Above, a boy stands before the oldest surviving synagogue building in New York City, located at 172 Norfolk Street. What was then a neighborhood fixture brimming with debates about Jewish identity and rite has, like many other Lower East Side synagogues, since faced…
Did any of your Jewish ancestors settle in New York City? Have you
wondered what life was like for those ancestors who settled on the Lower
East Side or any of the dozens of other Jewish neighborhoods that
emerged in the…
By Nicole Siegel, Research Intern and Graduate Student at Fordham University
With the destruction of the Georgian Synagogue of Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim (KKBE) in the fire of 1838, the congregation found it necessary to build a new structure, one that is still…
By Nicole Siegel, Research Intern and Graduate Student at Fordham University
One of the oldest congregations in America, Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim (KKBE) of Charleston, South Carolina, dates back to 1749 and is currently the fourth oldest congregation in the United States. Originally a Sephardic Orthodox Congregation, the community quickly embraced the ideas of Reform Judaism, becoming…
Row of Jewish-owned stores near Great Synagogue, Lumobl, Poland (now Ukraine), 1925. (Collection of Photographs and Measurement Drawings, neg. 23441. Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw. All rights reserved. Image courtesy the American Folklife Center, Library of Congress).
The prevailing image of the shtetl is the one in Fiddler on the Roof: a small, dirt-poor, strictly Jewish village. But shtetls…
