That sanctuary, with its lovingly restored, ornately painted walls and sunlit stained-glass windows, in turn doubles as an occasional concert hall. On this particular Sunday, the first official day of spring, 150 people had turned out for a tribute concert to honor the late klezmer clarinetist Dave Tarras. Tarras died in 1989, just three years after the Eldridge Street Project was formed to rescue the ruined synagogue building—and barely 10 years after Tarras himself was rescued from obscurity by the klezmer revival of the 1970s.

Some of those in attendance were, indeed, dancing. Not many—no more than five at a time, and occasionally just one, an older gentleman with a wild shock of gray, curly hair and very few inhibitions (it takes a certain amount of chutzpah to dance alone as a room full of people stares at you)—but some. And that was only fitting.

Klezmer music as we know it today is largely the invention of Tarras and contemporaries like Naftule Brandwein and Shloimke “Sam” Beckerman, all of whom were active during the period of intense American Jewish cultural ferment that occupied the space between the two world wars. Like his peers, Tarras had been a professional musician in the old country (he came to New York in 1921, driven from his home in central Ukraine by a wave of pogroms). His family members were wedding entertainers, and he likely grew up playing a repertoire that gelled sometime in the 19th century but whose roots stretch back to the 16th century.

At Eldridge Street, the clarinetist Joel Rubin and the tsimbl player Pete Rushefsky played a number of pieces from the same general pool—songs gathered by the Russian musicologist Moshe Beregovski (like “Tish Nign”) or performed by the early klezmer supergroup Belf’s Rumanian Orchestra (like “Dem Zaydn Tants”) that probably resembled the stuff that Tarras and his relatives played back in the Ukrainian region of Podolia. As interpreted by Rubin and Rushefsky, this material had the delicacy and slightly stiff-necked grace of chamber music, albeit with a persistent pulse. (If you want to hear the master himself play this repertoire, check out Tarras’s last studio recording, Dave Tarras: Music for the Traditional Jewish Wedding, re-released last year by the Center for Traditional Music and Dance.)

Once in America, Tarras soon began reimagining his musical heritage. Immersed in the wildly diverse melting pot that was New York City in the 1920s, he folded bits and pieces of other styles—Romani music, Greek music, American jazz—into his work. The results were transformative: Tarras compositions like “Edinitzer Bulgar” and “Happy Birthday Dinele,” which Rubin performed at Eldridge Street with the drummer Dave Licht and the accordionist Art Bailey in the trio format that Tarras often used, have an altogether different feel than their Old World ancestors—louder, more rhythmically propulsive, more kinetic and raucous. This is no longer 19th-century folk music for small-town, semi-rural settings; this is urban music for a 20th-century crowd, and it exerted a powerful influence over a subsequent generation of American-born klezmer musicians.

Unfortunately, it didn’t last very long. Just three years after Tarras arrived in New York, the Anti-Immigration Act of 1924 choked off the influx of fresh Eastern European blood that had sustained the Eldridge Street Synagogue and fueled demand for klezmer music. The Holocaust and the foundation of the state of Israel, both of which turned American Jewish attention away from Europe and toward less conflicted sources of inspiration, put the final nails in klezmer’s coffin, and Tarras, like the synagogue, settled into decades of neglect.

Happily, both enjoyed a second act. The synagogue received a $20 million renovation and was reborn as the museum, a focal point for Jewish culture on a Lower East Side where new neighborhood arrivals are more likely to come from Fujian than Odessa. And klezmer was rediscovered by a new generation of American musicians, among them Rubin, a founding member of the seminal revival group Brave Old World. Though Rubin never met Tarras, he wrote a doctoral dissertation on the subject of improvisation and ornamentation in the work of both Tarras and Brandwein; he also recorded an album of Tarras compositions and published a book of Tarras transcriptions. The two had plans to perform together, but after Tarras’s triumphant return to the stage in the late 1970s, his health declined precipitously, and the encounter never transpired.

It’s too bad; that concert would have been fascinating. Rubin, like many of his fellow revivalists, has an extremely broad and varied musical background, in which classical training rubs up against Greek, Turkish, and Balkan music, and much of the praise heaped upon Tarras—the liquid tone, the technical facility—applies just as well to Rubin’s playing. Listening to Rubin peel off one long, curlicued phrase after another, one can imagine what it must have been like to have heard Tarras in person, at his peak.

