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6 spectacular synagogues from a new book on Manhattan’s houses of worship
(New York Jewish Week) – In the mid 1990s, New York-based photographer Michael Horowitz wandered into the Eldridge Street Synagogue, a historic synagogue that is now dedicated to preserving the history of the Jewish Lower East Side.
At the time, the synagogue was undergoing a massive, $20 million, 20-year restoration. Horowitz, who is Jewish but said he is “not religious,” was moved by the resilience and perseverance of the congregation. Even more so, he was attracted to the building’s architecture and the dedication the community poured into preserving it.
Horowitz returned to Eldridge Street over the years to document each stage of the building’s renovations. It was in 2013, while looking for a new photography project, that Horowitz realized his impulse to document Eldridge Street could be translated to houses of worship throughout the city. He spent the next decade photographing Manhattan’s churches and synagogues — 95 of which are spotlighted in his new book “Divine New York: Inside the Historic Churches and Synagogues of Manhattan.”
Together, these buildings tell a fascinating New York story of immigration, architecture, faith and progress. “I wanted to open the doors to the public,” Horowitz, 71, told the New York Jewish Week. “I wanted to show everyone what was going on inside these buildings and show them how beautiful they are.”
He worked his way from Lower Manhattan through Harlem to some of the most notable houses of worship in the borough — from St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Midtown to the First Roumanian American Congregation, a now demolished Orthodox synagogue on the Lower East Side once known as “The Cantor’s Carnegie Hall.” Since beginning the project, a dozen of the buildings Horowitz photographed have been demolished, he said.
“Everyone should take the time and view them — even if you’re not religious,” added Horowitz, who has been interested in ecclesiastical architecture since he was a student at Queens College. “Then people will get an idea of what makes that specific group of people interesting and beautiful regardless of the dogma.”
According to writer Liz Hartman, who wrote the text to accompany Horowitz’s photos, these buildings tell the story of New York itself: When immigrant groups first came to the city with few resources, the structures were small and unassuming. Synagogues were built to serve one particular community — the Lower East Side’s Bialystoker Synagogue, for example, whose congregants were new immigrants from Bialystok, Poland. As the Jewish community began to prosper — and as immigrants began to arrive from all over Europe — synagogues became grander, more confident and diverse in membership.
“New York is the story of immigration, and the churches and synagogues are the story of immigration as well,” Hartman said. “Immigrants — New Yorkers — projected themselves through their houses of worship, and in a way that’s what made the city work. I hope that we can look at this project and see a story of immigrants — and see that we can support this with different groups going forward.”
Eleven of the houses of worship featured in “Divine New York” are synagogues. The New York Jewish Week tasked Horowitz and Hartman with selecting the most historically or architecturally significant synagogues of the bunch —no easy task because every house of worship in the book is a historic and notable one. Keep reading to see their selections and to learn more about these important Jewish sites.
Eldridge Street Synagogue (12 Eldridge St.)
A prominent stained glass window at Eldridge Street was destroyed in a 1938 hurricane — it wasn’t replaced until 2010, with a design from artist Kiki Smith (right). (Michael Horowitz)
This historic Lower East Side synagogue, dedicated in 1887, was the first synagogue building in New York erected specifically as a Jewish house of worship. “Right from the start, it distinguished itself from other synagogues by welcoming Jews from all over Eastern Europe while other congregations were defined by the towns or cities from which they came,” Hartman writes in the book. “It was also economically diverse; migrants right off the boat, peddlers, sweatshop workers, bankers, and entertainers were among its members.” The synagogue was also Orthodox at a time when New York’s grandest synagogues were being built by Reform congregations.
Eldridge Street Synagogue as seen from the balcony. (Michael Horowitz)
For decades, the synagogue thrived as Jewish immigrants filled the Lower East Side. However, by 1940, facing a dwindling membership, the congregation could no longer maintain the main sanctuary and closed it down. By 1970, the building was in danger of collapse and demolition. Students, journalists and historians teamed up to save the synagogue; the restoration began in 1986 and continued to 2007. Today, the building is known as the Eldridge Street Synagogue and Museum, which features exhibits, history and lectures on immigrant life in New York.
