USA: Boston's Vilna Shul Wins Prestigious Grant

USA: Boston's Vilna Shul Wins Prestigious Grant
by Samuel D. Gruber

(ISJM) Partners in Preservation is a recent initiative begun by the National Trust for Historic Preservation and American Express in Boston which this year has offered $1 million for ten local preservation projects. The project is unique in that it allows for on-line voting to determine which sites out of all those nominated will receive funds. After all the votes were tallied last spring, The Vilna Shul, Boston’s Center for Jewish Culture – the only Jewish site nominated, was shown to have come in seventh and in June it was announced that the Vilna Shul would receive a $90,800 grant. The funds will be used to uncover murals hidden since the 1940s in the historic synagogue's women's gallery.

The Vilna Shul is the first Jewish structure to be included in the Partners in Preservation program. The historic building and exhibits will remain open throughout this phase of the restoration project, which must be completed by December 2010.

The Vilna Shul, Boston’s Center for Jewish Culture, is the name adopted last year for the former Vilna Center for Jewish Heritage, Inc., created in the early 1990s when the small Beacon Hill synagogue was saved from demolition after it closing. Along with a new name,. the organization has new goals, and a new mission statement, and has developed a five-year plan to restore the Vilna Shul to its original appearance and to revitalize the building as a center of Jewish culture. Their new mission statement reads: “The Vilna Shul, Boston’s Center for Jewish Culture, preserves the historic Vilna Shul on Beacon Hill as a unique Jewish community venue and resource. It presents educational and cultural programs and exhibits that explore the Jewish experience of Boston.” The Partners in Preservation grant is an important step in the restoration process.

USA: Continued Progress for Restoration of Virginia, Minnesota Synagogue

USA: Continued Progress for Restoration of Virginia, Minnesota Synagogue

(ISJM) The May 2009 Newsletter of the B’nai Abraham Museum and Cultural Arts Center in Virginia, Minnesota reports great progress on the project to restore the 1910 synagogue in is centennial year. Matching fund have been raised form many private donations to secure the $48,500 grant from the Minnesota Historical Society. Work is now under way to complete the restoration of the sanctuary and several other important building features. The Friends of B’nai Abraham has also received a new matching planning grant of $5,957 from the Midwest Office of the National Trust for Historic Preservation from the Jeffris Heartland Fund. Fund will be used to plan the remaining phase of the restoration, which will include a serving kitchen in the social hall; restoration of the balcony area for storage and additional seating and walkway access form the street to the handicap lift. After planning, additional fund will still be needed to implement work.

The brick synagogue dedicated in 1909 is the last intact Jewish house of worship on Minnesota’s Iron Range, in the far north of the state. The 100th Anniversary and re-dedication of the B'nai Abraham Museum and Cultural Arts Center will be during the summer of 2010. ISJM member Marilyn Chiat has been an active participant in this project since its inception.

With its beautiful stained glass windows, it was described as “the most beautiful church (sic) on the Iron Range., ” in the local press at the time of its dedication. B’nai Abraham was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in the 1980s and is the only Minnesota included. It remained in active use through the 1990s.

Extensive updates with photos of restoration work can be found on the Friends of B’nai Abraham website. Photos of the stained glass windows, and various Judaica items associated wit the synagogue are also posted.

These other synagogues once also stood in Iron Range towns:

The Hibbing synagogue, Agudath Achim founded in the former Swedish Evangelical Emanuel Lutheran Church in 1922, which it had it moved from North Hibbing to 2nd Avenue West, was turned into apartments after the congregation disbanded in the 1980s.

The Eveleth synagogue, Agudas Achim, founded in a reconfigured Catholic Church that was purchased in 1909 and then moved to a new location and remodeled for Jewish use was transformed back into a church when the congregation disbanded in the 1970s, and was subsequently demolished.

The Chisholm synagogue, B'nai Zion, built in 1913, was sold to a church in the 1960s and was then demolished to make way for the pastor’s house.

USA: Thoughts About Touro Synagogue as Public Tours are Cancelled

Touro Synagogue Cancels Public Tours
by Samuel D. Gruber

(ISJM) On March 5th journalist Richard Salit reported in the Providence Journal that the Touro Synagogue Foundation had laid off the last of is staff, including Executive Director Steve Sitrin, and Malka Benjamin, coordinator of public programs. You can read the article here:


Update: Touro Synagogue tours suspended; museum on track


The immediate result is that tours of Touro Synagogue, the most historic and probably best known synagogue building in the United States have been canceled. Closing the synagogue is a dramatic step - since it is an important link in Newport's tourism network, and also the flagship Jewish tourist site in the country. Since almost everything about Touro has been elevated into the realm of national symbol, the symbolism of this move is very important.

