New Haven Independent

Kroog’s memories and the new visions of modern artists and documentarians came together Sunday afternoon at the opening reception of the Cultural Heritage Artists Project of the Orchard Street Shul at the John Slade Ely Center for Contemporary Art.

The exhibit’s organizers invited artists to make new works inspired by the old shul in the West River neighborhood, which some people are trying to save and revive.

The mingling of old-timers from the shul — about 60 members are left — and artists and historians harnessing their new media talents to help revive it made for an atmosphere that might be described as cutting-edge nostalgia.

In the photo Croog, who served as secretary of the board at Orchard Street Shul for 54 years, is reading in large Hebrew letters the Yiddishized name of Hon. David Fitzgerald, New Haven’s mayor. Fitzgerald was one of the featured speakers at that 1924 cornerstone-laying ceremony.

The text Croog is reading from is a Xeroxed transfer print of a period poster for the shul’s opening day. It is attached to one side of Sukkah, artist Mary Lesser’s contribution to the new exhibition. The piece is named after the wooden booths that Jews erect every fall as part of the Sukkot holiday.

But this is no ordinary Jewish festival booth. This sukkah is made of Asian paper and chine colle. Festooned from its ceiling instead of the traditional fruits are digitally enhanced photo images of the synagogue.

“I’m harvesting memories and prayers,” Lesser said

This is but one of many pieces in the exhibit that bring together new artistic and research technologies with the forms and symbols of Jewish observance. The exhibit fills up up the entire John Slade Ely Center, located at 51 Trumbull. The show runs through Jan. 31.

There’s also a handsome catalogue featuring the work of the 20 artists showing and essays by historians and architects.

Click here for fuller description of the art and artists. (And here for an article on how one contribution to the show was rejected, sparking charges of censorship.)

The show includes projected wall graphics, CRT monitors with digital recreations of the shul’s interior, a Google map with personal stories superimposed on now vacant sites, and at least half a dozen single channel audio and video installations featuring interviews with residents of the area old and new. Those pieces share space with a hauntingly hung Jewish prayer shawl made of canvas, resin, and ink by Bruce Oren.

Karen Schiff (pictured with shawl and monitor) wrote one of the essays in the catalogue. She appears in one of the videos. In it she reads from Lamentations on the bimah at Orchard Street, a transgressive no-no for women in that Orthodox precinct, where women traditionally sat in an upstairs gallery while men conducted services below.

The show is a first stage in a planned revival of the synagogue, although the future is far from certain.

Shul President Sam Teitelman joined Croog and others in hoping the art will help call attention to Orchard Street’s double message: the loss of the vibrant community that supported immigrant Jews in the Oak Street Corridor, but also a new future.

Teitlman has worked for years to raise money and new members to restore and reopen the shul, as a combination community center/museum and synagogue.

Most practicing Jews have long left the neighborhood. The synagogue currently holds services on Thursday morning only. Last month a movie program drew 100 people. Teitelman’s models include Eldridge Street Synagogue in New York and the Vilna Shul in Boston.

Teitelman held out hope that the planned redevelopment of the Route 34 corridor, including building new homes, might draw young, Jewishly oriented people back to the very downtown their grand parents and even great-grandparents settled. A back to the future.

Before that happens, Teitelman said, at least $300,000 is needed in the short term to bring the building up to code. Long-term he needs $1.5 million.

Meanwhile back at the sukkah, Herb Croog was remembering where the other shuls of New Haven were in 1924. “Rose Street, one; Factory Street, two; Broad, two; York, one, George Street, two; White Street, one; Foote, one.”

And of course, the sole survivor, Orchard Street Shul.

The exhibition was coordinated by Cynthia Beth Rubin. Click here for info about panels, forums, and programming in connection with the exhibition.