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After two and a half hours of drilling, sawing and hammering last week, Edwin Lopez and Joe Rivera succeeded in breaking into the Eldridge Street Synagogue's large basement safe. The congregation could not have been more pleased.
The two workers were the protagonists of a staged safecracking to recover the contents of four vaults in the 98-year-old synagogue, now undergoing restoration on the Lower East Side.
Once at the heart of Jewish life in the area, the building today is home to only about 20 worshipers of Congregation Khal Adath Jeshurun and Anshe Lubtz. Mostly grayhaired men who have spent their lives in the neighborhood, they recall to visitors the days when 800 congregants would fill the main sanctuary and when Yiddish was the primary language spoken on the streets.
Now, crowded shoulder-to-shoulder in a dingy storeroom, they watched modern equipment cut through century-old steel to reyeal about $40,000 of Toral ornaments from one safe and Hebrew books from another. Two others were empty.
"We hit the jackpot!" shouted one women
"What beauty," said Yossi Pasten, a congregant for 40...