{"id":271089,"date":"2026-06-18T18:10:12","date_gmt":"2026-06-18T18:10:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/271089\/"},"modified":"2026-06-18T18:10:12","modified_gmt":"2026-06-18T18:10:12","slug":"the-boroughs-full-of-jewish-echoes-and-memories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/271089\/","title":{"rendered":"The borough\u2019s full of Jewish echoes and memories"},"content":{"rendered":"

My sister, Lynn, and I always knew that our father grew up first in East New York and then in Flatbush, pure Brooklyn in every way, including his accent. (How much I\u2019d give to be able to hear that accent again! Now almost no one except Bernie Sanders has it; his is oddly unaltered by his half-century or so in Vermont, proving once again that you can take the boy out of Brooklyn, but\u2026)<\/p>\n

We also always knew that our mother was from the Bronx. The South Bronx, in fact, the neighborhood that was so brutally underserved, victimized, and set alight during the city\u2019s financial crisis in the 1970s. Her accent was far less audible than our father\u2019s; when she was in college, she told us, she took a speech course that took particular aim at glottal stops.<\/p>\n

Our parents, Ashkenazi both, used to tell us that theirs was a mixed marriage. His family spoke Yiddish, hers spoke Hungarian, and then there was the Brooklyn\/Bronx thing. But it worked.<\/p>\n

Lynn and I both know what Brooklyn looks like, and we know parts of the Bronx, but not the South Bronx, so when we saw that the Bronx County Historical Society was offering a walking tour of the neighborhood called Longwood, we jumped. (Then we walked\u2026)<\/p>\n

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\n\t\tDr. David Herszenson leads a tour in the Longwood section of the South Bronx. (All photos courtesy David Herszenson)<\/p>\n

It was wonderful.<\/p>\n

There are all kinds of love \u2014 romantic, platonic, parental, obsessive, healing. Our tour guide, David Herszenson, showed us another kind of love. A love of place. His love of the Bronx \u2014 both pure and clear-eyed \u2014 informed every stop we made on the walk, advertised as being 90 minutes but lasting for more than two hours, every minute of it fascinating.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a story to how David came to fall in love with the Bronx and guide the tour. He\u2019s a licensed New York City tour guide, which means that he had to pass a test about the city\u2019s history, landmarks, geography, and public transit system, among other categories. It\u2019s not up there with London\u2019s famous black-cab driver test, the Knowledge, which is notoriously difficult, but it\u2019s real nonetheless.<\/p>\n

David is also Dr. Herszenson, a physician who practices family medicine, of course in the Bronx. And he\u2019s the son of a father born in a DP camp, so his attraction to the South Bronx began with his interest in the old synagogues that lie, some repurposed, some disintegrating, in the neighborhood.<\/p>\n

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\n\t\tThis spectacular lobby is in the Fish Building on the Grand Concourse.
Its architects, Horace Ginsbern (n\u00e9 Ginsberg) and Marvin Fine, were Jewish. In 1940 a Yiddish movie, \u201cThe Amerikaner Shadchen,\u201d was shot there.<\/p>\n

So first, Dr. Herszenson\u2019s story.<\/p>\n

David Herszenson was born in Milwaukee. His father, Sidney Herszenson, was born in a DP camp in Germany. His parents were Polish Jews, who fled east to the Soviet Union, and ended up in a gulag in Siberia. Like many of the Jews who survived the war there, frozen, starved, only half alive at the end, they went back to their homes to hear the even more harrowing stories of the camps and clammed up, locked up by survivor\u2019s guilt for having had what they thought of as a relatively easier time. (All of this is relative; it is fair to say that the gulag survivors survived hell.)<\/p>\n

The family planned to go to Palestine, but they didn\u2019t because Sidney\u2019s older sister was sick \u2014 possibly with malaria \u2014 so a doctor advised staying away from there. (And that most likely was a wise decision; Palestine was Malaria Central at the time.) They were able to get visas to the United States and at first planned to join relatives in New Orleans, but that city\u2019s basically built in a swamp, so that move would have been unwise. They ended up in Brooklyn.<\/p>\n

