The Argyle elevated train stop in the North Chicago neighborhood of Uptown is one of the last places you would expect to find a synagogue. The street below the station is choked with Asian markets and homeless men. But turn the corner one block west and there it is, a massive structure of stone and stained glass rising incongruously above two- and three-story condominiums: the Agudas Achim North Shore Congregation synagogue.
In a way the obscurity is fitting. This is a story of lost and found: a synagogue that was lost and the two men who rediscovered it. But before Agudas Achim was lost, it was founded – in 1922.
At that time Uptown was a ritzy northern suburb of Chicago and a growing center for the city’s Jewish population. So when the First Hungarian Congregation “Agudath Achim” (originally founded in 1884) moved to Uptown from the West Side and combined with the local North Shore Congregation “Sons of Israel,” they decided to build big and build beautiful.
The result was a 23,000-square-foot synagogue that boasted a cantor, rabbi and full choir and regularly drew more than 2,000 people for Shabbat services. During the High Holidays people would pack the balconies up to the sky blue, vaulted ceiling.
But times change. By the 1930s and ’40s the trend was for Jews to move farther north – to Skokie, Roger’s Park and other, more distant suburbs – and by the 1960s the neighborhood of Uptown was crumbling. Almost overnight the vibrant Jewish community disappeared and the synagogue fell into disrepair. Dust gathered, the roof leaked, and vandals regularly smashed the rows and rows of stained-glass windows.
And that’s how Steven Turk found it 20 years later – a shell of a prayer space. “There was no [mortar] left on the south side of the building,” he says. “You could literally put your hand between the bricks. The water and moisture and snow would come right into the synagogue.” It was a miracle the building still stood, but it was also a miracle Turk found it at all.
Turk grew up on the North Side of Chicago unaware of Agudas Achim a few miles away, though he knew his family had lived in the Uptown neighborhood for generations. Then, during a trip to California in 1986, he met a cousin who kept talking about the “Turk family synagogue.”
“But he couldn’t remember where it was – North Chicago somewhere,” Turk says. “He hadn’t been there since the ’40s. So the first thing I did when I got back was drive up and down the streets looking for this synagogue.”
Turk found it closed and boarded up, but learned a minyan met there on Saturday mornings. Sure enough, when he walked in the door during the next Shabbat, there were his grandparents’ names on the plaque of benefactors. It was an emotional moment, he says.
“I walk in the chapel and there are nine elderly men,” Turk recalls. “The youngest 65, the oldest 102, looking at their watches, looking at the door, looking at their watches, waiting for someone to complete their minyan. And here walks in a 24-year-old kid who then tells them his family members founded the synagogue. They embraced me, literally, looked up to the sky and said baruch hashem. Praise god.”
Turk was hooked and soon took over for the sick and elderly president. The congregation, however, was also sick and elderly. Most of the congregants had either weathered the deteriorating neighborhood for decades or recently emigrated from the Soviet Union. All were poor. Turk was the youngest member by more than 40 years.
The most pressing tasks were to repair the south side of the synagogue and the roof, which had leaked for decades. Turk remembers one Yom Kippur when it started raining and the water poured down onto the congregants huddled in front of the bimah. That was a low point, he says. But with a little youthful enthusiasm he completed both projects, often paying out of his own pocket (though 12 years later he has finally been reimbursed).
Then there was the issue of the congregation itself. “During the late ’80s and early ’90s sometimes we wouldn’t have a minyan on Shabbat because the elderly congregants couldn’t get out of their homes because it was cold or snowing,” Turk says. That was another low point. But while fortune had brought Turk to Agudas Achim to serve as president, another series of coincidences was about to bring an exciting new spiritual leader to the congregation.
Rabbi Philip Lefkowitz was on the board of the Jewish Council of Urban Affairs in Chicago in 1994 when he noticed the JCUA was sponsoring a community service program for Jewish college students that included “renovating an old synagogue.”
“Being a rabbi,” he says, “I took a busman’s holiday and I came.”
Lefkowitz was surprised by what he found. “I walk in, it’s dingy, half the light bulbs don’t work, and I see on a bulletin board, ‘Steven Turk, president.’ My wife’s maiden name is Turk – not a very common name. I figured that there would be a few old guys taking care of the place, in their 70s. So I asked to see him. He came over, a young handsome guy about 30 years old. I said, you’re Steven Turk? Can we do a little family tree?”
It turned out Turk’s great-grandfather and Lefkowitz’s wife’s grandfather were brothers. From there the conversation turned to the litany of problems Turk faced as president as well as the future of the congregation.
