We spent most of today on the Lower East Side, a short subway ride from our hotel; that was our twelfth MTA trip since we arrived on Saturday, so the rest of our rides this week are free!
We intended to go directly to the Eldridge Street Synagogue but when I looked at the map of the area just outside the subway station, I noticed Kehilla Kedosha Janina was highlighted on the map, so we decided to go there first and look around. It’s the only Romaniote synagogue in the Western Hemisphere and still has an active congregation (though they have a hard time making a minyan). We couldn’t go in, but the outside was striking.
The Eldridge Street Synagogue was much more impressive; it was the first grand synagogue purpose-built by Eastern European Jewish immigrants in the United States. Technically, there’s still a congregation, but they haven’t met since before Covid, so the building is really a museum today. They offer docent-led tours every hour; our docent (John) was very knowledgeable about the building, its history, and Judaism, so I was surprised to find out that he’s Catholic (though his wife is Jewish and he ran a Jewish school for more than a decade). Only in New York, I guess!
The synagogue was opened in 1887, but over the years the congregation moved away and the remaining members couldn’t maintain the building properly. They closed up the main sanctuary on the second floor and met in the small sanctuary on the first floor – eventually, though, decay set in and there was a good chance that the building would be demolished – until Roberta Brandes Gratz, a preservationist, led a drive to restore the building. It took 20 years.
The first floor has many exhibits about the history of the synagogue and the community as well as the small sanctuary.
The upstairs sanctuary (and the women’s balcony) have been restored to their former glory, though a few spots have been left unrepaired.
The window above the Bimah was completely lost, and no pictures survived, so they commissioned artist Kiki Smith and architect Deborah Gans to create a stunning new stained glass window.
They also had to replace the floor outside the sanctuary and last year, they commissioned Mark Podwal to create a Jewish Zodiac mosaic there. Hadassah magazine has an interesting article about the mosaic, and the museum’s brochure explains the symbolism.
Our one-hour tour took 90 minutes and we were ready for lunch! The obvious place? Katz’s Delicatessen! We’d been warned not to let the line outside dissuade us; we only had to wait about 10 minutes before being allowed in.
We split a pastrami sandwich and a piece of real New York Cheesecake. Yummy!
The place was still quite busy when we left, and the line outside was three times longer than it was when we’d arrived.
Our next stop was the Tenement Museum, where we took the “100 Years Apart” tour, which let us see the lives (and apartments) of two families: the Wong family (from China by way of Hong Kong) who arrived in 1965 and the Gumpertz family (German Jews) who arrived a hundred years earlier. It was a fascinating tour, but it was hard to get good photos.
On our way out, we were told to look at the outdoor privy at 97 Orchard (where the Gumpertz family lived) – it served 20 apartments!
We returned to our hotel to get ready for our evening: Ghost Stories of New York at Joe’s Pub with the Bowery Boys. They’ve done this for seven years, and we’ve listened to each year’s show on their podcast, but being in the room where it happens was a different experience (if for no other reason than it was visual, not just audio).
The Boys decorate the stage appropriately for Halloween.
Joe’s Pub has a 2-drink or one-food-item minimum, so we had dinner while we waited for the show to start. It was delicious, and far better than I’d expect with a captive audience. But finally, Tom and Greg arrived, along with their piano and vocal partners, Andrew Austin and Lisa Karlin.
They always bring “Cheryl Crow” (a refugee from Party City) along to these shows, but she was missing this year until the very end, when she “flew” in.
The stories were pretty good; we’d heard two of them before but enjoyed them again.
When we got back to our hotel, we went up to the rooftop lounge to enjoy the view before calling it a night.
