Jewish Harlem Lives On

Every time I lead a walking tour of Jewish Harlem, I am bequeathed an opportunity to fall in love all over again with this neighborhood.

It is also a chance to remind myself of the significance of Harlem’s Jewish story to the development of Jewish life in New York City and America in the 20th century and beyond.

As is always the case, people arrived at Sunday’s tour with interesting, unexpected, and surprising personal and familial connections to the neighborhood. Their stories echoed the stories of Jewish Harlem: the tensions between uptown and downtown communities, between satellite communities and larger institutions, between first-generation immigrants and their children and grandchildren, and among Jews of different denominations, religious expressions, and eras of immigration. 

Everyone on the tour was curious, engaged, and asked wonderfully probing questions despite the heat. And it was particularly meaningful to welcome back longtime community members whom we had not seen in a while.

Unlike many Jewish walking tours around the world, this tour  does not begin and end with: “Here is where the Jews used to be. Here is what they used to do. Here is how they used to live.”

It is not a tour of the ghosts of Jewish past.

Rather, it is a tour of what was, but also of what is now, and a teasing out of the connective tissue across time, weaving the thread of past heyday and hopeful present together.

We are the inheritors of a spiritual DNA formed by the collective effort and work those that came before us put into cultivating Jewish life in Harlem. We hope to draw on and build upon their successes, and to learn and grow from shortcomings.

The story of Jewish Harlem is not over. We, all of us, are writing it together today.