Holiday Tour & Tasting: High Holidays in the Tenements

Visit the Levine and Rogarshevsky apartments, cleaned and decorated for the season, to find out how they celebrated the High Holidays! Explore how tenement residents transformed their apartments and neighborhoods for the most important week of the Jewish year.

Through the stories of the Levine and Rogarshevsky families at the turn of the 20th century, and new research into Yiddish newspaper ads and editorials, this tour explores the holiday season on the Lower East Side, where synagogue tickets “sold like hotcakes,” the US Post Office begged Jewish residents not to send so many New Year’s Cards, and entrepreneurs transformed dance halls, movie halls, and saloons into temporary synagogues. Newspaper articles and editorials debated what it meant to be an American Jew and to form an American Jewish community at a time of change.

After the tour, we’ll gather in the Museum’s demo kitchen for a special presentation and tasting from Sarah Lohman, culinary historian and author of Eight Flavors, who will recreate a “citron cake” from Hinde Amhanitski’s 1901 Yiddish cookbook, A Manual for Cooking and Baking.