Lecture: American Synagogues & Jewish Identity at Temple Adath, Syracuse (NY)

 Syracuse, NY.  Temple Adath Yeshurun, sanctuary.  Percival Goodman, architect (1971), Dorothy Reister, sculptor.  Photo: Samuel D. Gruber (2013).

For readers in the Central New York area, this Sunday morning, December 8th,  I'll be giving an illustrated talk at Temple Adath Yeshurun in Syracuse at 10:00 a,m,  Admission is free.  Come a little early for coffee and chitchat.

Arise and Build: American Synagogues & Jewish Identity

In the last hundred years, American Jews have built synagogues at a rate never seen in the world before, and in the process they have integrated the synagogue into the American landscape, and Judaism into the American cultural mainstream. This illustrated lecture explores the evolving form and meaning of American synagogue in the 20th century, shaped by architects and their congregational patrons. Through synagogue design, we trace changes in the organization of the American Jewish community and its relationship to American culture as a whole. The location, size, shape, and stylistic language adopted for synagogue designs throughout the century is a reflection of the changing needs and values of American Jews.


The venue is special.  Temple Adath is one of the last synagogues designed by modern master Percival Goodman, and it is also one of the very best- and certainly most striking - of modern buildings in Central New York.  You don't have to be Jewish to be interested in synagogue architecture, and you don't need to be Jewish to want to visit this building.  It has interest inside and out, and the entire plan - combining myriad practical and utilitarian functions with large worship, social and educational spaces - is worth study.  Goodman is often noted - and I have recently done so myself (see recent post about Herbert Ferber and Ibram Lassaw) - for his signature design elements such as sharp angles, natural materials (especial brick and wood) and the abundant incorporation of modern art in his designs - but he also excelled as a site and facilities planner.  He had a good sense of building siting, the relationship of parts for function and aesthetic and emotional effect, and how to develop interesting spatial progressions.

Syracuse, NY.  Congregation Adas Yeshurun (Neustadter Shul), Mulberry St (now State St). founded 1870, built 1878 (demolished). Photo: Rudolph, From a Minyan to a Community)

The evolution of Temple Adath Yeshurun as a congregation, and as a series of buildings, is a good illustration of the development of American synagogues common throughout the country (I develop this theme further in an essay titled The Continuing Exodus written for an exhibition about urban synagogues a few yeas back).  Temple Adath was an offshoot in 1870 from an existing congregation (New Beth Israel, commonly known as The Grape Street Shul).  Congregation Adas Yeshurun received a New York State charter in 1872, and the members then bought a house o Mulberry Street to use as a place of worship.  They erected a new building on the site in 1878.  This building remained in use until the congregation moved in 1922 to an imposing classical structure (designed by Gordon Wright) slightly further east  on South Crouse Avenue and Harrison Street (now the Hotel Skyler).  At that time the name was changed to Temple Adath Yeshurun.

Syracuse, NY.  Former Temple Adath Yeshurun, sanctuary.  Gordon Wright, architect (1922)

Fifty years later, in 1971, the congregation dedicated its present home on Kimber Road at the eastern edge of the City of Syracuse.  Design by Percival Goodman, it includes impressive ritual and decorative artwork by Dorothy Reister.  Some of the stained glass window panels from the 1922 building were moved and installed at Kimber Road.

Syracuse, NY.  Temple Adath Yeshurun, chapel.  Percival Goodman, architect (1971).  Photo: Samuel D. Gruber (2013).

For more information, call the Temple Adath office at (315) 445 – 0002, email info@adath.org, or visit www.adath.org.

Report on Krakow Conference on Managing Jewish Immovable Heritage Posted

Publication: Report on Krakow Conference on Managing Jewish Immovable Heritage Posted

(ISJM) Organizers of the Conference on Managing Jewish Immovable Heritage held in Krakow last April have released a beautifully illustrated summary report of the three-day event.  The complete proceedings have been available on-line since April.  It was remarkable gathering, and the positive consequences continue to develop through renewed interest and support for old programs and new projects, initiatives and partnerships developed in Krakow.

