FROM Relic TO Renaissance

Headnote

As institutions on the Lower East Side hustle to attract a new generation of Jews, the old neighborhood bristles with energy.

Leonard Cohen sings, "New York is cold but I like where I'm living. There's music on Clinton Street all through the evening."

As the Lower East Side continues its evolution from relic to renaissance, "Simply Tsfat" was the music on Clinton Street a few weeks ago, three young Breslovers playing two guitars and a fiddle in the social hall of the Chasam Sofer shul, a relic of the 1800s restored to a 21st-century sheen for a 20s and 30s demographic.

Beyond the music, though, Clinton Street saw something it probably had never seen in Chasam Sofer's heyday, almost a century ago. When the music ended, the crowd - and the shul was crowded - headed across Clinton Street to the Cocoa Bar, a chic establishment whose kitchen was kashered for the night.

Perhaps Chasam Sofer celebrating in the Cocoa Bar wasn't quite Mohammed coming to the mountain that wouldn't come to him, but this wasn't the first time Chasam Sofer figuratively crossed the street. Not long ago, the shul's Rabbi Azriel Siff kashered the kitchen at the old Punch & Judy's on Clinton Street for a Friday night Shabbat dinner.

"If they're not going to come to us," says Rabbi Siff of the neighborhood's elusive and uncommitted Jewish population, "we're going to go to them."

There's a palpable energy on the Lower East Side, as several Orthodox shuls - the Bialystoker, Chasam Sofer and Stanton Street, to name but three - each dating back to the neighborhood's mythical glory days, are hustling to attract the burgeoning Jewish population that often arrives upscale but less than observant, a complete switch from the old immigrant dynamic of observant but poor.

The Orthodox influx has been limited for one simple reason. One of the neighborhood's century-old Orthodox institutions, the haredi-tilting Mesivta Tifereth Jerusalem - a yeshiva serving students "from 5 to 90," according to one official - has been successful in thwarting all attempts at creating an eruv, rhe boundary-creating halachic device that would allow, among other things, parents to push strollers and carriages in the street on Shabbat. The more liberal shuls in the...