The 2nd Cemetery of Congregation Shearith Israel - 72-76 West 11th Street

 

In 1654, fleeing intense religious prosecution in their homelands, 23 Spanish and Portuguese Jews arrived in New Amsterdam.  It must have seemed that they had gone from one intolerable situation to another.  The colony's Director-General, Peter Stuyvesant, was openly anti-Semitic and the year the group arrived he wrote to the Dutch West India Company asking that "the deceitful race, — such hateful enemies and blasphemers of the name of Christ, — be not allowed to further infect and trouble this new colony."  Stuyvesant was no doubt crestfallen when the Dutch West India Company allowed them to stay.

The 23 settlers would form the seed of Congregation Shearith Israel.   In 1656 they requested permission to establish their own burying ground, rather than share New Amsterdam's common graveyard.  The location of the "little hook of land" granted to the Jews outside of the high wooden wall is unknown today.

In 1683, land was purchased for a new cemetery at what is today named St. James Place.  It is known as the First Cemetery of the Spanish-Portuguese Synagogue, or the Chatham Square Cemetery.

By 1804 that cemetery, too, was filled.  A plot of land on Greenwich Lane (later Greenwich Avenue) was purchased from John Agnew on May 1.  More than a century later, The Sun recalled that the "large burying ground stretched along the upper bank of Minetta Brook."  The cemetery, known as the Second Cemetery of Congregation Shearith Israel, opened in 1805, the first congregant interred being Wolfe Polack.

Ten years earlier, a yellow fever epidemic had broken out in Philadelphia.  The disease spread swiftly and eventually 5,000 people, one-tenth of the population, would succumb.   In July 1795, the first yellow fever death in New York City came.  Within a single week in August twenty-one victims died.  Around the time of the cemetery's opening, panic was such that those who could afford to leave the city did so, moving to the fresh air of remote hamlets like Greenwich Village.  The Jewish population was not immune to pernicious disease.  The New York Times later reported, "Many interments were made here during 1822, when the number of deaths in the City from yellow fever was very large."

The famous Commissioners Plan of 1811 laid out the streets and avenues, and placed West 11th Street through the Spanish-Portuguese Cemetery.  The thoroughfare that had existed only on paper suddenly became real in 1830.  On April 16, the Commissioners of Estimate and Assessment published their appraisal of "the loss and damage sustained by the owners" of the land and properties required for the opening of West 11th Street from Broadway to Greenwich Lane.  The Evening Post reported that the opening "took portions of two cemeteries--one belonging to the Jews, and the other to the Presbyterian Church."

Knowing that the cemetery was soon to be decimated, on June 2, 1829 Congregation Shearith Israel acquired land from Horatio Wilkes on West 21st Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues for a new burying ground.  That cemetery was opened on August 17, 1829 and the first interment, that of Mrs. Judith Lopez, took place on November 6 that year.  The last burial in the 11th Street cemetery was that of Israel Phillips, on January 6, 1833.

In the months and weeks before construction of West 11th Street began, many of the bodies in the 1805 cemetery were reinterred in the 21st Street grounds.  But, according to The New York Times, others were simply crowded into the remaining little triangular plot.  On May 18, 1879 the newspaper recalled, "A great many bodies that were dug up at the opening of the street were reburied in the south-west corner, which is now all that remains of the old burial-ground, and of which every foot is supposed to be occupied by humans remains."

By the time of that article, the forgotten little cemetery was showing the first signs of neglect.  In 1875 The Jewish Messenger noted, "The ground is covered with a sparse growth of grass, and there are a couple of trees.  It is in fairly good condition, but by no means presents as nice and clean an appearance as the Oliver Street [Chatham Square] and Twenty-first Street burying grounds."  Interestingly, it was an Irish immigrant rather than the congregation itself, who rescued the neglected parcel.  In 1882 the New York Chronicle explained:

All that remains of the second cemetery...is a parcel of ground in the shape of an obtuse triangle, on the south side of Eleventh street, near Sixth avenue.  It contains about fifty square feet.  In the centre is a pyramidal monument bearing the names of Joshua and Jacob Canter, and the date 1822.  It is surrounded by a number of tombstones.  The cause of the curious shape of this cemetery is that when Eleventh street was opened all but the southeast corner of the property was cut away.  Since then it has been allowed to run to waste, until recently Mr. Callanan, the owner of adjoining property, built a fence around it and fixed up the grounds.

The Joshua Canter mentioned in the article, was a well known portrait and landscape painter and art teacher.  He, like Jacob Canter, were most likely victims of the 1822 yellow fever epidemic.  