To follow many of these developments I suggest subscribing through email or Facebook to Jewish-Heritage-Europe.eu. 

You can access the report online or download it as a pdf here.

USA: Urgent Effort to Designate Lower East Side Good Samaritan/Eastern District Dispensary a NYC Landmark

New York, NY. Former Good Samaritan/Eastern District Dispensary. Rose & Stone, architects (1890). Photo courtesy Friends of the Lower East Side.

USA: Urgent Effort to Designate Lower East Side Good Samaritan/Eastern District Dispensary a NYC Landmark   
by Samuel D. Gruber

In New York City,  Lower East Side historians, neighborhood activists and preservationists are pushing the urgent landmark designation of the former Good Samaritan/Eastern District Dispensary on Essex Street.  The elegant Italianate structure is a work of  architectural note, but also an important landmark of social and cultural history - and especially early 20th century efforts to bring adequate health care to the urban immigrant and often indigent populations.   The landmark effort follows recent successful drives to designate and protect the Bialystoker Home and the Seward Park Branch of the New York Public library, both buildings with architectural and historical significance to the neighborhood and city.  The rapidly changing demographics and skyrocketing real estate prices in the Lower East Side leae many old buildings such as this one unprotected from serious exterior alteration, or outright demolition.

The Eastern District Dispensary was first established on Grand Street in 1832, during a major cholera epidemic, and functioned for about 120 years in various downtown locations, providing free or low-cost care to those particularly vulnerable to life threatening contagious diseases.   According to the Friends of the Lower East Side:

 When Eastern District and Good Samaritan Dispensaries consolidated and erected the building at 75 Essex Street in 1890, there were close to a dozen of these publicly financed neighborhood dispensaries operating in Manhattan. Funding for the land and building – a total of $112,000 – was raised through contributions; annual operating expenses were funded by the city. The ground level and first floor held physicians’ offices, quarantine rooms and an apothecary dispensing medicine for a cost of ten cents. Upper floors were used for waiting areas and examination rooms. After a law was passed in 1899 that only the indigent could be treated at city-operated dispensaries, visits became a source of shame and the number of patients declined. Dispensaries gradually phased out as hospitals opened outpatient clinics.

 New York, NY.  Seward Park Branch, NYPL.  Babb, Cook & Welch, architect (1909). Photo: Samuel D. Gruber (2010).  The library was designated at NYC landmark in June, 2013.

 New York, NY. Educational Alliance. Brunner & Tryon, architects (1891). Photo: Samuel D. Gruber (2010)

In the same manner of libraries, bathhouses and educational buildings - also often designed with impressive (and thought to be culturally uplifting) Renaissance details - the new dispensary stood as an example of municipal responsibility and philanthropic involvement in a neighborhood composed mostly of crowded tenements.   Since closing  in the 1950s, the building has been used for commercial, office and storage space.  It is now owned and occupied by Eisner Brothers, a sportswear retailer, but they have put the building up for sale.   

The still remarkably intact four-story building was designed in the style of a freestanding Italianate palazzo in 1890 by architects Rose & Stone.  The orange and tan brick and brownstone trim structure has five round-arched openings in the first story of the eastern façade along Essex Street, that provide the building - and the street - with an elegant rhythm. It bears some general resemblance to the near-contemporary Educational Alliance Building designed by Arnold W. Brunner and Thomas Tryon nearby at 197 East Broadway (corner of Jefferson Street), and erected in 1891.

 

The architects Charles Frederick Rose and Howard Colton Stone are well known for their design of the Isaac Vail Brokaw Mansion, erected 1887-1890 and demolished in 1965.  It was an enormous urban chateau across from Central Park on the northeast corner of East 79th Street on a stretch of Fifth Avenue known as “millionaire’s row.”  The Brokaw Mansion  demolition  began in February, 1965 and prompted a sharp editorial in the New York Times by Ada Louise Huxtable, an important salvo in the fight to stop the unprecedented demolition of historic buildings in the 1960s.  The demolition was one of the "outrages" that sparked landmarks legislation for New York City, adopted on April 19, 1965.  Rose & Stone also  designed a lovely row of neo-Renaissance  houses at 14-20 East 72nd Street and 22 East 72nd Street(1892-1894), which still stand and are part of the Upper East Side Historic District.