But Rubin is no clone. And when I asked him via email if he consciously used Tarras’s melodic ornaments during the Eldridge Street concert, his reply was instructive. “I suppose I used Dave’s ornaments as a starting point,” he wrote, “but I have a much freer relationship to the melody and the ornamenting of it at this point than he did (he pretty much did the same thing each time with minimal variations).”

That, in a nutshell, is why modern klezmer has avoided the stagnation that so often befalls repertory movements and instead has continued to develop and to expand, swallowing everything from avant-garde jazz to funk and hip-hop. (Clarinetist David Krakauer, another Tarras fan, recently released a nice album of klez-funk with James Brown’s old trombonist, Fred Wesley.) Just as Tarras responded to his new environment by creatively broadening the definition of Jewish music, so, too, have contemporary players like Rubin put their own stamp on a genre they helped bring back to life—honoring not only the music, but also the spirit, of Tarras and his colleagues.

It’s a fitting tribute indeed.

Wonton & Kreplach Festival
Potato & Scallion Pancake Festival
Tripe & Kishke Festival
Cholent & Chow Mein Festival
Double Cooked Pork & Yesterday’s Reheated Chicken Festival
Beef & Duck Tongue Festival
Whole Steamed & Gefilte Fish Festival
Brisket & Bean Curd Festival
Grandma’s & General Tso’s Chicken Festival
Corned & Orange Beef Festival
Matzo & Fish Ball Festival
Chop Suey & Chopped Liver Festival
Five Spiced Beef & Alka-Seltzer Festival

Egg Rolls & Egg Creams Festival [EldridgeSteet.org]

The Eldridge Street Synagogue, whose story Annie Polland tells in her lively and insightful new book, Landmark of the Spirit, encapsulates the whole arc of this New York Jewish history. When the cathedral-like synagogue opened, with a public celebration on September 4, 1887, it was an unmistakable declaration that Eastern European Jews had arrived in America.

For the first time, the Lower East Side’s Orthodox Jews would worship in a magnificent, purpose-built structure—there was seating for 740 worshippers—instead of the usual shtiebel tucked away inside a tenement, or at best a rented church. “In 1887,” Polland writes, “nothing in the neighborhood’s architecture announced the Jewish presence as strikingly as the Eldridge Street Synagogue did.”

The building’s Romanesque design, reminiscent of so many Christian churches (and executed by Catholic architects, the Herter brothers), was given a distinctly Jewish inflection. The Moorish-style keyhole windows invoked the architecture of medieval Jewish Spain, while the central “rose” window featured twelve Stars of David, an allusion to the twelve tribes of Jacob. Nor were references to the building’s New World environment lacking. Flagholders at the windowsills featured five-pointed American stars, to complement the six-pointed Jewish ones, and were used to display American flags. (All of these architectural details, and many more, are beautifully documented in the book’s color photographs.)

Photos from the book, top to bottom: Lightbulbs on the Ark, Facade after Restoration, Women’s Balcony, Barrel-Vaulted Ceiling

When the Eldridge Street Synagogue was built, there were already some impressive synagogues in New York, like Temple Emanu-El on Fifth Avenue. But that was a Reform temple, built by and for the older, richer, more established German Jews uptown, who looked on their downtown brethren with a combination of concern and disdain. Polland quotes the exquisitely nasty report on Eldridge Street’s opening-day festivities published in the Reform Movement’s journal, American Israelite. Writing under the pseudonym “Mi Yodea” (Who Knows), a reporter contrasted the “elegant simplicity” of the synagogue with the noise and vulgarity of the congregation: “women sparring over a balcony seat, ‘gentlemen’ who retained their cigar stumps with the intention of smoking them on the street after the dedication, and babies incessantly crying. He also mentioned ‘loud talking’ during the ceremony and ‘the running to and fro of the trustees as well as the public during the lectures and singing.’”

