MUSEUM

Eldridge Street Museum & Synagogue

http://www.eldridgestreet.org/

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eldridge_Street_Synagogue

 

 

I did not take as many pictures as I might have in the past since a visit to the two websites above includes several photographs.

 

This was our visit to the Lower East Side to the tenements and congestion of the immigration of Eastern European Jews to New York.  Between 1880 and the start of  World War I in 1914, about 2,000,000 Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi Jews immigrated from diaspora communities in Eastern Europe, where repeated pogroms made life untenable.

 

The generally wealthier and more educated German Jews who came earlier, 1840 - 1880, by then lived in the Upper West Side.

The synagogue on Eldridge Street was and remains Orthodox and suffered when the neighborhood Jews moved away, other groups of immigrants, primarily Chinese, moved in, and those Jews moving away could not attend survices on the Sabbath since they had to walk to worship.  The building went into deep disrepair.

This is another vacant synagogue on the Lower East Side.

 

 

Tenements like the early 1900s with clothing still being hung out to dry on the fire excapes.

 

 

 

The Eldridge Street Synagogue.

 

 

 

The Henry Street Settlement House.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Street_Settlement

 

The Henry Street Settlement House was started in 1893 to address the problems of poverty and healthcare resulting from the wave of immigration into the Lower East Side.