Sacred Sites, Holy Places
Text & illustration by Bernard Greenwald

When I was a young child, growing up in Newark, New Jersey, I often joined my grandfather at services in the tiny synagogue across the street from where we lived on Avon Avenue. He did not attend weekly, but only on certain holidays. Once across the busy street I could enter and seat myself with him on his bench. He'd be wearing his one suit (dark wool, no matter what the temperature outside), vest, a starched white shirt and tie with his voluminous black and white prayer shawl, probably brought with him from the Old Country, the Ukraine. On his head was the grey felt fedora he wore outside - attire identical to that of the mostly older men seated around him. I'd be introduced to them with pride; just being a grandchild was a position of great status, although I did not know why.

The service, in European inflected Hebrew, was of course totally unintelligible to me. I'd toy with the fringes on his prayer shawl and perhaps try to follow along in the pages of the prayer book, his blunt carpenter's forefinger moving along the lines from right to left. I'd had some instruction in the English alphabet but not exposure to Hebrew School yet and I'd try to puzzle out some of the letters, usually asking if the "aleph" in the book was the same as an "X" in English. The chanting from the bima, or platform in the center of the rectangular room, could seem interminable and drone-like because a goal was to complete an extensive liturgy in a reasonable amount of time--this could mean all day when people were fasting, or early morning until afternoon on a Saturday.

Periodically the rabbi would slam his prayer book repeatedly against the lectern and appeal for silence from the chatting congregants. This violent treatment of a holy book and his impassioned shout always surprised me--we were taught to treat holy books with great respect, never placing one on the floor, even kissing it if it were inadvertently dropped; it contained God's name.

While Newark and its suburbs had several grand temples built in imitation of Renaissance architecture, with huge, round stained glass windows, ours was a humble shul, a totally unadorned clapboard structure with an asphalt shingled roof and grey, asphalt-covered sides scored to imitate bricks. This sort of asphalt siding can still be seen today on a few of Red Hook's older structures. There was no landscaping, only hardscrabble Jersey grass, mostly plantain and other weeds, ignored and struggling to survive.

Not much more attention had been paid to the vis-ual esthetics inside either. The walls were plain painted plaster, but on them were thin slabs of marble incised with the names of people in memoriam. Each line was flanked by a small, flame-shaped light bulb on either end, sometimes illuminated, sometimes burned out. The intaglio letters were filled with gold paint and a general patina of age and casual reverence. The benches or pews were oak, and overpainted with thick, yellow faux wood grain.

I have no idea when the building had been erected. Its general design--a long rectangle with a peaked roof, one story like a Monopoly hotel, the windows opaque glass centers surrounded by small squares of colored glass along the edges--suggest the turn of the century. It didn't have a rabbi's study, classrooms, squash courts or a sauna. It was a humble place to worship for poor, immigrant, working people who had seen grander synagogues destroyed and larger communities dispersed, and who knew that their traditions were truly housed only in their hearts.

I remember a special aroma to the interior--a little mildewy, a little musty, with the particular odor of old books sometimes experienced in library stacks and used bookstores. During the holidays when we celebrated the receiving of the law, and on Friday nights, there was the odor of candles. During Simchas Torah each child would receive a paper flag, affixed to a dowel, with an apple impaled on the top with a candle on top of that. We'd march in a line around the bima--playing with fire not only with parental approval but with holy import as well. It was childhood paradise.

Years ago, before the beautiful abandoned synagogue on Abeel Street in Kingston was transformed, first into a Baptist church and then the West Strand Grill, I managed to slip inside. I was immediately struck by the odor, the essence of my grandfather's shul. That smell in my nostrils carried me back to my childhood.

On a recent visit to St. Paul's Evangelical Lutheran Church on Route 9, near Fisk Street in Red Hook, I experienced the same fragrance when its pastor, my friend Ken Jetto, let me into the chapel. St. Paul's is an extraordinary building. To my mind it is the most beautiful structure in Red Hook. Like the Milagros Restaurant building in Tivoli, which was once a Methodist church, it embodies all the grace, dignity and wonderful craftsmanship of the Victorian period in the United States. Such buildings represent the time when Red Hook was the nub of a vigorous, prosperous agrarian and commercial community. The care lavished on their construction demonstrates great pride.

The chapel itself is elegant and gorgeous, full of a suffused, pellucid light even on the overcast day I visited. It saturated the interior through the great rose-stained glass window facing Route 9 and the smaller stained glass windows on every other wall. The curving sweep of the polished maple pews reflected the arc of the apse in front and the circular window in back.

The high, vaulted white-and-gold ceiling has a finely-wrought, corrugated metal surface of an elegance the word corrugated does not convey. The curved ceiling of the apse is a sublime blue, interspersed with gold-leafed stars over a quotation from the Gospels. The color reminds me of Giotto. The polished wood, the red carpets, the organ and the polished brass railing around the choir glow in the early afternoon light. The sounds of traffic on Route 9 seem otherworldly and irrelevant. Every aspect of this environment has been carefully considered and resolved with reverence, dignity and total integrity.

St. Paul's congregation dates back to 1715. The present building, built in 1889, is their third structure on this site. It has been undergoing significant restoration lately by the architecture firm of John Waite Associates in Albany, which specializes in such work. The project includes a new copper roof, the repointing of the bricks, and the replacement of certain elements, like the crenellations, which have disappeared over the years. The project is expected to cost around $300,000. Contributions have come from the Synod of the National Church of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, the Sacred Sites Initiative of the National Landmarks Conservancy, and fundraisers run by the congregation on Hardscrabble and Apple Blossom days. Among them was a contribution by a couple married in the Church 55 years ago, who now live in New England.

I've been to numerous places of worship around the world; St. Mark's in Venice; the Blue Mosque and Hagia Sophia in Istanbul; the Church of St. Francis in Assissi; ancient synagogues in Venice and Amsterdam and the Western Wall in Jerusalem. While they don't all have the sensuous fragrance of my grandfather's shul on Avon Avenue, they all hold great power for me. Maybe it's because they embody in architecture here on earth almost no pragmatic function; their purpose is only to ground us, and our transient grasp of reality, in some grander conception of time and space.