Face-lift.(The Talk of the Town)(Eldridge Street Synagogue)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 10-DEC-07

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COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

The last time this department looked into the Eldridge Street Synagogue, down in Ben Shahn country, near the Manhattan Bridge, was almost twenty years ago, when the restoration of the synagogue--the first and the grandest of the temples built by Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe--was just beginning. Decades of enforced neglect had left the sanctuary sealed off and with pigeons roosting in the rafters. It was, this magazine's correspondent wrote then, "like the Twilight Zone. The room was covered with dust. There were prayer shawls strewn about, and ceramic spittoons on the floor. . . . In the ark were thirty Torahs, in various stages of decomposition." This week, at last, the work is complete, with a spiffiness that...

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