In reports like this—and in the many court records, board meeting minutes, synagogue publications, and interviews that Polland has ingeniously compiled—we can see how Eldridge Street, thanks to its size and prominence, became an important venue for debates about how Judaism should adapt itself to America. Simply building the synagogue, at a cost of more than $90,000, was a way for this congregation of immigrant manufacturers and merchants to show that they had made it in the New World. Polland pays due respect to the rich men, and their influential wives, who made Eldridge Street possible: men like the banker Sender Jarmulowsky, the first president, who combined Talmudic knowledge with business expertise. In his day, according to the Yiddish Tageblat newspaper, “Sender Jarmulowsky was a name that was known to every Jew in the old and also in the new world.” Today, practically the only trace of the name that remains is an inscription on the façade of “S. Jarmulowsky’s Bank, Est. 1873,” on the corner of Canal and Orchard. Then there was Isaac Gellis, the kosher-meat tycoon, who boasted that his was one of the first Jewish businesses in New York: older than ALL of the existing Jewish institutions; “older by ten years than the Jewish mass immigration from Russia and Poland,” according to one of his advertisements.

These were the men who paid the pledges and made the loans that kept the Eldridge Street Synagogue afloat. They also coughed up for the star cantors who were, in the 1880s, a sine qua non for any fashionable congregation. Polland offers a fascinating capsule history of the period’s “cantor wars,” which saw Europe’s most learned and talented singers flock to New York for enormous salaries. Eldridge Street managed to hire one of the greatest cantors in the world, Pinhas Minkowsky from Odessa, who asked for, and got, $2,500 a year. As Polland shows, Minkowsky was as vain as any opera singer. He wrote in his autobiography that “the congregation often boasted that Minkowsky ‘beat’ all the other cantors,” and he eventually quit Eldridge Street when the synagogue refused to pay him a $500 bonus, declaiming, “You have shattered me for no good reason and you have hurt my pride.” Perhaps such prima-donna behavior was only to be expected at a time when one synagogue Polland mentions advertised its cantor as having a voice “five hundred times stronger and sweeter than Caruso’s.”

Here was another kind of Americanization, the craze for celebrity and the competition for status; and it did not go uncriticized at the time. Indeed, the Eldridge Street Synagogue itself was attacked for ostentation: One critic spoke of “a Judaism composed of carved wood and ornamented bricks and covered up by a handsome mortgage.” Yet as Polland shows, during its first 50 years, the synagogue found creative ways to reconcile tradition with modernity. Members were supposed to be shomer Shabbos, for instance, yet this was hard to keep up in a country where Sunday, not Saturday, was the day of rest. Women prayed in a separate section, but the curtains meant to conceal their balcony from the men below were usually left open. Conflict and compromise were the stuff of daily synagogue life, then as now.

Finally, however, demographics presented the Eldridge Street Synagogue with a challenge that could not be finessed. By the 1930s, with the immigrant flow from Eastern Europe cut off and local Jews moving up and out of the Lower East Side, the congregation began to age and shrink. In the postwar era, the main synagogue was boarded up and services moved to a chapel; the building itself began to crumble. It took the determined efforts of the Eldridge Street Project, launched in 1986, to raise the funds to restore the synagogue to its original state. The building reopened late last year as the Museum at Eldridge Street and is open to the public for tours during the week. But not on Shabbat: for the last 121 years, Polland writes, even at its lowest ebb, the synagogue has never missed a Shabbat service.

On a summer morning in 1958, up on 126th Street in Harlem, Art Kane took a photograph of a group of musicians that included some of the greatest jazz players of all time, such as Dizzy Gilespie, Thelonius Monk, Charles Mingus, Charlie Parker. The photograph, titled “A Great Day in Harlem,” is now legendary and recently it served as the inspiration for another group photograph.

The new picture, taken on the steps of the newly-restored, 120-year-old Eldridge Street Synagogue on the Lower East Side, was of nearly 100 klezmer musicians from all over the United States and Europe. They came at the invitation of musician and ethnographer Yale Strom to celebrate the vitality of klezmer today. This photo (and a series of concerts planned alongside it) would be called “A Great Day on Eldridge Street.”

It seems like such a lovely idea, but could they really pull it off? And would it really, truly, be great? Here’s our report.

Photos courtesy of the Eldridge Street Project. Parading musicians by Jessica Schein. Group portrait by Leo Sorel.