Stanton Street Shul

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Rare tenement shul on the Lower East Side

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Place Matters Profile

By Emma Jacobs

The synagogue at 180 Stanton Street is one of the few tenement shuls still left of the 700 congregations recorded in 1918 serving the Jews of the Lower East Side.

The shul is the first American home of Congregation Bnai Jacob Anshe Brzezan ("Sons of Jacob, People of Brzezan"). Incorporated in 1893, the community of Jewish immigrants from the town of Brzezan in Southeast Galicia, (formerly Austria-Hungary, then Poland, now the Ukraine), created their place of worship from an existing structure on the site in 1913, within a thriving Lower East Side Jewish community. The shul has since changed with the neighborhood, but has struggled to preserve its old country roots.

Jews arriving in New York in the wave of immigration that began in the 1880s often organized in their new cities around hometown associations (called landmanshaftn in Yiddish) made up of immigrants from the same towns and villages in the Old Country. There were thousands of these organizations in

By Emma Jacobs

The synagogue at 180 Stanton Street is one of the few tenement shuls still left of the 700 congregations recorded in 1918 serving the Jews of the Lower East Side.

The shul is the first American home of Congregation Bnai Jacob Anshe Brzezan ("Sons of Jacob, People of Brzezan"). Incorporated in 1893, the community of Jewish immigrants from the town of Brzezan in Southeast Galicia, (formerly Austria-Hungary, then Poland, now the Ukraine), created their place of worship from an existing structure on the site in 1913, within a thriving Lower East Side Jewish community. The shul has since changed with the neighborhood, but has struggled to preserve its old country roots.

Jews arriving in New York in the wave of immigration that began in the 1880s often organized in their new cities around hometown associations (called landmanshaftn in Yiddish) made up of immigrants from the same towns and villages in the Old Country. There were thousands of these organizations in New York City. As mutual-aid societies, they offered immigrants a sense of community and roots in their new city as well as more tangible assistance. The 1896 constitution of the Brzezan association assures its members burial money and aid to the dependents of the deceased. Religious activities were also frequently included and sometimes these hometown associations founded places of worship. The word “shul” to describe a synagogue is Yiddish and derives from the German for “school” to emphasize the study that was central to Jewish ritual. The same community from Brzezan that had banded together with their hometown association founded a congregation in the Lower East Side where they could worship together.

The building at 180 Stanton Street is typical of the tenement synagogues that dotted the Lower East Side at the time it was built. The stone and brick structure is wedged into a tiny, narrow lot--only twenty feet wide and roughly 100 feet long. A three-story building, the synagogue houses the beis midrash (house of study) in the basement, where members daven during the week in daily prayer. The room houses a mix of the old congregation and the new. Old wooden desks and tables face the reader’s platform at the front, above which hang items brought from other communities that joined the congregation as the Jewish population in the Lower East Side dropped in the 1950s. The fridge by the door has snapshots of the oldest members and the youngest children together at shul events and holidays. Upstairs from the main sanctuary is a traditional women’s gallery that is no longer used.

The main sanctuary has a wooden central bimah (reader’s platform) placed at the center. Typical of old-fashioned Eastern European shuls that daven (pray) with what is called nusach sefarad (a type of Chasidic interpretation of Sephardic tradition), a centrally placed bimah is considered essential so that the reader can be heard more clearly through the shul. On the walls are a set of traditional paintings, called mazeles (from mazel as luck is derived from its original meaning as constellation). The twelve paintings correspond to the symbols of the zodiac, with one stand-out irregularity that looks a lot like a treyf (non-kosher) crustacean (a shrimp, lobster, crayfish perhaps) on the eastern wall. The set is one of only two that are known to remain in the Lower East Side (the other is on the ceiling of the Bialystocker Synagogue on Willett Street).

For more than thirty years the congregation was led by Rabbi Joseph Singer, also a social worker with the United Jewish Council of the Lower East Side. Born in Pilzno, in Poland, he arrived in New York in 1939 as a refugee and led the congregation from 1962 well into the 1990s.

Membership in the congregation fell over the years as the Jewish population in the Lower East Side fell, beginning in the 1930s and increasing in pace after Word War II. The membership became older and older, and the building itself suffered neglect. In 1952, Anshei Brzezan merged with the joint congregation Bnai Joseph Dugel Macheneh Ephraim which represented two other towns from Poland -- Rymanow and Bluzhowera --a common practice at the time to make up for the loss of worshippers. Shuls were also being lost to the public housing and urban renewal projects taking place in lower Manhattan in the 1950s. The Stanton Street Shul was one of only a few that survived, and the congregation hung in over the years. Now, as the neighborhood goes through another spate of changes, Jews are returning to the Lower East Side.