The Bialystoker Synagogue (7-11 Bialystoker Pl.)
The Bialystoker Synagogue is found in a Lower East Side building with an unassuming exterior, a holdover from the Methodist Church that was once there. (Michael Horowitz)
Founded on the Lower East Side in 1865, the Bialystoker Synagogue made its home in 1826 church building, purchased from a Methodist congregation, made with schist from Manhattan bedrock. The congregation maintained the austere exterior — though the interior was updated dramatically and boasts a grand ark and floor-to-ceiling stained glass windows. Curiously, an image of a lobster is featured on the elaborately painted ceiling murals — with little explanation for how the non-kosher crustacean might fit into the synagogue’s mission or Jewish identity. One hint is that the panel marks the Hebrew month of Tammuz, which corresponds with the astrological sign of Cancer, the crab. “It was bought from the Methodist Mariner’s Church, and there were a lot of fishermen that belonged to that church,” Horowitz told the New York Jewish Week. Or perhaps a kosher-keeping muralist didn’t know the difference between a lobster and a crab.
An image of a lobster is on the ceiling of the synagogue, in a mural marking the Hebrew month of Tammuz. (Michael Horowitz)
The synagogue, built in a traditional Orthodox style, has a balcony for women worshippers. In one corner of the balcony, a hidden door leads to an attic, which Hartman writes was allegedly a stop on the Underground Railroad.
The synagogue underwent a renovation in 1988 and is still an active traditional Orthodox congregation.
Central Synagogue (652 Lexington Ave.)
Central Synagogue moved into its Lexington Avenue location in 1872. While most congregations face east, towards Jerusalem, Central faces west. Hartman explains that the real estate was “too good to pass up,” and the congregation decided to have an entrance on Lexington. (Michael Horowitz)
Completed in 1872, the building that houses the renowned Reform congregation in Midtown East seats nearly 1,500 people — a fraction of the congregation’s approximately 2,600 members. That’s a long way from the original 18 members from Bohemia, a region of the present-day Czech Republic, who started the congregation in 1846 in a remodeled church in the East Village.
Central Synagogue was built around the same time and in the same neighborhood as the Episcopal St. Thomas Cathedral and the Catholic St. Patrick’s Cathedral — some of New York’s grandest churches, which are also featured in the book. “Each of the groups were saying, ‘We’re here and we’re proud and we have prosperity.’ They were showing off, but in a really beautiful way,” Hartman said. “For Central, it was very much a message of assimilation. They were as interested in liberty, inclusion and reform as they were in Jewish ritual.”
Congregation Shearith Israel (8 West 70th St.)
Congregation Shearith Israel, also known as the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue, was the only synagogue in New York for nearly a century and a half. The congregation moved several times before finding a permanent home on the Upper West Side. (Michael Horowitz)
Congregation Shearith Israel, also known as the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue, was the first Jewish congregation in the United States, made up of Sephardic Jews who had arrived in New York in 1654 via Recife, Brazil. The congregation was the only Jewish one in New York for a century and a half before a faction of Ashkenazi members grew big enough to split off and form B’nai Jeshurun in 1825. While the congregation was housed in several different buildings throughout its history, it has been in its current home on the Upper West Side since 1896.
Temple Emanu-El (1 East 65th St.)
Temple Emanu-El was named one of eight “religious” wonders in the United States by CNN, writes Hartman. (Michael Horowitz)
Founded by a small group of German Jews in 1845, Temple Emanu-El has become one of the grandest and more well-known synagogues in New York, boasting prominent members like ex-mayors Ed Koch and Mike Bloomberg, as well as hundreds of other influential Manhattanites.
Considered one of the leading synagogues in the Reform movement, Emanu-El made waves throughout the 19th century for translating all-Hebrew services into German, then English, as well as for installing an organ and for abandoning the mechitzah, the traditional divider between men and women during prayer. After several spots downtown, the congregation moved into its current building on 5th Avenue — the former site of John Jacob Astor’s mansion — in 1927. It can hold 2,500 people, making it one of the largest synagogues in the world.
