gallin Remembrance of Synagogues Past - The Lost Civilization of the Jewish South Bronx
Synagogue Organized Dedicated
Congregation Beth David 1914 1924


832 Fox
at Intervale
Bronx, NY 10459
The building is currently abandoned.


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Personal Impressions

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Rabbi Titkin went from house to house collecting money for charity. He was always saying, Leben is Zeece (Life is sweet.).

After we moved from the neighborhood I was still in the area because I taught in a school several blocks away. I went to the synagogue to say Yiskor on the days that I went to work.


The program for the Twenty-second Annual Banquet given on March 2, 1947 was written in both English and Yiddish.


Rabbi Dr. Lazar Schonfeld was installed in 1925. He was the former chief rabbi in Vincovci, Yugoslavia and Nagykaroly, Hungary. He was installed in 1925 and given a life contract in 1936.


Among the memories of the Fox Street synagogue are the women throwing down brown bags of candies after Bar Mitzvahs, Chanukah dreidels, singing Adon Alum, knowing the Saturday service almost by heart and forgetting my Bar Mitzvah speech and then improvising.

Unfortunately, I remember being chased by the Puerto Rican boys as we carried our Simchas Torah flags.


My son was Bar Mitzvahed at the Fox Street synagogue. We were very poor and the only social life was to go for a walk and visit family and neighbors.


The Rabbi was Rabbi Schoenfeld who spoke German-Yiddish. It was known as the Hungarian shul.


My parents belonged to this shul for 25 years. This was a Hungarian shul. The prayer books had Hebrew written on one page and Hungarian on the opposite page (Just as we now have English written on the opposite page). The sermons were in Hungarian.


Every adult needed a ticket to attend services on the High Holy Holidays. The young girls collected the tickets that were thrown away after the last service and used them to play games.


When I said Kaddish for my father, I attended Congregation Beth David on Fox Street. The rabbi was Lazar Schoenfeld who spoke a German Yiddish. A majority of the congregants were Hungarian.


The mechetunim and future second wife of one of my musicians lived at 830 Fox Street near Intervale. From your site I learned that this was (as of 1924) directly next door to the Hungarian Synagogue at 832 Fox Street.

I grew up in Brooklyn (I'm 59 now and my only direct connection with that neighborhood was the one year (1988/89) when I taught at a public school on Kelly Street. It was an overwhelmingly Hispanic neighborhood. There were only a very few poor, elderly Jews still living around there by that time.