Dr. Herszenson\u2019s maternal grandparents came from Odesa and got into the United States just before quotas began to be imposed. They moved to Milwaukee; that\u2019s where David\u2019s mother, Suzanne, was born, and a generation later where she gave birth to David.<\/p>\n

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\n\t\tDavid is in front of another Carnegie library in the Bronx; this one\u2019s in Morrisania.<\/p>\n

About the family\u2019s last name \u2014 \u201cWe are the only people in the world with the name Herszenson,\u201d David said. Or at least the only people in the United States. Everyone else changed it to the more phonetic Hershenson, he said.<\/p>\n

The Herszensons belonged to a Conservative synagogue in Milwaukee.<\/p>\n

David graduated from the University of Wisconsin at Madison as a premed student with a bachelor\u2019s degree in social work, and then he stayed local, earning his MD at the university\u2019s medical school. He arrived in the Bronx for his residency at the Montefiore Medical Center, where he finished that part of his studies as chief resident. That was in 2008. He also earned a masters degree in public health, specializing in policy and management, at Hunter College.<\/p>\n

The Bronx was a logical place for him. Montefiore \u201chad and has a social medical program, for people who are interested in the social aspects of medicine.\u201d That doesn\u2019t mean going to medical school to make friends; it\u2019s for doctors who care for their patients as whole people, and who are interested in the broader social policy that underlies medical care. He\u2019s now an assistant professor of family medicine at Montefiore Einstein. His practice centers on helping patients manage the kinds of healthcare issues that are common in poor communities, particularly diabetes and hypertension. He worked at the Bronx Health Collective until 2021; now he\u2019s at a clinic at Einstein.<\/p>\n

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\n\t\tThe Romanesque Revival-style, twin onion-domed Montefiore Hebrew Congregation opened in 1906. Its longtime rabbi, Jacob Katz, also was a chaplain in the Sing Sing prison in the 1920s and \u201930s. Now it\u2019s home to two churches.<\/p>\n

And, once again, he\u2019s a licensed city tour guide.<\/p>\n

There is at least one place where those two seemingly disparate lives come together, David said. He\u2019s involved with a nonprofit called Walk With a Doc, which \u201cencourages doctors to take walks with their patients on a regular basis.\u201d<\/p>\n

So how did he start to lead walking tours in the Bronx?<\/p>\n

At least in part because of all the synagogues there.<\/p>\n

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\n\t\tA model of the building as a shul.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn 2020, it was covid, and I couldn\u2019t do what I used to do. I used to see lots and lots of Broadway shows,\u201d he said. \u201cI was really busy. But all the things that I used to do I couldn\u2019t do.\u201d He lived on the Grand Concourse, \u201cso in the evenings, I would just walk around.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is a really nice website about Bronx synagogues, and that started me. I was walking from synagogue to synagogue And then I started to look at other buildings, and they were all really interesting. They each had a story, and I would start to read about them.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I moved to the Grand Concourse\u201d \u2014 that avenue of once and some still grand Art Deco apartment buildings, many of them home to Jews, particularly between the wars \u2014 \u201cI started to post about it on Facebook. I started sharing neighborhood and building profiles, and people responded to them. One friend, who runs an outdoor group, said, \u2018You really should give us a tour,\u2019 and I agreed, and I did. That was five years ago.<\/p>\n

\u201cI got addicted to tours then.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\n\t\tThis is the lobby at 888 Grand Concourse, the only Emery Roth building in the Bronx. Roth, a famous and influential architect, was Jewish.<\/p>\n

The tours are a mixture of history, sociology, art history, and architecture. \u201cI\u2019d always been interested in history,\u201d he said. \u201cArchitecture is new. I learned a lot.\u201d<\/p>\n

