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To a Jew, a synagogue is not just a place to worship. It is an expression of his orherpersonality, as much as a home oran article of clothing might be. Some prefer an elegant, cavernous space with a high-hatted rabbi, others a plainspoken room they call a shtiebl led by a man-of-the-people. Some yearn for a service in Yiddish, others in Oxford English. Some like to keep the men on the main floorand the women in the balcony; others like them all mixed together. It is no wonderthat one of the archetypal Jewish jokes is about the Jewdiscoveredonthedesertislandwhowhilemaroonedfor yearsbuilttwosynagogues:onethathegoestoandonethat he refuses to set foot in. As this impressive collection of synagogue photographs and an erudite narrative informs us, the Lower East Side oncehadmorethan350congregationsand70discreteJewish houses of worship—and they came in many shapes, sizes, and styles. These synagogues held immigrant seamstresses and rag-trade entrepreneurs, stars of the Second Avenue Yiddish theater, and the peddlers and tailors whom they entertained. The shul-goers came largely from Russia, Poland, Romania, and Hungary, but there were also traces of German Jews and even Greek Jews. They turned the LowerEastSideintotheworld’slargestJewishenclave,perhaps the most densely populous place on the planet, a spot that was famously the seedbed forsome of America’s greatest entertainers, like George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Fanny Brice, the Marx Brothers, and Benny Goodman and also some of its most notable merchant princes, labor leaders, writers, and scientists. But that scrappy world of tenements and pushcarts gradually dissolved as Jews scratched theirway first to the outerboroughs of the Bronx and Brooklyn and then to the suburbs; before long, the children of rumpled, workingclass exiles were accepted in the elite halls of Harvard and Yale and at white-shoe law firms and boardrooms. Left behind were the synagogues, or at least many of them. The decline began with empty seats on shabbos and thenontheHighHolidaysaswell.Soonthesynagogueshad to close or sell out, becoming theaters, churches, and even laundromats for newer immigrant groups and more recently apartments for young hipsters. Now the number of still-functioning synagogues is down to perhaps a dozen, andsome of those are more museums than worship places. A stroller through today’s Lower East Side can not only see revived buildings like the breathtakingly restored Eldridge Street Synagogue—a marvelous pastiche of Moorish,Gothic,andRomanesquestyleswhereaminyanstill worships—but can detect Mogen Davids and otherJewish f oreword xi 18317-Wolfe_Synagogues 9/24/12 12:05 PM Page xi tracery hidden like pentimento under crosses and iglesia and laundromat signboards. Still, the work of reconstructing thatfading,almostvanishedworldisenhancedbybookslike thisone.Thiscollectionshepherdsusthroughthestill-extant buildings like the stonework gem of the Bialystoker Synagogue and the Angel Orensanz Center—now more a cultural space than a true shul—but revives, Lazarus-like, those that have been destroyed ortransformed. Breathing life into that bygone world takes people with passion like Gerard Wolfe, who assembled and wrote this collectionandupdateditwithintelligenceandauthorityafter threedecades.Igotasenseofwhatoneperson’sforceofwill and the tug of communal memory can do as a new reporter fortheNewYorkTimesinthemid-1980swhenIlearnedabout ahistoricsynagoguethatwasonitslastlegs:ChasamSopher, then 134 years old and among the city’s oldest. Although it was a classic of Romanesque Revival that predated the Civil War, the vaulted ceiling above the women’s balcony had been decaying foryears and plasterdust was leaking out. “Thewholeroofisnotworthapenny,”MosesWeisertold me, tapping his cane on the ceiling. “I’m scared that on Rosh ha-Shana the ceiling will fall down and hurt someone.” Weiserwasaleprechaun-sizedretiredbutcherandHolocaust survivor who had sustained the synagogue through years when other shuls in the neighborhood were shutting down,oftendrawingonhisownsavings.Buthedidnothave the $30,000 to $40,000 needed for repairs. The morning afterthe article appeared, my telephone, as they say, did not stop ringing, with offers of cash, including one from a man who said, “I’ll take care of the roof.” That love fora history all American Jews share—fourout of five descendants of the Eastern European immigrants of the late 1800s and early 1900s trace theirbeginning to the LowerEastSide—ispalpableinthisvaluableandimportant book. In its pages, the demolished or burned-down synagogues are reborn. Those that have been hidden behind otherpurposesareilluminatedoncemore.Andthetreasures that keep going, like Chasam Sopher and Eldridge Street, are seen anew in all their refurbished glory. There is not a synagogue here that the desert-island Jew would not want to step into. Joseph Berger, authorof Displaced Persons: Growing Up American After the Holocaust xii foreword 18317-Wolfe_Synagogues 9/24/12 12:05 PM Page xii ...

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