Park East Synagogue (163 East 67th St.)
The architects Schneider and Herter “took a no-holds-barred approach to the elaborate Byzantine-Moorish design of the synagogue,” writes Hartman of the arches, colors, stained glass and ark at Park East. (Michael Horowitz)
Built in 1890 by brothers Jonas and Samuel Ephraim in honor of their late father, Zichron Ephraim, this Orthodox synagogue has elaborate and eclectic arches, cupolas and stained glass throughout its design, reflecting its prominence in the New York Jewish community. “The design of the synagogue is anything but subtle and so, too, is its spiritual leader for more than 50 years, Rabbi Arthur Schneier, who is outspoken in his advocacy of religious freedom, human rights, and mutual respect,” writes Hartman.
It was Schneier who invited Pope Benedict XVI to Park East in 2008, marking the first ever papal visit to a synagogue in the United States. Schneier, who is currently searching for a successor, was conferred a papal knighthood for interfaith effort for religious freedom. For many decades, Park East was a haven for Jews who immigrated from the Soviet Union.
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I love the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival. This year, it left me heartbroken
I’ve heard Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth” hundreds of times. But one recent Friday afternoon, returning from the grocery store with food for Shabbat dinner, was the first time I truly listened to the words.
“There’s battle lines being drawn,” Springfield sang. “Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong / Young people speaking their minds / Are getting so much resistance from behind.”
Six decades later, those lines felt less like a period artifact than a live transmission.
I’ve spent most of my adult life working in and around Atlanta’s Jewish community, including six years on staff at the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival, leading community engagement and guest programming. So when the Israeli Consulate General to the Southeastern United States pulled its sponsorship of AJFF mid-festival last month — publicly rebuking the organization over its engagement with a Muslim Morehouse College student who had made social media posts criticizing Israel’s actions in Gaza — I felt it the way you feel a fracture in your own family.
What followed was even more painful to witness. This juror, by multiple accounts, was thoughtful, respectful, and described his role with the festival as an honor. The naming and public shaming he has been subject to in the past few weeks, as Jewish organizations issued statements of condemnation, have likely undone any understanding and bridge-building that had taken place over the course of his engagement with AJFF.
And AJFF, one of the largest Jewish film festivals in the world, found itself at the center of a communal firestorm — not for screening a controversial film, but for engaging with a young man of a different faith and perspective as part of a three-person jury evaluating human rights documentaries.
Reflecting on this now that this year’s festival has concluded, I’m troubled by what this incident shows about just how far the “battle lines” Springfield mentioned have extended — and how dangerous they are. Sometime between the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023 and today, something troubling took hold in parts of our community: the conflation of Jewish identity with unquestioning political loyalty to the current Israeli government.
The Talmud records that the rabbis preserved minority opinions precisely because truth is not always with the majority, and because a dissenting voice might one day be vindicated by circumstance. We are a people who have, for millennia, argued with God. Are we now going to stop arguing respectfully with each other?
And what does it mean for Atlanta — a city that styles itself the cradle of the civil rights movement — when its Jewish community responds to disagreement in this close-minded manner?
AJFF was built to advance a different set of goals. The festival’s mission has always rested on the belief that film is uniquely powerful as a vehicle for human connection — that sitting in the dark together, watching stories unfold, can open us to perspectives we might otherwise never encounter.
AJFF does not screen films as endorsements, nor does it require audiences to agree with what they see. Many screenings are followed by panel discussions designed to surface complexity, not resolve it. The festival’s explicit commitment to “foster intergroup understanding among Atlanta’s diverse cultural, ethnic and religious populations” is not a political statement — it is a pedagogical one.
Art doesn’t ask us to capitulate to another point of view. It asks us to be present with it long enough to recognize our shared humanity. As Robert Redford, honored during Sunday’s Academy Award in memoriam tribute, once said: “The glory of art is that it can not only survive change, it can lead it.”