Elissa Sampson, who arrived at the shul years ago, when it was still largely a congregation of the older immigrants who were left, says that their shul offers something different for the new arrivals: "Our guess is that if someone wanted a really gorgeous suburban synagogue, then they wouldn't be coming here. They'd take one look and they'd figure it out fast...so what they get here is something hamish, homelike, something real and...familiar...that's a good translation, a piece of the old country."

Paradoxically, it was the publicity around the near-closing of the synagogue that helped to attract new members back. The family of the former rabbi, Rabbi Joseph Singer, sold the building in 2000, in part to ensure a pension for the aging leader of the congregation. The move to sell the property was fought, successfully, by the remaining members when the congregation learned it was to lose its home. The younger members say they felt a responsibility to preserve the congregation for the old timers who still came every day for the morning minyan (prayer service). Afterwards, the newly-organized congregation turned their energies to restoring and sustaining their building -- which was in bad shape -- with the help of new members who learned of the shul from the attention drawn by the court case.

Many of the older members still arrive daily for morning prayers and are a beloved presence in the congregation that is now much more mixed in age and background that it was a decade ago. A new, young rabbi joined the shul in August of 2006 and Rabbi Yossi Pollak and the congregation have worked to restore and preserve the aging synagogue with help from volunteers, members, donors, and organizations such as the Lower East Side Conservancy. The once-leaking roof has been repaired and the buckets for drips removed from the sanctuary. They’re being put to new use with the help of volunteers, who have begun cleaning out the objects that have accumulated over the years and will help with the renovation of the women’s balcony, which the members hope will soon be a gallery space. The help of experts from the Metropolitan Museum has been enlisted to try to restore the wall paintings in the sanctuary. The congregation has begun to offer the sorts of programming talks and music now common as a way to build community around Jewish congregations. Virtually no one is left any longer from the town of Brzezan but this community is its legacy.

“There’s a way,” says the congregation’s vice president, Jonathan Shore, “in which the continuing legacy of that place in Poland continues to shape and provide some reason for this narrow and relatively humble building to continue as a synagogue and a Jewish place in memory." Today, in the daily rituals and interactions at the Stanton Street Shul, a new community has taken shape in the New York’s Lower East Side with a unique connection to the old.

Sources

Interviews with Jonathan Boyarin, Yossi Pollack, Elissa Sampson, and Jonathan Shore by Emma Jacobs for Place Matters, April 5, 2007.

Cowan, Paul. An Orphan in History. New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1982. 173-205.

Hannah Kliger, ed. Jewish Hometown Associations and Family Circles in New York: The WPA Yiddish Writers’ Group Study.Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992.

Mark, Jonathan. "Days of Awe on Stanton Street." The Jewish Week 22 Sept. 2006. 9 Apr. 2007

Mark, Jonathan. "The Fight for the Stanton Street Shul." The Jewish Week 30 Mar. 2001. 9 Apr. 2007 (http://thejewishweek.com)

Rich, Tracey R. "Judaism 101: Synagogues, Shuls and Temples." JewFAQ. 2001. 24 Apr. 2007 (www.jewfaq.org/shul.htm)

Robins, Anthony W. Excerpts from an unpublished report describing the shul and explaining its significance. Congregation Bnai Jacob Anschei Brzezan.

Tugend, Alina. "Wandering Jew - a Nosh of the Big Apple." Jewish Journal 27 Jan. 2006. 24 Apr. 2007 (www.jewishjournal.com)

[Posted, August 2007]

Nominations

Stanton Street Shul on Stanton Street between Clinton and Attorney is a little gem of East European immigrants and survivors who now mix with American born and other immigrants to keep going the last tenement shul in that part of the Lower East Side. Abie Roth, who is at least 92, gets up and opens the shul every weekday at 6:00 a.m. so that he can say Kaddish. He is from Podacje (Austria-Hungary before WWI, Poland between the wars, Ukraine today); Gedalya Getzler and Benny Sauerhaft, who are from Blujev-Riminev; Freema Gottlieb from Scotland; Belkis Rodriguez from Venelueza; Leonardo Prizont from Argentina; and a slew of others. It's the most interesting immigrant and Lower East Side born mix of young and old in a building which for better or worse is unchanged since the turn of the century (there is no hot water for instance and we daven in school desks from 1900).

