Abroad in New York
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Judaism lacks anything like the classical or gothic traditions that in the Catholic Church produced Chartres or St. Peter’s. Though in no faith does tradition play a stronger role than in Judaism, synagogue architects have often had to invent traditions on the fly.
One pregnant strand of such tradition making occurred through the late 19th century in the Moorish revival that may be what springs to most people’s minds when they think “synagogue.” The most noteworthy of our “Moorish” synagogues is Central Synagogue on Lexington Avenue and 55th Street, from 1871-72, which followed from a style that central European congregations had evolved, though it also fit nicely with New York’s own high Victorian moment.
In the 1890s a more sober synagogue architecture came in, eschewing the gallimaufry of earlier times. See the splendid classical synagogue of Congregation Shearith Israel on Central Park West and 70th Street.
A good place to see a range of synagogue architecture is in Brooklyn’s Boro Park neighborhood. Most New Yorkers know this is an overwhelmingly chasidic neighborhood (of several sects), and so would be unsurprised that there are many synagogues there. Yet the chasidim inherited rather than built Boro Park’s architecturally noteworthy synagogues.
Boro Park was a heavily Jewish neighborhood in the early 20th century, and the later Chasidic migrants were attracted to the neighborhood for what we might call its Jewish “infrastructure,” primarily its many synagogues. These the chasidic groups have supplemented with new synagogues, typically unprepossessing structures of modern appearance.
There is nothing unprepossessing about the older synagogues, which include splendid examples of their stylistic evolution.
Start at Twelfth Avenue and 40th Street, where the former Temple Beth-El from 1906 represents what historians call the shtetl style. Shtetl Jews from Eastern Europe sought to replicate the humble country synagogues they were familiar with from the old country. Many of these same migrants, however, soon developed more cosmopolitan tastes.
At Fourteenth Avenue and 49th Street stands Temple Emanu-El, from 1908. It may seem an anomaly for a synagogue to be in a neo-colonial style. In fact, that was the style of America’s first synagogues, like Touro Synagogue in Newport. The turn of the 20th century gave us a colonial revival in architecture in general. For Jewish congregations, it must have had a special resonance. It reminded everyone that Jews were as old a part of this nation as any other group.
Very different in style is Temple Beth-El, at Fifteenth Avenue and 48th Street, built in 1920 as the successor to the Twelfth Avenue Beth-El. This is one of the city’s grandest synagogues, combining Romanesque and Moorish elements, with massive arches both outside and in, rich interior ornamentation, and a huge dome that dominates its part of Boro Park. Something in the style proclaims steadfastness, a solidity that is sure though perhaps not easily arrived at – in a word, and especially must this have been so when the auditorium reverberated to the strains of cantor Moshe Koussevitzky, tradition.
