At the beginning of the 20th century, Manhattan’s Lower East Side was densely populated by immigrant Jews and their children. The stretch of East Broadway between Clinton and Montgomery Street at one point had over 50 small synagogues, known as shtiblekh. Now one of the few that survive on this erstwhile Shtibl Row is Agudath Israel Youth of Manhattan, which stands on the brink of dissolution with the anticipated loss of one of its members and, with him, its ability to get a quorum of adult males on Saturday morning. Jon Kalish reports:

Now in its 94th year, the congregation was incorporated in 1930 as Zeirei Agudath Israel. The shtibl was previously located on Avenue C in what is now known as Alphabet City; it then moved to a building on East Broadway that was subsequently torn down and replaced by a church. The Aguda moved into its current location in 1968 when it leased the second floor from the congregation that owned the four-story structure, Beth Hachasidim DePolen. A sign over the entrance to the building says, “Congregation Beth Hachasidim DePolen, Inc.” and to the right of that an old, sun-bleached sign reads “Agudath Israel Youth of Manhattan, one flight up.”

Today there are ten or so shuls still functioning in the greater Lower East Side. In 1900, . . . there were more than 500 shuls in the area between Bowery and the FDR Drive, and between Division Street and 14th Street.

But this story is not an entirely sad one: the departing member isn’t defecting from religion or dying, but getting married and moving to a different neighborhood.

In 2001, in the immediate wake of al-Qaeda’s attacks on America, Jonathan Rosen was asked to write something about anti-Semitism. So many of the points he raised in the resulting essay, reproduced in full at the link below, ring true today, and make clear just how predictable so much of the global reaction to October 7 has been. Rosen reflects on what he wrote then from the standpoint of 2024:

It is worth remembering that the Nazis saw the Holocaust as self-defense, though Jews were a minuscule fragment of a giant militarized nation. This was irrational, of course, even as they spoke the language of science, redefining Jews as a biological menace, like a virus, making the murder of babies and the elderly necessary, too, because like a microbe only extermination was the cure. It was the existence of Jews that made them a provocation, just as the existence of Israel, in any borders, inspired the Hamas massacre, as its 1988 covenant, never revoked, makes abundantly clear. The towers were a similar provocation.

It was back in 2001 that Rosen found himself “awakened to anti-Semitism,” as he wrote at the time:

I am not being chased down alleyways and called a Christ-killer. . . . But in recent weeks I have been reminded, in ways too plentiful to ignore, about the role Jews play in the fantasy life of the world. Jews were not the cause of World War II, but they were at the metaphysical center of that conflict nonetheless, since the Holocaust was part of Hitler’s agenda and a key motivation of his campaign. Jews are not the cause of World War III, if that’s what we are facing, but they have been placed at the center of it in mysterious and disturbing ways.

I felt this in a different form reading coverage of Israel in European papers. Though public expressions of anti-Semitism are taboo in a post-Holocaust world, many Europeans, in writing about Israel, have felt free to conjure images of determined child killers and mass murderers. Earlier this year, the Spanish daily La Vanguardia published a cartoon depicting a large building labeled “Museum of the Jewish Holocaust” and behind it a building under construction labeled “Future Museum of the Palestinian Holocaust.”