According to the Friends of the Lower East Side, the former dispensary

 "is already listed as eligible in the Lower East Side Historic District placed on the National Register in 2001.  In addition, it is noted in the Environmental Impact Statement for the development of the Essex Crossing/Seward Park Mixed-Use Development.  Adjacent to the planned new construction, this unique Lower East Side building is threatened by damage from work conducted around it and, since it is currently advertised for sale, is vulnerable to demolition or inappropriate alterations by new owners."

To Contact the New York Landmarks Preservation Board  in support of the designation of the former dispensary, click here.

You can read some more history of the building from a 2010 blog by Allison Siegel from the Lower East Side Tenement Museum.

Happy Birthday William Gropper

William Gropper.  Your brother's blood cries out (1943).

Happy Birthday William Gropper
by Samuel D. Gruber

Today is the birthday of William Gropper, born in New York to immigrant parents on December 3, 1897, and one of the most prolific, hard-hitting and influential American radical artists in the interwar period.  Though as a committed Communist he disavowed religious Judaism, during World War II and after the Holocaust he acknowledged his Jewish heritage by producing suites of drawings including Your brother's blood cries out (1943) and, in 1970, the series of twenty-four color lithographs on Jewish village life called The Shtetl.  Gropper died in 1977.

William Gropper. The Shtetl (1970). From Syracuse University Special Collections Research Center.

See the entire suite here.

Syracuse University has a large collection of Gropper works in the Special Collections Research Center (SCRC) and I often take my students to see these. Gropper's work is part of the University's large holding on radicalism, including American Communism.  In the 1920s, Gropper began work as a staff cartoonist for the Yiddish Morning Freiheit.  His many scathing cartoon attacks on capitalism in the Freiheit often included variants of typical anti-Semitic stereotypes.  He also was a regular contributor English language left-wing publications such as the Daily Worker and the World.  He was a founder New Masses,  to which he contributed some of his best political work, including, after Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, attacks on Hitler and Nazi aggression. 

Your brother's blood cries out (named for Genesis 4:10) was probably published in 1943, after the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.  It was one of the more explicit works of art during the Holocaust by an American artist.  Gropper was not a witness to the ongoing atrocities, but unlike other artists of the time who preferred to reference Nazi brutality obliquely through metaphor and mythological themes (Lipchitz), or through powerful but abstract imagery (Picasso), Gropper used his skills as a cartoonist to depict immediately recognizable scenes of oppression, humiliation, suffering, and finally resistance.  He drew on a long tradition including classical art and Goya's Horrors of War prints, but most notably on the many photos, prints and paintings by Jewish artists of Jewish suffering in the pogroms of the early 20th century and during World War I.  

Matthew Baigell has pointed out in his essay in Absence/presence: Essays and Reflections on the Artistic Memory of the Holocaust (Syracuse Univ. Press, 2005) that the scene of the burned synagogue, where plundering German soldiers carry off a menorah  recalls of the Arch of Titus relief from Rome.  The pile of corpses, however, comes from Goya, and perhaps from well known photos of the Kishinev and other pogroms.  Between 1953 and 1956 Gropper produced a series of 50 lithographs he titled The Capriccios, which are direct homage to Goya's works of the same name. 

Here are photos of the eight prints of Your brother's blood cries out, taken from the set in the Syracuse University Special Collections Research Center.  They are important works for the study of Holocaust Art, but are rarely illustrated in their entirety (for those who want their own set, I notice that there is a portfolio for sale on Amazon.com).  In addition to his prominent role as a political artist, we can remember William Gropper as an artistic "witness" to the Holocaust.