NEW YORK, NY.- The Museum at Eldridge Street and the Blavatnik Archive collaborate on an exhibition of early twentieth-century postcards of the "Jewish Ghetto" on the old Lower East Side and the shtetls of Eastern Europe. These vintage postcards from the Blavatnik Archive find a fitting home in the Museum's landmark site, the 1887 Eldridge Street Synagogue - a magnificent National Historic Landmark that is the first synagogue built in America by Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. The exhibition is on view through Wednesday, March 8, 2017.

At a time when immigration policy is front-page news, these early twentieth-century postcards provide important historical perspective. In captivating color and stark black and white, they recall vanished places that are at the heart of the Jewish immigrant experience. They also suggest how cultural conceptions and types were disseminated in popular culture.

From 1880 to 1924, one third of the Jewish population of Eastern Europe left for the United States fleeing persecution and seeking economic opportunity. Most settled on the Lower East Side making it the most crowded neighborhood in the world. On these shores, Jewish immigrants found themselves in a new kind of densely urban neighborhood. Still, echoes of the old country could be found in the cries of the marketplace, the plaintive tunes of the synagogue, and most of all in the shared Yiddish language of neighbors.

The Museum's landmark home, the 1887 Eldridge Street Synagogue, is one of the most striking markers of that era. Once the center of the Jewish immigrant community, today it is a part of a bustling Chinatown.

The Jewish Ghetto in Postcards features fifty postcard images, interpretive text, oral history quotes, and an iPad component where visitors can enlarge and examine the postcards.

The postcards of Eastern Europe depict men with long beards, wooden homes along unpaved streets, and other stereotypical scenes of the shtetl, with captions printed on the cards describing them as "Jewish Types" and the "Jewish Quarter." Some of these images are snapshots taken by passing soldiers during World War I who were struck by the exotic-looking community they encountered. The bulk of the exhibition features images of New York's Lower East Side, long an immigrant gateway. Images of bustling streets with pushcarts and horse-drawn carriages, a pickle vendor, and a surprisingly beautiful view of tenements with laundry suspended from one tenement to the next recall a by-gone era.

The Lower East Side is described on both the front and back of postcards as "The Ghetto" or "Judea." During the first decades of the 20th century, the term "the Ghetto" was understood as the place where the Jews lived in New York City. The postcards were collected in albums, sent as a memento from travels, or - as indicated by a message scrawled on one of the featured images - mailed by Progressive-era teachers and workers who wanted to show the atmosphere of the neighborhood where they worked.

Along with the exhibition, the Museum is presenting a rich calendar of companion cultural programs, including curator-led tours, walking tours, lectures and music that focus on the American Jewish immigrant experience on the Lower East Side. The Museum will also offer educational programs for local school children, many of them recent immigrants.