Museum Woe
The Wonders of America
By Jenna Weissman Joselit
The news that the Eldridge Street Synagogue, aka Khal Adas Jeshurun Anshe Lubz — once one of the most architecturally distinctive houses of worship on the Manhattan’s Lower East Side — has, at the conclusion of a 20-year-long restoration project, turned itself into the innocuous-sounding Museum at Eldridge Street, is cause for both celebration and contemplation. On the positive side of the ledger, there’s much to applaud in an institution that moves with the times and that is flexible and adaptable enough to reinvent itself as a historic space given over to the presentation of the “immigrant experience.”
Despite the glories of its vaulted ceiling and stained-glass windows, the warmth of its wooden interior and the majesty of its Aron Kodesh, it’s clear to anyone with an eye to the present that the days when the synagogue’s pews would be routinely filled with worshippers are long gone. (I should point out that a stalwart, if modest, coterie of daveners has kept a minyan going for years, but it meets downstairs and not in the main sanctuary.) Bar and bat mitzvah celebrants, as well as brides and grooms and their wedding guests, will doubtless make use of the newly restored sanctuary, as well they should, but that doesn’t quite translate into a living, breathing shul, the fulcrum of a community, now does it? But constituting itself as a museum, well, that might do the trick, bringing droves of people into the building on a regular basis to see the sights, and generating a sense of energy as well as good will. So far, so good.
And yet, there’s something about a synagogue-turned-museum that saddens, even disturbs. It’s an axiom of modern-day life that today’s fashions are yesterday’s news, that neighborhoods come and go, that most things have a very limited shelf life. When seen from this perspective, the inability of a shul to sustain itself over time ought to be par for the course, part of the natural order of things. But somehow it’s not. Perhaps that’s because the waning, and ultimate disappearance, of a shul is no ordinary event, no simple casualty of change. It carries the whiff of disappointment, the sting of failure about itself. And so it is with the Eldridge Street Synagogue. Despite its majesty, keen sense of self and
abiding fidelity to religious tradition, this institution was unable to retain its hold on the body politic. For much of its 120-year-old existence, it withered away for want of attention, its fate a sorry commentary on American Jewry’s fickle heart.
Will the Museum at Eldridge Street fare better, having traded one identity for another? Will an institution that explores the traditions of the past endure where an institution that actually practiced these traditions could and did not? Given the sensibility characteristic of the contemporary American Jewish community, there’s every reason to think so: Museums, of late, have become everyone’s darling. When it comes to placing a value on community resources, shuls are out; Jewish museums are in. Growing numbers of American Jews at the grass-roots have found that the museum rather than the synagogue, the federation or the Jewish community center offers a singularly attractive form of community — and at little emotional and financial cost. A place to assemble with other Jews, to affirm one’s identity, to define one’s values, to embrace the past, Jewish museums have also become the venue of choice for weddings and other ritual moments.
The perceived limitations of the synagogue and other long-standing American Jewish institutions are by no means the only factor that explains the current popularity of the museum. A profound internal shift in its mandate and sensibility also has a lot to do with it. A decidedly neutral space with a built-in potential for inclusivity, the museum has changed its stripes. Once the quiet preserve of the scholar and the aesthetically inclined, it has become the agora of the modern-day Jewish community, where it actively engages the public. The inspiration behind the restoration of the Eldridge Street Synagogue, Roberta Brandes Gratz, explained in a 2005 interview with The New York Times why thinking of the synagogue as a museum now made perfect sense. “The concept of the museum has changed,” she related. “It doesn’t have the connotation of a place that is only about the past. That’s why Eldridge can be comfortably put in that category, because we are not only about the past.”
As it engages with the present, drawing in audiences who come for a concert, a lesson in genealogy and a workshop in immigration history, or simply to stare in wonderment at a beautifully restored, late 19th-century building whose appointments are probably unlike anything else they’ve ever encountered before, here’s wishing the Museum at Eldridge Street well. As the old prayer would have it, biz hundert un tsvantsik. May this latest Eldridge Street avatar flourish for another 120 years.
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Just don't use the word "avatar" in connection with a shul. Wrong use of language for a otherwise house of G-d. Otherwise, very interesting. Reminded me when I visited the shul on St. Thomas with sand on the floor which dated back to the 1700's; it burnt down and rebuilt in 1840. I gorgeous building. Unfortunately, it is relegated a handful of tourists and the weathly unafiliated Jews who want a bar mitzvah in the virgin islands. Well, better than nothing.
However, better a JEWISH museum than another Spanish Church or Chinese cultural center that most of the former synagogues that litter the Lower East side have turned into.
Fiddle,faddle. Let's count our Eldridge blessings and spare us the breast beating.
If ever an article about Jewish life entirely missed the point, this puerile piece of total nonsense sure does. Abandonned synagogues in Eastern Europe may be sad testimonies to the destruction of Jewish life; but a shul on the ridiculously romanticized cesspool known as the Lower East Side (the old 10th Ward: the Calcutta of America) that cannot fill the pews is hardly any symptom of religious decline. Rather, it is a potent and happy symbol of the material success of the Jews who managed to move out of the roach and rat infested tenaments of that Hell to places like the Upper East Side, Riverdale, Westchester, Short Hills & Greenwich -- that is a cause for celebration. Moreover, instead of turning the old shul into a museum, they should have sold it and given the money to tsedaka ! I find nothing sad about old shuls in [word deleted]ty neighborhoods. Only relief for those who once davened there and are now in a better place.
If Jenna had bothered to come to services for the past four Saturdays, she would have discovered that since the Synagogue restored its upstairs, services have indeed been Services have been going on in the main sanctuary on Saturday morning since restoration. As a member both of the congregation at Eldridge Street for over twenty five years, and a member of the Board of Directors of the Project which raised the money to restore the building and to introduce a number of important programs which go on throughout the year both downstairs and upstairs, I am really shocked by this kind of premature lament.
We were recently at the Eldridge Street Synagogue on a visit to New York. I have visited New York many times in the past and was only able to walk past it. Now to be able to see the inside and know what a wonderful place our ancestors were able to create. We both felt a warm closeness to our past that had been missing. We appreciate all the hard work that went into this restoration, it could have so easily been lost to the ages. It is here for us now and we hope that it will remain for those to come and also be proud of, and even to worship in again. It is sad that things changed over time and that people moved on and left this shul behind, but it is also wonderful that we have been able to find it again, that it was not lost forever like so many other shuls around New York, and Europe were during the last century.
And why would someone like Dr. Joselit care? She teaches at Princeton University and probably wouldn't bring any of her students to that museum. I mean, she doesn't even daven there. I'm confused by her commentary about turning the synagogue into a so-called museum. There are so many other synagogues in Eastern Europe that would be worthy of attention and have had such similar activities occur. I think that she's being a purest over what a museum is and what a synagogue is. Please devote your attention to something a little more on par with the rest of jewish society, like those in some communities who cannot afford to pay yearly synagogue dues.
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