One of the last remaining tenement synagogue buildings in the East Village is set to be demolished, and a new luxury condominium will rise in its place.
The former Lemberger Congregation Anshei Ashkenaz, a four-story building at 256 East 4th Street, was built in 1925. Sometime around 1970, it was converted to Emmanuel Baptist Church/Iglesia Bautista Emmanuel. It operated as a church until the congregation sold it to a developer last year, Crain’s New York Business reported.
The new six-story condominium, to be developed by StudiosC, an architecture and interior design firm, will be an all-new construction.
“It’s personally saddening to see this part of our history destroyed, especially in a case like this, where it’s just unnecessary,” said Andrew Berman, the executive director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, a nonprofit.
About 10 tenement synagogues remain in the East Village, according to Berman, some of which have been converted into public housing through the New York City Housing Authority, churches or luxury apartments. At its peak, there were closer to 25, serving distinct Jewish communities of the Lower East Side and East Village, where immigrant Jews from across Eastern Europe crowded during a massive wave of immigration that began in the 1880s. Estimates suggest that between 1900 and 1910, nearly half a million of the Lower East Side’s residents were Jewish.
Today, only one synagogue in the East Village functions as a congregation within its historic building — the Congregation Meseritz Synagogue, an Orthodox community that had about 40 members in 2008. Since then, the building has been converted into condos, though the synagogue still operates in its basement floor.
Established in the 1890s, the Lemberger Congregation Anshei Ashkenaz served Jewish immigrants who hailed from the city of Lemberg in Galicia (now Lviv, Ukraine), which was also known as Lwów in Polish or Lvov in Russian. Lemberg was a hub of Hasidic Judaism, and had a bustling Jewish community, with multiple synagogues of different religious practice, Jewish hospitals, yeshivas and other schools, and a robust Yiddish press.
The congregation’s first building was on the Lower East Side, at 150 Attorney St., an address that now appears to be a garage sandwiched between two contemporary, boutique condominiums. The Lemberger Congregation later relocated to 256 East 4th Street, first into a brick house at that address, according to the Jewish Communal Register, and then into a building constructed in 1925 by Russian-born architect James J. Millman.
One of the founders of the synagogue, who would later become its president, was Leon Stand, a Jewish immigrant from Austria and an assemblyman at Tammany Hall — the Democratic political organization that wielded decades of influence in New York politics. Stand’s son, “Bashful” Bert, was Tammany Hall’s first Jewish secretary, while his brother, Adolph, served in the Reichstag in Austria.
Prior to its conversion to a church, the central round window had a star of David with a menorah, which has since been replaced with a brick cross. There were additional stars of David in four of the other arched windows. The Ten Commandments, carved in stone, are visible on the exterior of the building, and past the wrought iron gate, which once had a star of David, were two separate men’s and women’s entrances into the building. Tax photos from 1940 show the building had star of David spires on the roof, and that etched above the main entry was a Hebrew quote from Psalm 118:20: “This is the gateway to the Lord; the victorious shall enter through it.”
Photos from the blog EV Grieve taken in mid-February appear to show stained glass star of David windows still in place at the back of the building.
Preservationists like Berman are already mourning the loss of the historic building, and as such, the Greenwich Village Preservation Society has launched a campaign to expand landmarks protection in the East Village.
“You’re not always going to be able to keep a congregation going longer than it’s able to,” Berman said. “But at the very least, you can keep the building that housed those people, and in many ways embodies the history of their presence in the neighborhood.”
Though it’s too late for the Lemberger Synagogue, Berman says, the efforts to protect and preserve other historic sites in the East Village is an important one. Without landmarking these sites, they are at risk of being destroyed or replaced with new developments.
One site he’s worried about? The Yiddish Theater Walk of Fame.
Since 2006, when the owners of the Second Avenue Deli moved the original location away from the East Village, no one has been maintaining the sidewalk, which is the responsibility of the adjacent property owner.
“That is a piece of Jewish history in the neighborhood that we are very concerned about,” Berman said. “And we’ve been trying to come up with some sort of plan for some way of maintaining and preserving that really important artifact.”
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