About this listing
Greek Jewish synagogue on the National Register of Historic Places
Place Details
Borough : Manhattan
Neighborhood : Chinatown
Place Matters Profile
Kehila Kedosha Janina, a New York City landmark, is the only synagogue in the Western Hemisphere that practices Romanionte Judaism, a rare branch of Judaism that originated centuries ago in Greece.
Overview
Two-stories high, faced with light-colored brick, newly cleaned and shining, Kehila Kedosha Janina Synagogue stands apart from its commercially-focused neighbors, mostly food-related enterprises serving the far-flung businesses of Chinatown. It's easy to spot the symbols of Judaica adorning the synagogue's façade. More elusive are the architectural references to far-off lands -- to a part of the map we once called the Near East.
Inside, the entrance vestibule is tiny, crowded with stairs that lead up to the women's balcony and down to the kitchen and activity room. (Like other orthodox forms of Judaism, women and men sit separately for services.) Directly ahead are dark wooden benches that face the raised bema, the platform from which services are conducted. Behind the bema along the back wall stands the ark -- the ehal
Read More
Kehila Kedosha Janina, a New York City landmark, is the only synagogue in the Western Hemisphere that practices Romanionte Judaism, a rare branch of Judaism that originated centuries ago in Greece.
Overview
Two-stories high, faced with light-colored brick, newly cleaned and shining, Kehila Kedosha Janina Synagogue stands apart from its commercially-focused neighbors, mostly food-related enterprises serving the far-flung businesses of Chinatown. It's easy to spot the symbols of Judaica adorning the synagogue's façade. More elusive are the architectural references to far-off lands -- to a part of the map we once called the Near East.
Inside, the entrance vestibule is tiny, crowded with stairs that lead up to the women's balcony and down to the kitchen and activity room. (Like other orthodox forms of Judaism, women and men sit separately for services.) Directly ahead are dark wooden benches that face the raised bema, the platform from which services are conducted. Behind the bema along the back wall stands the ark -- the ehal -- covered with an embroidered velvet cloth. This is where the Torah scrolls -- containing the written form of Jewish Law -- are stored. The whole room is long, narrow, and rather dark; its furnishings far from fancy.
The second floor, traditionally the area where women look down at the bema and witness the services, serves as the synagogue's museum. Arrayed along the walls are exhibit panels bearing maps, photographs, and text. "Learn about a people you never knew existed," reads the brochure text. "Discover a lost tribe just around the corner." Nearby are free-standing cases showing traditional clothing, religious objects, and the stuff of Greek Jewish life in New York and the northwestern city of Janina -- or Ioannina -- capital of the Epirus region of Greece and hometown to the synagogue's original congregation. The exhibits are simple but professionally done, conveying information about the synagogue, and about Romaniote Judaism and the experience of Greek Jews.
History
On September 17, 1927, one week before the Jewish New Year, Greek Jews from Janina opened their brand new synagogue -- Kehila Kedosha Janina -- the Holy Congregation of Janina. The congregation itself was not new. For two decades already "Yaniotes" in the Lower East Side had been operating a burial society and holding religious services in rented rooms. Building their own structure marked their settled status and their improving incomes.
It was not at all uncommon to organize a congregation around a place of origin. In fact, Jews all over New York City had done just that, and as a result, synagogues once dotted the landscape. Small, tightly-knit groups structured religious and secular life. What distinguished Kehila Kedosha Janina from many of the others was its Greek identity (Polish, Russian, and German were far more common) and its identification with the Sephardic Jewish tradition of Spain and Portugal rather than the Ashkenazic tradition of Central Europe and Russia. That identification changed in the 1990s when long time congregant Isaac Dostis rediscovered the Romaniote roots of the congregation's distinctive traditions.
