Annie Polland, 35, could see at first hand the richness of American Jewish life when she was growing up in Milwaukee.
On the one hand, she attended the Hillel Academy Jewish day school through sixth grade, where she had “a lot of Orthodox classmates.”
On the other, she also attended Sunday school at Reform Congregation Emanu-El B’ne Jeshurun. “At an early age, I saw all the ways that Judaism was taught,” she said.
But probably the most important aspect of her Jewish education, she said, was spending time with her grandparents, Inez and the late Harry Schoenfeld, who would tell her stories about their Eastern European immigrant parents.
Eventually, all this added up to a career. Polland currently is vice president for education at the Museum at Eldridge Street, which is housed in the Eldridge Street Synagogue in New York City.
She has recently published her first book, “Landmark of the Spirit: The Eldridge Street Synagogue” (Yale University Press, hardcover, $35, 192 pages).
Moreover, in a few weeks, she will be leaving the Museum at Eldridge Street to take a similar position at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in New York.
Finally, she is at work on a new book that will be the second volume of a three-volume history of the Jews of New York City, to be published by New York University Press.
Her contribution to this series (other authors will write the first and third volumes) will focus on Jewish immigration to New York City from 1840 to 1940.
Grooves in the floor
“Landmark of the Spirit” is a biography of the synagogue, which is significant as the first dedicated synagogue building constructed in New York City by the Eastern European Jewish immigrants.
It opened in 1887 and combined a variety of architectural styles: a Gothic cathedral-like rose-style stained glass window, plus Moorish-style horseshoe arches over the doors. (Milwaukee Congregation Beth Israel’s old building on Teutonia Ave. displays some influences from the Eldridge Street Synagogue’s style.)
The building had fallen into disrepair as its original community moved away in the 1950s and after. Its neighborhood is now New York City’s Chinatown.
It became the museum in 1986 and a massive restoration was completed in 2007.
Today, the synagogue building is “the best preserved artifact of that era,” said Polland. “You go in and you’re encompassed” by what a worshipper of the time would have seen. “It’s like a time capsule.”
But the building was restored “not just for its beauty, but for the story it has to tell about the Eastern European Jews,” Polland said. “You need history to connect to the people there.”
So in her book, Polland said, she used elements of the building to tell the stories of the people who used it.
Indeed, one can see physically such themes as the immigrants’ struggle to “Americanize and still preserve Judaism” in such traits of the building as the grooves in the floor, worn by worshippers’ feet as they rocked back and forth in the traditional Orthodox prayer style, and in the three holders for the American flags that used to hang from the building’s western side.
“Make it real”
In looking back, Polland’s career seems an inevitable development, but she said she originally had “no career goal in mind.” After graduating from Shorewood High School, she went to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, majoring in political science and Hebrew studies less because of a career aim than because “that’s just what I was interested in.”
Then, through the Milwaukee Jewish Federation, she went to Israel as a volunteer for Project OTZMA, working at a children’s boarding school and on a kibbutz, she said. In fact, it was when she was working in a kibbutz banana field and feeling bored that she decided she wanted to go to graduate school.
She attended Columbia University to earn her doctorate in American Jewish history. But she also led walking tours through New York City’s lower east side, the famed neighborhood of the eastern European Jewish immigrants.
While doing her academic work, “I felt disconnected from real people,” she said. But leading the tours showed her how to “take the learning in the classroom and make it real for people.”
She was finishing her dissertation in 2004 when the job opened at the museum.
Two years later, she was leading a tour for middle school students, and the father of one of them had a wife who was an editor at Yale University Press. Through that contact came the idea for “Landmark of the Spirit,” which Polland completed in 2007.
Her next job will take her beyond just the story of the Jewish immigrants, to include the Italians, Germans and others. But the Tenement Museum has “the same focus on immigration history and public history” that has become her interest, Polland said.
Loading ...