Lower East Side Museum's New Exhibition 'The Jewish Ghetto in Postcards' Opens Thursday

LOWER EAST SIDE, NY — The Museum at Eldridge Street's new exhibition "The Jewish Ghetto in Postcards: From Eastern Europe to the Lower East Side" opens Thursday. The exhibition features 46 postcards of street scenes of the Lower East Side and Eastern Europe at the start of the 20th century.

From 1880 to 1924, one-third of the Jewish population of Eastern Europe left their cities and shtetls—small towns with large Jewish populations—for the U.S. to escape persecution. The postcards are rarely seen images of the shtetls that were wiped out during the Holocaust, and the “Ghetto” of the old Jewish Lower East Side.

Many of the Eastern European Jews settled on the Lower East Side, making it the most crowded neighborhood in the world at the time. During the first decades of the 20th century, the term "the Ghetto" was understood as the place where the Jews lived in New York City.

These early twentieth-century postcards drawn from the Blavatnik Archive show the perspective of the immigrant experience in the city.

"Postcards, the visual social media of the early 20th century, provide a portal to the bustling life of an immigrant community in NYC, as experienced 100 years ago," Mr. Blavatnik said.

The Eldridge Street Synagogue is a fitting venue to present the postcards, as it's the first synagogue built by Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe in the U.S. The synagogue is the Museum's landmark site and was built in 1887.

The exhibition opens Dec. 15 and runs until March 8. The museum is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday through Thursday and 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Friday.

To learn more, visit the museum's website.

Photos courtesy of the Blavatnik Archive Foundation