A JCC Sprouts in Harlem as Jews Head (Back) Uptown
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
There were once set-in-stone dividing lines between the Jewish Upper West Side and predominantly black Harlem. But no more, with this week’s announcement that a Jewish community center will open uptown this January, the product of a wave of gentrification in the fast-changing uptown neighborhood.
As reported in The Jewish Week, the center will open on West 118th Street as a collaboration between the United Jewish Appeal and JCC Manhattan. While the Harlem site won’t have the gym and facilities common to JCCs, it will host among other events religious services, meditation classes, and mixers for singles.
Some people are incredulous about the move into Harlem, said Dava Schub, program officer for Manhattan JCC: “They say ‘There’s a Jewish community there?” She added: “It’s a multi-colored community.”
Harlem’s Jewish population has gotten a boost recently, as gentrification has increased the neighborhood’s profile among young urban professionals, and priced out many people from the Upper West Side. Schub estimates the number of Jews at 8,000.
Jeffrey Gurock, a professor at Yeshiva University and author of “The Jews of Harlem: The Rise, Decline, and Revival of a Jewish Community, calls that figure historically significant.
“I’ve been telling people that Harlem has two beginnings,” Gurock stated in a Jewish Week interview, referring to the community’s population boom. One came in the late nineteenth century, and the other is underway today, he said.
Harlem does has a rich Jewish past, and is 90 years ago had the third-densest settlement of Jews, after Lower East Side and Warsaw.
As the New York Times has chronicled, the area’s Jewish past can be seen, ironically, in many Christian houses of worship. Previously used as synagogues, the buildings contain hints of their prior life—stained-glass Stars of David, cornerstones that date construction on the Jewish calendar, and balconies that used to be the women’s section of temple.
Harlem has also helped give rise to the Black Israelites, a religious movement that emerged over a century ago, claiming ancestry from the ancient Hebrew tribes and existing in a certain tension with the established Jewish community. Harlem’s initial Jewish community dissipated in the thirties, due to a combination of upward mobility, white flight, and demographic contraction.
Thane Rosenbaum, a New York University law professor who lives in Harlem, predicted that in addition to serving the community already there, the center might have a ‘build it and they will come’ effect.
“It will get people to realize the possibility of living in Harlem as Jewish New Yorkers,” he said.
Contact Daniel J. Solomon at [email protected] or on Twitter @DanielJSolomon
This is a moment of great uncertainty. Here’s what you can do about it.
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news this Passover. All donations are being matched by the Forward Board - up to $100,000.
This is a moment of great uncertainty for the news media, for the Jewish people, and for our sacred democracy. It is a time of confusion and declining trust in public institutions. An era in which we need humans to report facts, conduct investigations that hold power to account, tell stories that matter and share honest discourse on all that divides us.
With no paywall or subscriptions, the Forward is entirely supported by readers like you. Every dollar you give this Passover is invested in the future of the Forward — and telling the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
The Forward doesn’t rely on funding from institutions like governments or your local Jewish federation. There are thousands of readers like you who give us $18 or $36 or $100 each month or year.
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