“I asked, ‘What are you doing in a place like this?’” Lefkowitz says. “He told me, ‘It’s killing me here.’ But I saw the gentrification [in the neighborhoods to the south] and I thought to myself: It’s got to hit here. It’s only a matter of time. So I said, ‘If the [current] rabbi leaves, I’ll give it a shot.’”
As fate would have it, two weeks later the part-time rabbi left, and Lefkowitz took the job for no pay. But new leadership was not going to make the original problems go away. By this point almost all the pre-1960s congregants had died off, and the Jews remaining in the neighborhood were elderly Russian immigrants living on Social Security and paying no dues to the synagogue. Nevertheless, Lefkowitz was a huge success.
At some point after the 1960s, the congregation had switched from Orthodox to Conservative, but Lefkowitz started leading Orthodox services again, making the Russian Jews feel more at home. They also felt more comfortable with him. Lefkowitz, a bearish man with a salt-and-pepper beard, dresses in traditional black robes and thoroughly looks the part of an Old World rabbi. Though he didn’t speak Yiddish when he first arrived (he thought his first sermon was a huge success – until he realized the Russians hadn’t understood a word), he taught himself so he could communicate. Suddenly the synagogue was popular again.
“That success brought me nothing but misery,” Lefkowitz says. “Usually 1,000 people in the pews means more wealth. But every person added took away. If you use the building, you turn on the lights. Who pays for the lights?”
In the meantime, he and his three sons ran the synagogue. If the toilet was plugged, they unplugged it. If they held an event, they prepared everything. Once Lefkowitz scrounged to hold a fancy community seder, with the cost at $18 a plate or whatever members could pay. The average person paid about $1.50.
And the neighborhood was still bad. Drug use was rampant, and since at that time an empty lot was all that existed next door, addicts could take their time smashing a window, climbing inside and getting high. They would also steal whatever they could get their hands on – wine, computers, anything.
Once two men stole a large stainless steel table donated to the synagogue’s kitchen. They were caught when they tried to sell it for scrap metal a few blocks away.
Then, in the form of a trickle, there was progress. Slowly and surely the main prayer space was cleaned and made usable through scattered donations. The small chapel, kitchen and common area were all remodeled. Then, about three years ago, younger faces started appearing in services, the first evidence of change in the neighborhood. By 2007 Lefkowitz’s decade-old prediction that gentrification had to hit was coming true. Young professionals were finally settling in Uptown to avoid the sky-high rents of Lincoln Park and other trendier neighborhoods to the south.
“This High Holy Days, I would say that 85 percent of the people who attended were not Russian-Jewish emgrants to the United States, and they were not seniors,” Lefkowitz says. “Normally I give a second sermon, the first in English and the second in Yiddish. I didn’t even give the second sermon. There was no need to. That’s a remarkable change.”
In response, Agudas Achim has developed new programming, such as Hebrew classes on Tuesdays, and created new events, such as its first ever Israeli Film Festival this January. It’s also a reciprocal relationship, with younger members helping provide the manpower for new events as well as attending them.
However, the older community of Russian Jews is dying off at the same time, and at an alarming rate. There used to be about 70 people for regular Shabbat services. Now there are 14. In one year Lefkowitz says he lost 35 attendees. But while overall numbers are down, the momentum has continued, and now Lefkowitz, Turk and a new president, Moshe Cohen, have big plans.
The first stage involves finishing the synagogue. “That we have young people in the area is good,” Cohen says, “but we need to get the restoration done. We need to be able to offer them something visually interesting.” A national capital campaign is already under way, and the congregation hopes to finish renovations in the next three to four years.
After that, Lefkowitz and Turk envision tearing down the derelict Hebrew school next door and building a community center to serve not just the Jewish community, but all of Uptown. When completed, the five-story community center will include classrooms, a gym, an auditorium, a mikvah and a roof garden. In Lefkowitz’s opinion, while Jews are no longer the majority in Uptown as they were 80 years ago, Agudas Achim should still serve a central role in the community. Already the synagogue hosts the local Block Club’s town hall-style meetings and lets other community organizations use its facilities.
Still, even with the gentrification not everything is roses at Agudas Achim. Recently the congregation resorted to welding all its windows shut after the same person robbed the synagogue twice, and hate slogans have been painted on the exterior walls. But Lefkowitz and Turk are determined to revive what they have uncovered.
“Agudas Achim is the last remaining classical, cathedral-style, magnificent synagogue in Chicago. It’s just so important that we save it,” Turk says. “My great-grandparents 80 years ago invested so much time and energy to build this synagogue that I feel it’s my role to pass it on to my kids in the same way.”
Visit Agudas Achim at 5029 N. Kenmore in Chicago or call 773-561-0435 for more information.
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