Inviting a young Muslim student to evaluate films about human rights is not a provocation. It is that mission — AJFF’s mission — made real.
Organizations and individuals who are willing to engage in thoughtful, open-hearted dialogue with those whose experiences differ from their own — who resist the pull toward insularity and choose engagement instead — are doing some of the most important work in American civic life. That willingness, that courage, has the capacity to create lasting change for the better.
These are not radical ideas. They are deeply Jewish ones.
Hamas’s terror on October 7, 2023, was a cataclysmic rupture — a massacre that has legitimately shaken every Jewish person I know, including those who hold the most progressive views on Israeli policy. The grief and fear are real. The trauma is real. And antisemitism — actual antisemitism, not mere criticism of a government — is real and rising, and must be confronted without equivocation.
Just last week, a gunman rammed his vehicle into a synagogue in suburban Detroit in what the FBI called a targeted act of violence against the Jewish community. It is a reminder, as if we needed one, that the threats facing Jews in America are not hypothetical — they are physical, present, and demand our clear-eyed vigilance.
But vigilance and exclusion are not the same. Nor does the latter reflect the truth of the American Jewish community.
A recent poll from the Jewish Federations of North America found that while 88% of respondents affirm Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish, democratic state, only 37% identify as Zionists. These numbers do not reflect a collapse of Jewish values. They reflect a community grappling honestly and painfully with a situation that resists easy answers — which is exactly what Jewish communities are supposed to do.
That’s also what Judaism is about, at least the version I was raised in.
That Judaism tells us to welcome the stranger because we were once strangers ourselves. It instructs us that the most important commandment is to love your neighbor. It has, in my experience, made the Atlanta Jewish community one of the most generous, creative and genuinely pluralistic in the country.
The cancellation of individuals and organizations, the public shaming, the erosion of communal institutions that took decades to build — these are not expressions of Jewish strength. They are symptoms of fear. And fear, historically, has never served us well.
I do not have all the answers. My own views on Israel and Gaza have evolved, and I expect they will continue to. What I hold with confidence is this: if we retreat into camps of “Good Jew” and “Bad Jew,” defined not by ethical conduct or spiritual practice but by the volume of one’s political allegiance, we will lose something irreplaceable.
“Young people speaking their minds,” to quote Springfield, are already showing signs of disengagement from Jewish institutional life. They will not be won back by litmus tests and boycotts. They will be won back, if at all, by communities that demonstrate the capacity to hold complexity without cruelty.
The post I love the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival. This year, it left me heartbroken appeared first on The Forward.
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German antisemitism commissioner quits far‑left party over anti-Israel resolution
(JTA) — BERLIN – The antisemitism commissioner for the German state of Brandenburg has resigned from his far-left party over a resolution passed Sunday condemning Israel.
After 11 years in Die Linke (The Left), Andreas Büttner has quit its ranks over the position taken by members in Lower Saxony, in former West Germany. But it’s also personal: Büttner said he’s had enough of what he has described as harassment from within his party.
“It’s no longer possible. And I can’t go on … without betraying my own convictions,” Büttner wrote in a statement to party leaders. The letter was shared with the dpa, the German press association.
Die Linke is the successor to the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, the ruling communist party of former East Germany, and has a platform that is critical of capitalism and of NATO. Die Linke notched a better-than-expected finish in last year’s national elections, drawing 9% of the vote despite internal tensions over Israel and Germany’s handling of antisemitism.
According to news reports about Büttner’s resignation, Brandenburg’s party leaders expressed “great regret and respect,” and promised to continue fighting antisemitism with him.
“This is not a question of party affiliation,” wrote Stefan Wollenberg, the party’s managing director in Brandenburg.
The trigger for Büttner’s move was a resolution condemning current forms of Zionism, put forward by the party’s youth delegation in Lower Saxony. They insisted that the resolution — passed at their convention in Hanover last weekend — was not against Zionism per se, only against “existing political manifestations of Zionism.”
But Büttner, who has long stood up for Israel in defiance to his party, and has openly criticized antisemitism from all corners, said the message was unmistakable.