Sephardic Jews had lived for centuries on the Iberian Peninsula under Spanish and Portuguese royal and ecclesiastical rule until the year 1492 when King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella brutally expelled them. Many of the exiles fled to lands that were part of the Ottoman Empire surrounding the Mediterranean Sea: to the areas we know as the Balkans, Greece, Turkey, Syria and Egypt. The Ottoman Empire was rather new when the Sephardic Jews arrived; its Turkish leaders having only that same century consolidated their rule. Forced to leave their material goods behind, the Sephardic Jews carried into exile their culture (including their language known as Ladino), their memories, and their learning and skills.
Jewish links with Greece date back to the territorial conquests of Alexander the Great (356-323 B. C. E.), and Jewish settlements continued to exist in the cities of the Hellenic world and later Roman and Byzantine Empires. These native Greco-Roman Jews were known by the name Romaniote. It was the Romaniotes of Ioannina, Greece who were particularly successful at preserving their community and tradition for centuries -- until the Nazi Holocaust.
In the 1910s, Jews of all traditions as well as many Christians emigrated en masse from the Ottoman lands to the United States, propelled here by all manner of human and natural disaster. The Lower East Side Tenement Museum -- located only a few blocks from Kehila Kedosha Janina -- records an upsurge of what then were called Greek and Turkish -- or Oriental -- Jews living in the apartments at 97 Orchard Street during these years. Go on a tour of the Museum and you'll see the recreated apartment of one of these families -- the Confinos -- who emigrated here from Kastoria, Greece in 1913.
Whatever distinctions may have persisted between Sephardic and Romaniote Jews in the old world, once here, the differences seemed to lose clarity -- especially given the Romaniote's small numbers. Congregant Isaac Dostis recalls, "I myself, am Romaniote, but I remember growing up in the Lower East Side completely puzzled about my community's identity. I thought Kehila Kedosha Janina was a Sephardic synagogue. It wasn't; it was a Romaniote synagogue from Ioannina. My friends were Sephardic; I lived in a Sephardic neighborhood. If I was Sephardic too, why didn't I know Ladino, the language of the Sephardim? I remember the awkwardness, the discomfort, of being more aware of what I wasn't, than of what I was -- Romaniote.”
Now cognizant of their status as the last practicing Romaniote synagogue in the western hemisphere, the congregants of Kehila Kedosha Janina have embarked on a sophisticated campaign to preserve their heritage. They are educating themselves and others about Romaniote and Greek Jewish traditions by organizing cultural initiatives such as cooking classes and group excursions to Greece, by publishing a synagogue newsletter, and, of course, by operating their museum. Thanks to the Sisterhood of Janina -- still active after three-quarters of a century -- they are following the Jewish admonition to take care of the needy. The congregation's good works include restoring the old Jewish cemetery in Janina which was severely neglected after the community was decimated in the Holocaust. They are struggling to keep the congregation intact and pass down Romaniote customs -- such as a distinctive wedding blessing, a particular way of reading from and storing the Torah, and special Greek chants for reciting the liturgy. And they are preserving and renovating the synagogue itself.
First acknowledged as historically significant by the National Register of Historic Places (1999), the building is now legally protected by its designation as a New York City landmark (2004). Its façade has been beautifully renovated -- a huge expense for a tiny congregation, but with friends like architect Leonard Colchamiro (who did the work without charge) and supporters in New York's preservation community, somehow the bills are being paid.
It's a complicated business to balance past and present, but the members of Kehila Kedosha Janina believe they have this mission to perform. Their reasons are many, but in part it's about being the last of a line. "One of our torah scrolls comes from a synagogue in Ioannina that was destroyed by the Nazis during the Holocaust," Isaac Dostis explains. "The Mayor of Ioannina, Demetrios Vlachides, saved the scrolls and returned them to the few survivors after the Nazis were defeated. Our countrymen sent one of the scrolls to Jerusalem and one to us, encased in a beautiful tik, as an offering of thanks to God for the survival of the old synagogue and for their lives."
Sources
Place Matters interviews with Hyman Genee and Isaac Dostis, ca. 2000, 2005
Rae Dalven,The Jews of Ioannina (1989)
Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Greece, Univ. of Athens, Documents on the History of the Greek Jews , 1999.
[Posted by Place Matters, May 2007]
