Wash Heights Jewish Center Says Goodbye To Its Historic Synagogue

WASHINGTON HEIGHTS, NY — A Washington Heights synagogue where Jewish faiths of all delineations and Holocaust survivors have gathered for decades to worship and share their stories is no longer a holy space after a bid to refinance the building burst with the 2008 housing bubble.

Congregation members and Jewish community leaders gathered at the Fort Tryon Jewish Center at 524 Fort Washington Avenue on Jan. 23 for a final deconsecration ceremony before its new owners take over.

"A prayer space accumulates its sanctity through years, decades, of prayer and Torah, service after service, reading after reading, with every whisper, and every song," Rabbi Guy Austrian said during the ceremony. "You can feel that in an old synagogue."

The deconsecration ceremony marked the end of a strange and frustrating saga that left the historic synagogue unusable in a perpetual state of demolition after a real estate deal went bad during the 2008 financial crisis.

"Rabbi Guy Austrian and other leaders of the Fort Tryon Jewish Center community conducted a ritual in our historic building to transition it away from its role as a holy, religious space," Fort Tryon Jewish Center told Patch in a statement. "We honored the generations who built the community and gathered in that space. And we celebrated the bright future ahead for our community as we move forward towards a permanent, long-term home of our own."

A few days before the January ceremony, the Amalgamated Bank finalized a sale of the synagogue building and its lot to a new owner — representing the official end of the Fort Tryon Jewish Center's ability to use the uptown building.

To understand the ceremony and sale finalization that took place at the end of January, you need to start all the way back in the 1930s.

The Fort Tryon Jewish Center was founded in 1938, one year before the start of World War II, by a diverse group of long-time Upper Manhattan residents and recent Jewish immigrants escaping from Europe.

The congregation's first home was the basement of a small building on Fort Washington Avenue and West 187th Street.

After 16 years, the synagogue moved to 524 Fort Washington Avenue, where it called home for the next 54 years.

By the time the synagogue moved into its new space, many of its congregants were Holocaust survivors.

The holy space's new building was filled with velvet and mahogany pews, lined by 80-foot stained glass windows, and centered by a 20-foot mosaic arch in the shape of Moses' two tablets.

At its peak, roughly 700 people attended the Fort Tryon Jewish Center's high holiday services.

However, in the early 2000s membership began to dwindle, and in 2003, the synagogue entered into a series of transactions with a developer who owned the neighboring lot on Overlook Terrace.

The congregants didn't know it at the time, but it was the beginning of the end for the historic synagogue.

The developer, Rutherford Thompson, had bought the land on both sides of the Fort Tryon Jewish Center with the goal of building a 23-story condominium tower.

Thompson still needed extra air rights and a second entrance on Fort Washington Avenue, though.

In 2005, Thompson and the Fort Tryon Jewish Center struck a deal to sell roughly 39,000 square feet of air rights for $2 million, with the additional agreement that the developer would gut and rebuild the deteriorating synagogue.

At the beginning of 2008, Thompson promised that the renovation would only take three months, but a few months later the housing bubble burst under a wave of subprime mortgages, and the developer's loan servicer, Amalgamated Bank — cut him off after he had received just $11 million of the $95 million that he had been promised to do the work.

At that point, Thompson had already begun the renovation project and demolished the interior of the synagogue — rendering it unusable.

In the years after, the renovation project was abandoned as the Fort Tryon Jewish Center attempted to work with the involved parties to come to a resolution as it lacked the resources to finish the project by itself.

• Read More: A Deal That Collapsed Leaves a Manhattan Synagogue in Shambles

The Fort Tryon Jewish Center stopped holding services in the original synagogue and began renting various spaces throughout the Upper Manhattan neighborhood. In recent years, the congregation has gathered in the social hall of the Hebrew Tabernacle, across the street from the longtime synagogue.

Transactions involving the space went quiet until 2020, when Amalgamated Bank foreclosed on Thompson's original lot on Overlook Terrace and became its new owner.

Later that year, Amalgamated approached Fort Tryon Jewish Center leadership about buying the 524 Fort Washington Avenue lot, along with the synagogue building.

After several community town hall meetings, Fort Tryon Jewish Center voted in January 2021 to move forward with the sale as the best path forward for finding a long-term home.

Amalgamated subsequently sold the properties to a new owner, which was finalized in January 2022.

Fort Tryon Jewish Center says that it is committed to using the money to find a new permanent home in the neighborhood for its 125 congregation households of 262 people.

"Wherever we go, we carry with us the aspirations and the blessings of our elders and all who came before us," Rabbi Austrian said during his remarks at the transition ceremony. "May we be a worthy link in the chain, making good use of these blessings, and passing them on to those who will come after us.”