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205 In the summer of 1846, Isaac Mayer Wise, the future leader of American Reform Jewry, only a few weeks in New York after a harrowing sixty-threeday voyage, was in despair. His attempt to teach English had failed, and he had but a few dollars to his name. Fellow Jews advised him to become a peddler. Instead he decided to take one more chance and called at the home of Rabbi Max Lilienthal on Eldridge Street. Their meeting changed the course of American Judaism . Lilienthal welcomed Wise and started him on a momentous career. This meeting of like minds who envisioned radical changes to the practice of Judaism made New York the scene of a momentous contest in American Jewish history.1 ■ The Synagogue in Crisis While architecturally graceful and opulent sanctuaries announced the growing standing of the city’s Jews, congregations played a diminished spiritual role among the Jewish population. Threadbare attendance at weekly and daily services presaged serious problems. Antebellum New York was not colonial or even republican New York. Its Jewish community was far more diverse and becoming increasingly secular. Moreover, Jews, like the city they lived in, focused on the world of the entrepreneur. How relevant could a synagogue be in such a booming capitalist society? Visitors’ reports reveal problems facing synagogues in antebellum New York. Lydia Child, a favorably inclined liberal Christian reformer from Boston , attended Rosh Hashanah observances at Shearith Israel in 1841. She found the services “a vanishing resemblance to reality; the magic lantern of the past.” Men, she reported, wore “fringed silk mantles, bordered with blue stripes” and C H A P T E R 1 0 The Challenge of Reform 206 ■ h av e n o f l i b e r t y “dreary” modern European hats. The black silk robes of the hazan reminded her of an Episcopal priest. The hazan led the service, but in fact the chanting consisted of “monotonous ups and downs of the voice, which, when the whole congregation joined in it, sounded like the continuous roars of the sea.” The “ceremonies were in a cold mechanical style,” less earnest and less pious than those at a Catholic church. The use of only Hebrew made the prayers “a series of unintelligible sounds.” In other words, services continued as they had for generations , led by a hazan, with each member praying at his or her own pace. Child, of course, understood no Hebrew, but that was also true of much of the Jewish community. Isaac Mayer Wise declared that the “majority of Israelites” did not understand Hebrew prayers, resulting in a “want of devotion” at services. Decorum was lacking “because the worshippers do not know what they say.”2 In 1873, Wise reminisced about the state of the synagogues in New York upon his arrival from Bohemia in 1846. Shearith Israel’s ritual, he recalled, was “antiquated and tedious.” “Crass ignorance” ruled B’nai Jeshurun, as the shamash laughed when Wise asked for a copy of the Mishnah, basic books of Jewish law. He found only ignorance at Polish synagogue Shaaray Zedek, and the German congregations, including Anshe Chesed, were as “ill-behaved as in Germany.” The hazan at Anshe Chesed “trilled like a nightingale and leaped out like a hooked fish.” Wise could not endure the “intolerable sing-song” of the service. An anonymous German visitor who lived in New York from 1853 to 1854 also criticized Shearith Israel, where, he observed, the presidents sat on “thrones.” At the service, the congregation went through the rituals, but “little of the inner self is involved. Spanish self-complacency and American custom combine to smother the seed of life.” Great attention was given to ritual detail, while “all else is neglected.” Hazan Lyons, “after gurgling out his trill . . . looks around for applause, especially from the women.” All congregations were “unkind and un-Jewish” to strangers. A group of “well-dressed, respectable and earnest German Jews” were “brutally kicked out” of a Sukkoth celebration of a non-German congregation. It was not that New York did not contain pious Jews, but “piety is not expressed in congregational life.”3 By the 1850s, most Jews in New York City did not belong to a synagogue. So that congregations could supplement their income, they allowed Jews to purchase High Holy Day seats without becoming members. The actual number of dues-paying members is unknown. Based on population estimates compared with the number of congregations in the city, it would...

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