Exploring Jewish Heritage, Beyond the Village and Back

Since 2006, May has marked Jewish American Heritage Month, 31 days to explore and celebrate the impact of Jewish values, contributions, and culture on the nation’s history and character. Greenwich Village, the East Village, and NoHo are communities rich with sites that showcase and commemorate 350 years of Jewish history in our city. That hyperlocal heritage is also well-connected to many locations throughout New York that also highlight the Jewish American experience, as seen in our Beyond the Village and Back Maps. Today we explore a few of those richly historic sites.

Temple Emanu-El

Temple Emanu-El at East 65th Street and Fifth Avenue is New York’s largest synagogue, and by reputation is the largest Reform synagogue in the world. But this very uptown institution actually has some very strong roots downtown.

The temple was designed by Robert D. Kohn on the former site of the Mrs. William B. Astor House in the Romanesque Revival style, and features an arch with symbols representing the 12 Tribes of Israel, flanked by two 1920s lions resting on semi-engaged columns. The undeniably, incredibly grand building was built to be the largest Reform Jewish synagogue in the world. Over the entrances’ three doorways are four columned stained-glass windows, topped by a beautiful flower of stained glass with a Jewish Star at its center. And rows of pews evoke the memory of the community’s first pews on East 12th Street, at a time when they were a journeying community of American German Jewish immigrants, whose history is tied to a strange, detached steeple now sitting in front of a dorm.

The disembodied church steeple sits in front of a 26-story NYU dorm at 120 East 12th Street between Third and Fourth Avenues. The steeple once belonged to the 12th Street Baptist Church, built on this site in 1847. After just eight years, the Baptist Church ceded the structure to a new occupant, Temple Emanu-El, a small Jewish congregation formed in 1845 that previously met on the second floor of a building at Grand and Clinton Streets and then a former Methodist church at 56 Chrystie Street. 

Emanu-El was the first Reform Jewish congregation in New York City, and among the many reforms first implemented at the 12th Street building was allowing men and women to sit together in the pews for the first time. From these humble beginnings, Temple Emanu-El moved to Fifth Avenue and 43rd Street in 1868, and in 1927 to its massive current location at Fifth Avenue and 65th Street.

Read more about the temple’s homes from the Lower to Upper East Side here.

Congregation Shearith Israel

Congregation Shearith Israel, now located at 2 West 70th Street, takes pride in being the very first Jewish congregation in North America, where about half the world’s Jewish population now lives. It was founded in 1654 by 23 Jews of Spanish and Portuguese descent who had been living in a Dutch colony in Brazil. When the colony changed hands and the Portuguese took over, the Jewish community fled to avoid the imposition of Inquisition policies, which had previously pushed their families out of Portugal and Spain in the late 15th and early 16th centuries.

Shearith Israel was the only Jewish congregation in New York City from 1654 until 1825, and was allowed to build its first synagogue in 1730 on today’s South William Street. As the only synagogue, Shearith Israel was where Jewish residents of New York turned for education, worship, charity, and community. The congregation first moved to 60 Crosby Street in SoHo in 1834, then to 5 West 19th Street in 1860, and finally to its current landmarked location at 2 West 70th Street on the Upper West Side (built in 1897, and designed by Arnold Brunner with interior and windows by Louis Comfort Tiffany). 

So Shearith Israel never had a synagogue in Greenwich Village or the East Village, leapfrogging over these neighborhoods in their 19th-century uptown migration. So what’s the connection to the Village? One could argue that they owe their existence to one East Villager: Peter Stuyvesant.

Director-general of New Netherland from 1647 until 1664, Stuyvesant built his home, farm, and chapel in today’s East Village, and many vestiges of Stuyvesant’s wealth, power, and visions for the neighborhood are still visible today. He was strongly opposed to religious pluralism, and as such made life quite hard for the Jewish refugee founders of Congregation Shearith Israel (as well as for Lutherans, Roman Catholics, and Quakers). When the Jewish refugees arrived in New Amsterdam after fleeing Brazil, Stuyvesant seized their possessions and ordered them sold at auction, and jailed two members of the group. He wrote to the Dutch West India Company in Amsterdam, asking permission to expel the Jews. The Jewish community in Holland petitioned the Dutch West India Company, and the company ultimately denied Stuyvesant’s request, thus giving the Jews of Shearith Israel (and by extension of New Amsterdam) a permanency and stability that they previously did not have (though without permission to worship in a public synagogue for some time).