Resolutions that condemn Israel as a “genocidal state” and an “apartheid state” are “no longer acceptable to me,” he wrote in his resignation. He criticized the Lower Saxony party for coming perilously close to questioning Israel’s right to exist.
The fight against antisemitism should transcend party lines, he added. “All the more shocking for me is what I have had to experience within my own party for years,” he wrote, as cited in the Tagesspiegel newspaper.
Büttner, a former police officer who was elected in 2024 to his position as Brandenburg’s first commissioner for combating antisemitism, has had his differences with his party for some time over its views on Israel. Departing from his party’s official stance, Büttner supports the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, known as IHRA, which labels some criticism of Israel as eliminationist and thus antisemitic.
In 2025, members of his party tried and failed to have him expelled over his solidarity with Israel.
Büttner also has been targeted by unknown perpetrators, who in 2024 vandalized his car with swastikas and other Nazi symbols, and in January set fire to a building on his property, leaving a Hamas symbol as their calling card.
The new resolution, which condemns Hamas as well as Israel, characterizes terrorism as a result of “occupation, disenfranchisement, and a lack of prospects.”
It rejects “the Zionism that actually exists today” and recognizes “ethnonationalism and political Zionism as a major obstacle to a peaceful future for all people in the region.”
It says that both Israel and Hamas “harbor fantasies of annihilation” against one another.
The resolution refers to “two years of genocide” in Gaza, calls for an “end to apartheid in Israel and the occupied territories” and criticizes the alleged instrumentalization of antisemitism “to delegitimize criticism of actually existing political Zionism.” It presents a list of demands on Israel, but none on the Palestinian leadership or Hamas.
Die Linke has a long history of anti-Israel activism: In 2010, prominent party members took part in the ill-fated Gaza Freedom Flotilla, aboard the Mavi Marmara, which the Israeli military intercepted in an operation that killed 10 activists. The German politicians were among those arrested and deported home.
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Israelis and Americans deserve to know why they are still at war
Israelis have once again been asked to live under the shadow of war. Sirens and missiles punctuate sleepless nights. Families sleep beside safe rooms. Children measure their days between alarms.
People will endure that, when they believe there is a purpose behind the sacrifice.
Yet three weeks into the current confrontation with Iran, Israel’s government hasn’t offered anything resembling such clarity. Nor has that of the United States. And as the costs of war accrue in both countries — with Americans worrying about forces deployed across the region, and paying the price of the conflict at the gas pump — citizens of both countries deserve something basic from their leaders: a direct, compelling explanation of what this war is supposed to achieve.
In a democracy, citizens who are sending their children to shelters and their soldiers to the front absolutely have the right to know the objectives of a war. Yes, you cannot reveal operational details that could endanger pilots, intelligence sources, or soldiers in the field.
But explaining the purpose of a war is not the same thing as revealing tactics. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. President Donald Trump aren’t exhibiting prudence by keeping things, as the Forward‘s Arno Rosenfeld wrote, “incoherent.” Instead, they’re showing contempt for those they govern.
The hubris would be troubling even if either government in question enjoyed broad public trust. But neither Netanyahu nor Trump are leaders who command such confidence. And the arrogance that has infected even officials under them reflects a deeper pattern that has long defined both men’s leadership: an extraordinary sense of entitlement to power.
An Israel defined by hubris
Many Israelis believe that Netanyahu bends the truth routinely and will do almost anything to remain in power. Under those circumstances, demanding blind faith in this war is insulting.
Consider the extraordinary elasticity of the government’s claims. In June, after the earlier 12-day confrontation with Iran, Netanyahu declared that Israel had pushed back Iran’s missile and nuclear threats “for generations.”
If anyone made the mistake of believing him at the time, it is now obvious that he was lying. Iran still possesses missiles, which we know, because they have rained down on Israel throughout this war. If this conflict is now necessary to confront the very same dangers, the public deserves an explanation of what exactly happened to the supposed “generations” of security their leader had promised.