He talked about the Bronx. When Jews first moved into New York, most began in Manhattan, in the extraordinarily crowded Lower East Side. (The story of the Jews of Newark, the ones born at the Beth, is similar in kind but different in detail.) When they could no longer take the density and could afford to leave, many first moved uptown, to Harlem, or out to Brooklyn. When Harlem became crowded, they went further north, to the Bronx; from there, they fanned out to North Jersey and Westchester County. (Meanwhile, the Jews in Brooklyn, to continue to generalize, moved further out in that borough, then east to Queens, then further east to Long Island.)<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Bronx was called the Jewish borough,\u201d David said. That was most true in the 1930s and \u201940s. At one point, he said, the South Bronx was about 40 percent Jewish.<\/p>\n

There were many synagogues in the borough. Each one has a story; there are grand ones, with imposing architecture. Many of them are churches now, but when you look up, you see the stars of David in the stained glass and Hebrew words and the Jewish year etched in the stone on the upper levels. David can tell the stories of each of them.<\/p>\n

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\n\t\tThis mosaic, unsurprisingly, is in the Fish Building on the Grand Concourse.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s another detail that describes the travels of the Jews of the Bronx. On many doors of many buildings, including his own, there are painted-over mezuzot. That wasn\u2019t done out of any animus, just a simple lack of knowledge. Nobody knew what that thing on the door was.<\/p>\n

Back on our tour, my sister and I got to see our mother\u2019s neighborhood. Some of it is rundown, although our walk did not go through any streets that anyone who remembered the \u201cBronx is burning\u201d era might have expected. Some of it was vibrant; there are brightly colored murals all over. The South Bronx was where hip hop was born; there\u2019s much of that culture visible too. The Yiddish theater had thrived in the Bronx; there\u2019s a theater, now in total disrepair, that had housed one of its troupes.<\/p>\n

David was able to get us into one of the apartment buildings there. We climbed up the stairs to the roof \u2014 many, many stairs \u2014 and were able to look down at the borough.<\/p>\n

We walked by one of the original Andrew Carnegie libraries; this one, called Woodstock, was designed by McKim, Mean & White.<\/p>\n

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\n\t\tThis painted-over \u201cghost mezuzah\u201d hangs in a building on the Grand Concourse.<\/p>\n

We went past a shul that\u2019s still in business \u2014 it\u2019s now home to two churches, one of them Spanish-language Seventh Day Adventist \u2014 that is crowned by two onion domes. David\u2019s not sure why.<\/p>\n

As we got closer to Fox Street, the buildings started getting nicer. There were a few blocks that looked like brownstone Brooklyn; David said that those were built early in the Bronx\u2019s development, when it still was considered to be more rural than urban. (That\u2019s before the concept of suburban really took root.) Our mother\u2019s building was brick, and it was neatly painted in a subdued, pretty red. There was a courtyard, and three elderly women sat on benches there, talking. There was a neatly tended city park next to it, and children playing in it.<\/p>\n

Neither of us had any idea what to expect, but neither of us expected what we saw. It was neither bursting with wild, exuberant life nor at all threatening. It was pretty. It was even a bit sedate. It looked like a good place to grow up.<\/p>\n

We don\u2019t know what shul our mother and her family went to, but we do know that they went to shul, and that it would have been Orthodox. Now that the neighborhood has been demystified but instead brought to life for us, maybe we can begin to figure out where it might have been.<\/p>\n

And we plan to go on more walking tours with Dr. David Herszenson. He gives tours to anyone who wants them, he said; fees go to the Bronx County Historical Society, not to him. He does them free, out of love. And he knows what he\u2019s talking about.<\/p>\n

He\u2019s at dshersze@yahoo.com; his walks, and many of his photographs, are at facebook.com\/BronxandBeyond<\/a> and Instagram.com\/HerszensononGuiding<\/a>. The neighborhoods he tours with the most Jewish stories, he said, are Longwood, the Grand Concourse Historic District, and Morrisania. And he\u2019s really good.<\/p>\n

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