Eldridge Street Synagogue: The Moorish Revival Crown of the Immigrants

Why is it significant?

Stand before the soaring brick and terra-cotta facade of the Eldridge Street Synagogue and let your eyes rise toward its magnificent seventy-foot Moorish horseshoe arch.

Key Facts

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Stand before the soaring brick and terra-cotta facade of the Eldridge Street Synagogue and let your eyes rise toward its magnificent seventy-foot Moorish horseshoe arch. Tucked snugly between tenement buildings on a narrow street, this glorious sanctuary was the first grand synagogue erected in America by Eastern European Jewish immigrants, opening its carved wooden doors in eighteen eighty-seven. Passing from the noisy sidewalks into the vestibule, you enter an awe-inspiring sacred space bathed in sapphire and amber light filtering through intricately patterned stained glass.

In the late nineteenth century, thousands of impoverished Jewish families fleeing anti-Semitic pogroms in czarist Russia crammed into the squalid tenements of the Lower East Side. This congregation pooled their meager earnings as pushcart peddlers, garment seamstresses, and cigar rollers to hire Christian architects Peter and Francis William Herter to build a majestic house of worship that boldly proclaimed their newfound religious freedom and American citizenship. The congregants insisted on magnificent architectural flourishes that rivaled the finest German and Sephardic synagogues uptown, proving to the wider world that working-class immigrant laborers could erect a sanctuary of supreme dignity and timeless beauty.

Gaze up into the barrel-vaulted ceiling sixty feet overhead: a breathtaking sixty-seven-lamp brass chandelier suspends above the hand-carved walnut bimah, while the eastern wall is illuminated by artist Kiki Smith's luminous blue rose window installed in two thousand ten.

Notice the deep ruts and polished hollows worn into the pine floorboards beneath the pews: they were carved by the shuffling feet of hundreds of thousands of worshippers who crowded here during the High Holidays a century ago. Congregants gathered under the soaring arches to celebrate sacred milestones and find comfort in the shared faith of their ancestors.

Walk east along Division Street to East Broadway to discover the historic skyscraper of the Jewish Daily Forward.