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FLANKED BY aging tenements, the Eldridge Street Synagogue has endured for a century. Its brick facade is still intact - six stories high, an imposing blend of styles, Romanesque, Moorish and Gothic.
But its somber front gates are padlocked now, and only the most curious visitor to Manhattan's Lower East Side would notice a small plaque at the base at the building.
In 1886, the bronze tablet states, the Khal Adath Jeshurun congregation erected this synagogue, "the first great house of worship built by East European Jews in this country." In 1980, the inscription concludes, the temple was designated a registered national landmark "in recognition of its historical and architectural significance."
To passersby, the synagogue presents an incongruous image: a symbol of another era, surrounded by small shops decorated with signs in Chinese. Yet the old temple has struggled to remain alive.
Through the years, a small congregation has held orthodox services in the Bes Midrash, the house of study, in the temple basement. Since the mid-1950s, Benjamin Markowitz, the shammes, has dutifully served as sexton and caretaker.
But the toll of time is obvious: Above, the main sanctuary is dusty and rotting, despite the immense stained-glass window that is the centerpiece of the temple facade. By 1939, the membership dropped to under 50 and the sanctuary was sealed.
In 1982, a new and grand plan evolved, to restore the landmark temple to its former grandeur. So the Eldridge Street Project was born. * * *
To complete the work, says Ruth Abram, co-director of the Eldridge Street project, a drive to raise $3 million has begun. The temple, she points out, is not the oldest in New York. In the 1700s and early 1800s, German and Mediterranean Jews arrived, and built their own temples, settling uptown, assimilating, becoming Americans.
Then the great waves of European Jewry from Russia, Poland and Austria-Hungary began to reach these shores in the 1880s; they transformed the Lower East Side into one of the world's largest Jewish communities. The first congregations held services in storefronts, in homes, even in churches. Finally, in 1886, funds were raised to build the synagogue.
For Abram, the Eldridge Street Project is more than a restoration. It also links past immigrant experience to...