The Art and Architecture of Jewish Affluence:
The Synagogues of New York’s Upper West Side
Wednesday, May 7th, 7-8:15 pm at 7 West 83rd Street
Free LIVE event! Registration Required.
Landmark West! invites you to a FREE, in-person illustrated lecture by noted historian Dr. Samuel Gruber in honor of LW's 40th Anniversary as the preservation organization of the Upper West Side.
Graciously co-sponsored by Congregation Rodeph Sholom
Within a generation of arrival in New York City, immigrant Jews began to move uptown. This was true for German-speaking Jews in the mid-19th century and Yiddish-speaking Jews in the early 20th century. The movement was part of the broad process of acculturation and greater affluence in which European Jews became Americans.
The building of impressive synagogues uptown was both a sign of continuity with cultural traditions and their successful acceptance into New York City's ethnic and religious pluralism. In the first half of the 20th century, the newly developed and still developing Upper West Side attracted growing numbers of middle-class or middle-class-aspiring Jews. In the century following World War I, New York's uptown Jews sponsored a wealth of Jewish architecture, with many of the large and often ornate synagogues designed by Jewish architects.
This talk will examine the development and design of approximately a dozen synagogues on the Upper West Side serving all the major branches of Judaism. We'll explore what the buildings have in common, how they differ, and what role three generations of Jewish architects had in shaping Jewish identity.
Our Speaker:
Samuel D. Gruber (BA, Princeton University; Ph.D. Columbia University) has been a leader in the documentation, protection, and preservation of historic Jewish sites worldwide for 35 years. He was founding director of the Jewish Heritage Program of World Monuments Fund (1988-1996) and Research Director of the U.S. Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad (1998 through 2008). He presently directs Gruber Heritage Global, a cultural resource consulting firm, and is president of the not-for-profit International Survey of Jewish Monuments. From 1994 until 2022, he taught courses in Art History and Jewish Studies at Syracuse University. He has also taught at Binghamton, Colgate, Cornell, and Temple Universities and Le Moyne College. Dr. Gruber has curated several on-line exhibitions including Life of the Synagogue; Synagogues of the South; and Romaniote Memories. He recently curated the exhibition Sacred Space: Synagogue Architecture and Identity at the library of the Jewish Theological Seminary. Since 2021, Dr. Gruber has been a lead researcher on the International Holocaust Memorial Monument Database project, a partnership of the Center for Jewish Art, Hebrew University; the Miller Center, University of Miami; and the International Survey of Jewish Monuments. He is the author of Synagogues (1999) and American Synagogues: A Century of Architecture and Jewish Tradition, and has written scores of articles, book chapters, and published reports. Most of these writings and his blog, Samuel Gruber's Jewish Art and Monuments, as well as many recorded lectures, can be found online. Beginning this summer, Dr. Gruber will be delivering a series of six lectures about the History of the Jews of Rome.