Soon after the 23 Spanish and Portuguese Jews of Sherith Israel arrived in New Amsterdam, they began to make arrangements for the creation of a cemetery — the very first Jewish burial ground in North America. In 1656 the New Amsterdam authorities granted the Shearith Israel Congregation “a little hook of land situated outside of this city for a burial place” at a location that is currently is unknown. The congregation’s second cemetery, which is today known as the First Cemetery because it is the oldest surviving one, was purchased in 1683 and located at 55-57 St. James Place. When this “First” cemetery reached capacity in the early 19th century, a “Second” one needed to be established in 1805 on a much larger plot of land in then-rural Greenwich Village. This West 11th Street cemetery was consecrated on February 27, 1805. At first, this was only a satellite cemetery, but after an 1823 public health ordinance banned burial in the congregation’s Chatham Square location, the newer “Second” Cemetery became the congregation’s only burial ground. Among those buried here are Revolutionary War veteran Ephraim Hart and noted painter Joshua A. Canter.

Learn more about Congregation Shearith Israel, annd its connection to another Village location, the city’s narrowest house at 75 1/2 Bedford Street, here.

Brotherhood Synagogue

For more than 70 years, the Brotherhood Synagogue at 28 Gramercy Park South has sought to meet the spiritual and cultural needs of its members in a welcoming, progressive community, while working to make religious brotherhood a living reality. It became the first Jewish congregation in New York City to open a homeless shelter, and has been progressive in its longstanding outreach to the non-Jewish community, holding joint classes and celebrations with other downtown churches. Its striking landmarked brownstone home on the south side of Gramercy Park, one of New York City’s true gems of preservation, is rich in history and architecture, following some of the most important strains of the social and physical development of our city, with a special connection to the Underground Railroad, religious reconciliation and cooperation, and historic preservation. And one of those strains ran right through Greenwich Village.

In 1859, when an early Quaker group expanded beyond the capacity of its home on Orchard Street, it acquired four lots on Gramercy Park South (20th Street) for $24,000, and commissioned the architectural firm of King & Kellum to construct a new space. King & Kellum was recognized at the time for their work at the Tweed Courthouse on Chambers Street and for elegant cast-iron buildings such as McCreery’s on Broadway and 11th Street.

While the 20th Street Meeting House was flourishing, the Village Presbyterian Church at 141-145 West 13th Street in the West Village was facing a challenging future. Built in 1846–47 in the Greek Revival style, the classical balance and symmetry of the façade mask an interesting history, one that involved several rebuildings, after decimating fires in 1855 and 1902; its eventual transformation into well-hidden apartments; and a strange turn in politics that helped Grover Cleveland secure the Presidency in the 1884 election. The church merged with other Presbyterian congregations to remain afloat in the first half of the 20th century. In 1954, a new Jewish congregation formed by Rabbi Irving J. Block started using the Village Presbyterian Church as home for the next two decades, until the building was sold and turned into apartments in 1975. 

Back at 28 Gramercy Park South, the Quakers chose to move from that meeting house following a series of internal disputes. In 1964 the 106-year-old building had been sold to a developer for $500,000, who intended to turn it into apartments. Following public outcry, the structure was purchased from the developer by a foundation hoping to convert it to a performing arts center. This venture failed. The United Federation of Teachers later bought the site for offices and meeting space, but that idea failed as well. The building was designated a landmark in 1965, but even that was not enough to guarantee the building’s survival.

Fortunately, in 1975, Rabbi Block finalized the purchase of the site for his Brotherhood Synagogue. Architect James Stewart Polshek — then dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation — took notice of the sale and was so impressed by the space that he offered his design services pro bono in order to renovate and reconstruct the building as a synagogue.

Nearly half a century later, the Brotherhood still occupies 28 Gramercy Park South, the culmination of some 200 years of history that saw the Quaker, the Presbyterian, and the Jewish faiths all seeking a place to call home.

Read more about the site’s history serving many faiths here.

These are just three of the locations throughout the city that have strong historic and current ties to our communities. Explore sites in Manhattan Below 72nd Street here and in Upper Manhattan and the other boroughs here.