Distinctive features of the building are the crooked stairs that open to go down into the building, the broken stained glass window with the few panes of original colored glass hinting at what the magen david pattern must have looked like, the little school desks for davening, the Blujev-Riminiv broken memorial lamp, the old rabbi's kapote, the old stained talisim hanging in a rack, the Max Roth name on the middle of the fluorescent fixture that hangs down like a pre-rocket age spaceship.

We are listed on the New York State and National Registers, but we are now up against time, given the age of the daveners and the physical neglect of the building over the last 50 years. Saving the building and recording the memories of shul members are high priorities.

The Stanton Street Synagogue is one of the last remaining “tenement” synagogue buildings in the heart of New York’s Lower East Side. These turn-of-the century synagogues that were shoe-horned into the Lower East Side’s small lots, have all but disappeared. As the last of these tenement synagogues left between Delancey and Houston Streets, the Stanton Street Synagogue survives today as a distinctive architectural, cultural and religious landmark of the Yiddish-speaking Eastern European Jewish community of New York City’s Lower East Side, the most famous immigrant district in a city renowned for its immigrant history.

The Lower East Side is both a historical and living Jewish community. Our synagogue embodies both. We want anyone who walks into the Shul to feel a warm connection to Eastern European Jewish life.

The survival of our small shul (one of approximately a dozen functioning synagogues in the neighborhood today) is not only a testament to the perseverance of our elderly, immigrant members, for whom it is a true home and living memorial to otherwise forgotten towns. It is also a symbol of the renewal of the Lower East Side as a neighborhood where younger Jews with their own traditions are now moving in and forming connections, reweaving the chain of generations so nearly unraveled in the turmoil of the twentieth century.

Although it is small and extremely modest, Bnai Jacob Anshe Brzezan on Stanton Street has been singled out as a fine example of the phenomenon of the vernacular synagogue building. Its 20-foot-wide façade is arranged in a typically tripartite design with a central entrance. Ornament reflects both Classical and Jewish influences. The façade’s three bays are separated by cast-stone pilasters, which carry a cornice and pediment with classical moldings. Hebrew lettering incised in the pediment spells out the congregation’s name and the year of construction. There are circular stained glass windows at the second and third levels of the central bay, each with a Star of David, but containing only remnants of the original glass.

In the interior, are 'mazelos' or astrological contstellations that are crumbling literally into ruin. They represent the traditional folk belief that the month one was born was an important component of one's destinty. Once prevelant throughout the Lower East Side and in Eastern Europe, these mazelos are now seen only in two Lower East Side shuls. While this is not beautiful art, it is representative of a generation of immigrants and is very particular to their interpretation of life in Eastern Europe and the Lower East Side. The Virgo counterpart, is a B'tullah (a virgin) but due to the prohibition on showing the face in traditonal art since it might encourage some sort of idol-worship, what is shown is the embroided cuff and hand of the Btullah holding a sheaf of wheat for the month of Elul. The embroidery is similar to what would be found on a Ukranian peasant blouse. There is also a lobster portrayed in the mazelos which we think may have had to do with a fundamental misunderstanding as to what a scorpion (admittedly a desert creature) may have looked like. There is a certain irony in the lobster having survived the test of time when more typical mazelos that were to be found in most Lower East Side shuls simply disappeared.

There are also tiny wooden and cast iron turn-of-the century school desks where the older members still pray; they have ink wells and little shelves to put prayer books.

If any of these things were to change or disapear, it would like having a page torn out of a history book that told the immigrant story. It's one thing to hear about the generation of people who migrated from Eastern Europe; it's quite another to see what they thought was pious art; or desks appropriate to their height; or look at simple but vivid stained glass windows and know that they were a very public representation of pride in beauty at having been able to create a shul building for all in the street to admire. This was not a rich congregation; they were never able to afford a boiler for heat and hot water, and the shul still uses the original gas radiators which are quite beautiful (if not up to current building code) for heat.

The shul is raising money to renovate which is desparately needed given the state of the building. The leaking roof and fire escape were done most recently. The rest of the exterior needs to be done as well as the interior and the shul is trying to raise money for this.

For more information, log onto the shul website: www.stantonshul.com. Also see the Australian Broadcast Company program on the shul: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/radioeye/stories/2006/1716097.htm.

To contact the Stanton Street Shul for general information, email info@stantonstshul.com.

(Updated by the Nominator, November 2006)