Obviously the current financial situation which has hit all not-for-profits hard is at least partly to blame for the demise of the Foundation. Presumably the Foundation counted on grants and gifts to help cover salaries. There are probably other factors in play, too. The Foundation has been erecting an expensive - but to me somewhat problematic - visitor and interpretive center on a lot adjacent to the synagogue. My guess is that as happens with so many small organizations, the strain of expansion - even though funded primarily by a donor (former Ambassador John Loeb, a descendant of Newport Jews for whom the new Center is to be named) - was too great, especially when the new facility is forcing the organization to reinvent itself. Matters are, of course, complicated by the fact that the synagogue is owned by the historic (Sephardi) Congregation Shearith Israel in New York, and leased for a nominal fee to the active Orthodox Congregation Jeshuat Israel of Newport (which though its members are Ashkenazi, by agreement follows Sephardi ritual). Many other players have gotten involved over the years, most noticeably the U.S. Park Service - playing a role I have never quite understood. The Foundation exists beside the congregation, entrusted to protect and preserve the historic building, and to properly present it to the public.



According to the Providence Journal article, the 3,100 square foot Loeb Center for Religious Freedom is still scheduled to open in August. At that time, according to the article, tours will begin again (though I had previously been told when I visited Newport last summer and met briefly with recently fired Executive Director Sitrin that the presentation of the Center would, in fact, replace formal synagogue tours.)

I was impressed with Foundation's program that brought college students to Newport for the summer to serve as guides - I was even looking forward to encouraging some of my own students to apply. But was troubled but what I perceived to be a lack of legitimate historical and social inquiry in what I learned of the program of the new center. Like much of the work on Touro's history over the past century, the presentation as presently made known seems to lean more to the ideological and hagiographic view of Newport. We will have to wait and see what the new center's content is. My requests on behalf of ISJM and this blog for more information last fall went unanswered. I am concerned that even when open there may not be sufficient funds available, for now money will be needed for maintain and staff both synagogue and interpretation center.

Will the exhibition be static, or will there be an historian and/or curator at work? Will the Center encourage new research and interpretation (about Rhode Island and New England Jewish history, synagogue architecture, historic preservation, etc.) or will it maintain what the fairly static view of Touro and Newport's Jews which has been fine-tuned since Touro became a National shrine more than a half century ago? In the past there seems to have been a serious disconnect between history taught at Touro and the more wide-ranging work of the Rhode Island Jewish Historical Society. It would a boon to both organizations if George Goodwin or some historian of similar qualification were brought in to link the two.

The website of Loeb's organization focuses almost entirely on the earliest history of Newport's Jewish community - and its religious freedom guaranteed by President George Washington in his famous letter to the congregation which stated that the new nation would give "bigotry no sanction." Still, that episode is just one small part of Touro's history, since the original Sephardi community dissolved not long after Washington's pronouncement.

Touro as the Foundation of Jewish Heritage Preservation

It is because Touro's greatest legacy may be its pioneering efforts at historic preservation (the very reason it is called the Touro Synagogue is because of an early endowment made to protect and preserve the empty and unused synagogue by Abraham Touro that the building survives today. More than a half-century before the Anti-Demolition League was formed to save Bevis Marks Synagogue in London, and more than 150 years before the World Monuments Fund started its Jewish Heritage Program, a few early American Jews had the foresight to plan the preservation of Touro.

As early as 1822 the Rhode Island American and General Advertiser wrote: We are told that the Jewish Synagogue at Newport is still standing, and with little expense might be long preserved, as a “handsome specimen of ancient architecture." A few months after this notice appeared, Abraham Touro made a bequest of $10,000 to the legislature of the state for “supporting the Jewish Synagogue in the State.” The following year, in the June 1823 session of the General Assembly there is mention of “An Act to Secure and Appropriate the Touro Jewish Synagogue Fund.” Endowing the building, even when it was not in use, protected it. It was in today’s terminology “mothballed,” until it would come into regular use again when Eastern European immigrants reconstituted the Newport Jewish community.

Thus began a nearly two century tradition of conserving the historic synagogue, which remains today the oldest standing synagogue buildings in North America. Most recently, the Touro Synagogue Foundation funded and oversaw an extensive restoration of the building that reversed some earlier work, and notably saw the complete restoration by Newman's, Ltd. of Newport of the synagogues many metal light fixtures and other valuable fittings (for a full and exemplary preservation report click here). The new Visitors’ Center will open in 2009, and I hope it tells this story, too. The interest shown by Abraham Touro established a precedent among American Jewish congregations of care and reverence for their synagogue buildings. Still, the vicissitudes of man and nature have caused most of the oldest synagogue buildings in American to be destroyed or demolished (and donors often prefer to build new synagogues than maintain older ones) so Touro remains among American Jewry's most precious possessions.

