East Midwood Jewish Center is a Conservative synagogue located at 1625 Ocean Avenue, Midwood, Brooklyn, New York City.
Organized in 1924, the congregation's Renaissance revival building (completed in 1929) typified the large multi-purpose synagogue centers being built at the time, and was from the 1990s until 2010 the only synagogue with a working swimming pool in Brooklyn. The building has been unmodified architecturally since its construction, and in 2006 was added to the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP).
Membership dropped during the Great Depression, and the synagogue suffered financial hardship, but it recovered, and by 1941 had 1,100 member families. In 1950 the congregation built an adjoining school; at its peak its enrollment was almost 1,000. As neighborhood demographics changed in the late 20th century, and Brooklyn's Jewish population became more Orthodox, the East Midwood Jewish Center absorbed three other Conservative Brooklyn congregations.
The East Midwood Jewish Center has had only three rabbis since it was founded. Reuben Kaufman served from 1924 to 1929, Harry Halpern from 1929 to 1977, and Alvin Kass since then. As of 2011, the rabbi was Kass and the presidents were Michael T. Sucher and Larry Isaacson.
Read more about East Midwood Jewish Center: Famous Members
Famous quotes containing the words east, jewish and/or center:
“The beds i’ th’ East are soft.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“For every nineteenth-century middle-class family that protected its wife and child within the family circle, there was an Irish or a German girl scrubbing floors in that home, a Welsh boy mining coal to keep the home-baked goodies warm, a black girl doing the family laundry, a black mother and child picking cotton to be made into clothes for the family, and a Jewish or an Italian daughter in a sweatshop making “ladies” dresses or artificial flowers for the family to purchase.”
—Stephanie Coontz (20th century)
“Every beloved object is the center point of a paradise.”
—Novalis [Friedrich Von Hardenberg] (1772–1801)