Yet instead of engaging with tough questions from the press about why Israel engaged in this war, what its goals are, and when it will end, Netanyahu has opted to exclusively discuss the war on friendly platforms. There are social media videos produced by his team, which are pure propaganda; the rare stage-managed “news conference,” usually with the few questioners selected in advance; and a studious avoidance of interviews with the Israeli media — with the sole exception of the pro-Netanyahu Channel 14.
Incredibly, when asked by a reporter from Haaretz a few days ago what the goals of the war were — and why no explanation has been offered to the citizens of the country — Government Secretary Yossi Fuchs actually had the temerity to respond that, in his eyes, citizens don’t need to know about those goals. Some have been set, he said, but they are confidential.
This posture invites, of course, even more suspicion.
Muddled American messaging
If Netanyahu says too little, Trump, on the American side, possibly says too much.
He speaks constantly about the war, yet always seems to struggle with precision or coherence.
One day he suggests the conflict could last a long time. The next he says he thinks it may end soon. When asked about terrorism that could follow escalation, he shrugs that “some people will die.”
This is not surprising; Trump’s rhetoric on these things has always been belated, confused and focused on spectacle. Within hours of the bizarre American seizure of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro — a reprehensible figure but still the head of a sovereign state — Trump appeared on television explaining that the U.S. needed access to Venezuelan oil.
With short-term operations like that in Venezuela, Trump’s inability to explain why the U.S. needed to engage, and outline what Americans can expect going forward, was less glaring. Now, as he waffles between demanding NATO allies come to aid the war and insisting their help isn’t needed; bizarrely declares the war will end “when I feel it in my bones”; and makes clear that the war was initiated with no strategic foresight, it’s impossible to ignore
So Americans, like Israelis, are left struggling to understand what exactly their government is trying to accomplish. And while in Israel the war is still broadly supported — so great is the anger at the Iranian regime, and so effective has been Israel’s missile defense — that is hardly the case in the U.S.
The blame game
The risks of a war defined by ever-moving goalposts and a deliberately obscure timeframe are obvious and terrifying. Just look at the war in Gaza.
That conflict dragged on for nearly two years, accompanied by repeated declarations that Hamas would soon be eliminated. Today, Hamas still exists. Yet the government has offered no serious accounting of that reality. On the way to this endgame, in which the status quo has ended up preserved but with Gaza in ruins, Netanyahu repeatedly blocked off-ramps. He was clearly indifferent to the widespread perception that he was using the continuation of the war to avoid accountability: he explicitly and shamelessly argued that spectacular breakdown on Oct. 7 could not be investigated while the war continued.
In fact, he is using the exact same playbook in this new war, arguing last week — with Trump’s support — that Israeli President Isaac Herzog should issue him a pardon in his ongoing corruption trial so that he can focus on the war.
Some Israelis now genuinely fear that prolonged emergency conditions could become politically convenient. Netanyahu’s critics openly speculate that a monumental national crisis might provide justification to delay or manipulate elections — as Netanyahu is obsessed with remaining in power and is badly behind in the polls.
In the U.S., this fumbling has opened the door to an alarming new reality: one in which Israel and its international supporters are blamed for dragging the U.S. into war. On Tuesday, Joe Kent, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, resigned over the war with a public letter making unproven allegations that Trump fell prey to an Israeli “misinformation campaign that wholly undermined your America First platform.” There is a clear risk that such rhetoric, fueled by the sense of directionlessness in this war, will increase already surging antisemitism.
The paradox of justification
Netanyahu and Trump’s failure to clearly justify the war does not mean that the Iranian regime deserves indulgence.
Tehran has brutalized its own citizens for decades and exported violence throughout the Middle East. Through Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, the Houthis in Yemen, and Shiite militias in Iraq, it has helped fuel conflicts that have cost countless lives. The regime has given the world many reasons to wish for its disappearance.
For the past month I have been arguing relentlessly that the Iranian regime has forfeited any claim to sympathy and that its actions have justified the Israeli and U.S. attack.
A long war determined to bring the regime to its knees may not be fundamentally unjustified. But requiring blind faith in the leaders prosecuting that war is.
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