For further readings on the architectural and preservation history of Touro see:

Allen, T.J., 1948. "Touro Synagogue as a National Site," in Touro Synagogue of Congregation Jeshuat Israel. Friends of Touro Synagogue, Newport, R.I.

Goodwin, George M., 2000. “The Politics of Preservation: How Touro Synagogue Became a National Historic Site,” Rhode Island Jewish Historical Notes, 13:2 (Nov 2000), 177-207.

Schwartz, Esther I., 1958. “Touro Synagogue Restored, 1827-29,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, XVII (summer 1958), 23-26.

Schwartz, Esther I., 1959. “Touro Synagogue Restored,” Rhode Island Jewish Historical Notes, III (Oct 1959), 106-131.


More general histories include are varying reliability include:

Gutstein, Morris A. et al, 1948. Touro Synagogue of Congregation Jesuat Israel, Newport, Rhode Island, Society of Friends of Touro Synagogue National Historic Shrine, Newport.

Gutstein, Morris, A., 1958. To Bigotry No Sanction: A Jewish Shrine in America 1658-1958. New York: Bloch Publishing Company.

Lewis, Rabbi Dr. Theodore, 1975. "History of Touro Synagogue." Newport History: Bulletin of the Newport Historical Society 48, Part 3, No. 159 (Summer 1975):281-320.

Pool, David de Sola, 1948. “Some Notes on the Touro Synagogue,” Touro Synagogue of Congregation Jesuat Israel, Newport, Rhode Island, Society of Friends of Touro Synagogue National Historic Shrine, Newport, 7-13.

Schless, Nancy Halverson, 1973. “Peter Harrison, The Touro Synagogue, and the Wren City Church,” in Winterthur Portfolio 8 (1973), 187-200.

USA: National Trust for Historic Preservation Names New York's Lower East Side to 2008 list of America's 11 Most Endangered Historic Places.

National Trust for Historic Preservation Names New York's Lower East Side to 2008 list of America's 11 Most Endangered Historic Places.

[n.b. This report was first posted by email on June 13, 2008]

(ISJM) The National Trust for Historic Preservation, America's foremost historic preservation organization, announced on May 20th its list of eleven most endangered sites in the United States. As in many recent years, the Trust has chosen not to emphasize specific buildings, but has sounded the alarm about the real or potential destruction of entire historic neighborhoods, cityscapes and landscapes. On this year's list is New York City's Lower East Side, the historic home to multiple waves of immigrant populations, including hundreds of thousands of East European Jews who settled in the area (mixing or displacing earlier immigrant groups) especially between the 1880s until the First World War. The area has remained, or has been re-invented, in the popular American Jewish imagination as the historic heartland of American (read: East European) Jews. After the destruction of so much of the Jewish culture of Europe in the Holocaust, the Lower East Side (or East Side as it was earlier known) took on greater significance for American Jews – many of whom were now embracing suburban life - as a potent reminder of "from where they came." The area is usually recalled with mixture of fact and myth (see Hasia Diner's excellent book "Lower East Side Memories").

Even today, however, there remains a substantial Jewish population in the area, and numerous synagogues. But the Lower East Side is also the home to increasingly trendy commercial establishments and high-rent apartments. Conversion and renovation are transforming social and often physical aspects of the neighborhood. There is increasing demolition of old buildings in order to build bigger newer ones, and this more than any single factor puts the area at risk. The Lower East Side has always been an area of transition. Preservationists cannot stop change, and most do not want to. But they hope to slow down development and to force greater review and consideration of new projects in the area, and more closely watch the impact of single building projects on the neighborhood as a whole. New York is not alone with this problem. Many European cities including Budapest, Paris and Rome all face increased development pressure on the former Jewish centers of their cities. New development and higher rents, as well as demolition and new construction, are changing the character of those formerly quiet places. See for example "Paris Jewish quarter fights tourism, commerce in battle for soul" http://www.eurojewcong.org/ejc/news.php?id_article=1356

To read more from the National Trust see:
http://www.preservationnation.org/travel-and-sites/sites/northeast-region/lower-east-side.html

To read Lower East Side Preservation Coalition Executive Director Katy
Daly's remarks see:
http://www.preservationnation.org/issues/11-most-endangered/resources/lower-east-side-katy-daly.html