Once sitting in a field, in 1925 the little cemetery was hemmed in by apartment buildings.  photographer unknown, from the collection of the Museum of the City of New York

Another grave belongs to German-born Ephraim Hart (originally Hirz, he changed his surname when he arrived in Philadelphia around 1780).  Having fought in the Revolution, he became an elector of Congregation Shearith Israel on April 2, 1787.  One of New York City's most successful merchants, he helped organize the Board of Stock-Brokers, today's New York Stock Exchange.  His gravestone reads:  "Ephraim Hart / Pennsylvania / Pvt Capt. Henry Graham's Co. / Rev War / July 16, 1824."

Broken and eroded headstones are in desperate need of preservation.

As Mr. Callanan had done, the Congregation Shearith Israel has refocused interest in restoring the more than two-century-old cemetery.  Its West 11th Street Project Committee, formed in 2013, hired architect-conservator firm Rachel Frankel Architecture, as part of the ongoing restoration/preservation effort.

photographs by the author

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The 1897 Congregation Shearith Israel Synagogue - Central Park West

photograph Gryffindor

In 1654, with both the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions raging in Europe, a group of 23 Spanish and Portuguese Jews fled to America by way of Brazil, establishing themselves in lower Manhattan.  For nearly a century they worshipped in rented spaces until, in 1730, they converted an obsolete gristmill into a synagogue, creating the first American synagogue. 

As the congregation grew and the city expanded northward, so did Congregation Shearith Israel, moving three times to new houses of worship.  By the mid-1890s, the congregation had grown large and wealthy.  The members selected a site at the corner of Central Park West and 70th Street for their next shul--a developing neighborhood filling with impressive homes.  Congregation Shearith Israel purchased five lots for $140,000.

 

P. L. Sperr photographed the building on March 4, 1929 from the collection of the New York Public Library

Architects Arnold W. Brunner and Thomas Tryon were hired to design the new synagogue.  Although fashion in Jewish religious architecture had tended to reflect Near Eastern styles–with onion domes and Moorish arches, for instance–the architects took a different approach.

Archeological excavations in Israel near the Sea of Galilee at the time had uncovered classical ruins of a Greco-Roman period synagogue.  The discovery sparked interest in Jewish history predating the Moorish period.  Arnold Brunner referred to the concept as the “sanction of antiquity.”

The architects produced a dramatic Roman temple, completed in 1897, with four gigantic Corinthian columns supporting a cornice and ambitious pediment.  A grand flight of stone steps leads to the entrance.  Its new synagogue told the community that Congregation Shearith Israel had come a long way since 1654.

photo by Wurts Bros. from the collection of the Museum of the City of New York

Tiffany Studios produced the soaring stained glass windows, and the interior walls were clad in various types of marble.  Two millstones from the colonial period gristmill synagogue on Mill Street were installed at the entrance and the reader’s desk from that same synagogue was brought in.

photos via shearithisrael.org

One room, called The Small Synagogue, is furnished in the Georgian style, including some of the furniture original the 1730 Mill Street building.

Over a century after the building's completion, Congregation Shearith Israel continues its venerable history in New York within its monumental classical synagogue.

The Hidden Cemeteries of Congregation Shearith Israel

The 21st Street Cemetery in 2010

Tucked away between brick buildings and protected by brick-and-stucco walls, three tiny urban cemeteries hide from the casual passer-by.  They chronicle the history of the venerable Congregation Shearith Israel and sit as silent anachronisms in 21st century Manhattan.

The earliest surviving cemetery (the exact location of the first is unknown) dates to 1683 and sits on St. James Place near Chatham Square in Chinatown. 

The original 23 Spanish and Portuguese Jews fled the Inquisition, arriving in what was then New Amsterdam in 1654.  More than 300 years later, it is one of the oldest surviving historical sites in Manhattan.

The 21st Street Cemetery at the turn of the last century - from the collection of the New York Public Library

Greenwich Villagers know well the second Congregation Shearith Israel cemetery on West 11th Street off 6th Avenue.  This tiny triangle of land holds about 20 headstones, a fraction of those buried here when the cemetery was a much larger square burial ground.  Burials began here in 1805 when Greenwich Village was far from Manhattan to the south and the surrounding area was rural countryside.  By 1830, however, the city's grid plan was taking place and West 11th Street cut through the plot.  The majority of the deceased were disinterred and moved north to the new cemetery on West 21st.

above photos show the 11st Street Cemetery in 2010

The Congregation established the final cemetery on West 21st Street just west of Sixth Avenue.  About 150 headstones survive here; however with the demolition of the row of buildings on 20th Street allowing weather conditions into the previously sheltered plot, the stones are quickly eroding away.  Inscriptions in Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese or English which were astonishingly crisp a decade ago are now all but illegible.

Gates of the 21st Street Cemetery in 2011

Opened when the disturbed burial plots from 11th Street were relocated, the last interment here was in 1851, just before the 1852 law  making burials in Manhattan illegal.   These three incredible, hidden cemeteries stand in silent testimony to a rich yet harsh 300 year history of Jews in New York.

photographs by the author

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