still, this family of five—Rex came along in 2006, Theo in 2008, and Delia in 2009—would be happy on a street that has become increasingly gentrified.1 The Borgenichts did not seek out Jewish neighbors when they bought the building, but they were pleasantly surprised to find them. One Saturday morning , Yoel encountered what he described as two Orthodox Jews walking down Manhattan Avenue. A neighborhood street encounter is perhaps the most time-honored Jewish tradition in this city. After stopping to greet them, Yoel discovered that they were part of a newly created Chabad (Lubavitch) Hasidic outpost on Manhattan Avenue and 118th Street. This renowned Orthodox Jewish outreach movement had recently set up shop in the community. Jewish religious life was returning to Harlem after more than half a century. Like most other New York Jews, Shoshana and Yoel appreciated having a congregation near them, though they did not plan to attend the synagogue. As young parents , their prime issue was finding the right kind of Jewish-multicultural preschool program for their older boy. While the Borgenichts enjoy their circle of Jewish friends, they get along well with their African American neighbors, including a couple they describe as “elderly, sweet,” who have lived on the block for forty years. As Yoel and Shoshana relate their neighbors’ story, “back then”—that is, in the 1960s— “if you got a good deal in the neighborhood, [you] never left, due to public transportation,” coupled with the draw of “a strong [African American] social community.” If the Borgenichts did not live in the most salubrious of personal settings, they still felt comfortable and relatively safe on essentially a...

Share