The Eldridge Street Synagogue

The building at 12 Eldridge Street does not look like a starter congregation's first home. It has a rose window, a barrel-vaulted sanctuary rising two full storeys, brass chandeliers, hand-stencilled walls and a facade that borrows from Moorish, Gothic and Romanesque sources all at once. It was built in 1886 to 1887 by Eastern European Jewish immigrants who had, in many cases, been in the country only a handful of years. That combination - modest means, maximal ambition - is the fact the building itself puts on record, and it is worth taking seriously as evidence rather than sentiment.

The congregation, K'hal Adath Jeshurun with Anshe Lubz, was one of many small Orthodox congregations that had been meeting in rented rooms and tenement spaces on the Lower East Side as Jewish immigration from the Russian Empire, Poland and the Austro-Hungarian lands accelerated in the 1880s. Rather than build modestly, as most such congregations did, they commissioned a purpose-built synagogue on a scale and with a degree of ornament that had few precedents among American Ashkenazi congregations at the time. The architects were Peter and Francis William Herter, brothers who otherwise worked mainly on tenement and commercial buildings nearby - the Eldridge Street synagogue was, by all indications, their most ambitious commission.

What survives is unusually legible. The building was not rebuilt or heavily remodelled in later generations; when the congregation's fortunes declined through the twentieth century, the upstairs main sanctuary was largely sealed off and used only occasionally, while a smaller basement study house carried on regular services. That accident of decline is also why so much of the original interior - the stencilling, the woodwork, the cast-iron and brass fittings - survived into the era of restoration rather than being replaced piecemeal, as happened in many other historic urban synagogues.

What the fabric shows

Read as an object, the synagogue makes an argument that no document alone could make as forcefully. Immigrant communities of the period are usually remembered through the tenements they crowded into and the sweatshops they worked in - real conditions, poorly paid and often precarious. The synagogue sits a few streets from where many of its builders lived in exactly those conditions, and it is built of stone, stained glass and carved wood, not of the cheapest materials available. It says, in effect, that a community without much money considered a house of worship worth building properly, and found the means to do it. The building is a primary source for that priority in a way that census records or wage tables are not.

The interior also preserves a record of taste and identity. The Moorish Revival elements in the facade and sanctuary - horseshoe arches, geometric ornament - were a common choice for nineteenth-century synagogue architecture across Europe and America, echoing a supposed "Oriental" style thought by some contemporaries to evoke a distinctly Jewish, pre-European architectural inheritance rather than borrowing directly from any single church tradition. Alongside it sit Gothic-style windows and a rose window drawing on a form more associated with cathedrals. The combination reads less as confusion than as confidence: a young immigrant congregation reaching for whatever vocabulary of grandeur was available and assembling it into something new.

The restoration as evidence in itself

The decades-long restoration that followed is itself part of the record. Beginning in the 1980s, a preservation effort - eventually organised as the Eldridge Street Project and now operating as the Museum at Eldridge Street - undertook to stabilise and repair the building rather than replace what had decayed. The work included structural repairs, cleaning and conserving the original stencilled decoration, and restoring the trompe-l'oeil painting and woodwork close to their nineteenth-century appearance. It was substantially complete by 2007, when the sanctuary reopened to the public after roughly two decades of work.

One element of the restoration is openly a modern addition rather than a reconstruction: the round window above the ark, where the original glass had long since been lost, was replaced not with a historicist copy but with a new design created jointly by an artist and an architect, unveiled in 2010. The museum has been straightforward about the distinction between what is original fabric and what is twentieth or twenty-first century repair or replacement, which is part of why the site functions well as evidence - visitors and researchers are told, room by room, what they are actually looking at.

Congregation K'hal Adath Jeshurun with Anshe Lubz still holds services in the building, run independently of the museum that occupies and preserves the same structure. That arrangement - a living Orthodox congregation and a public history museum sharing one address - is unusual, and it means the building continues to do the two things it has always done: house prayer, and stand as a document of how one immigrant generation chose to spend what little it had.