East 85th Street between Park and Lexington, from the pavement opposite: the 1902 limestone front of Kehilath Jeshurun between brownstones, children from the Ramaz school next door going by in twos, and New Yorkers stood along the kerb on the synagogue side. Through the doors are the lobby and the school corridor, where more of them hang, and the sanctuary with its galleries on columns, forty stained glass windows and the eternal light over the ark.
Kehilath Jeshurun, a Modern Orthodox synagogue at 126 East 85th Street, was founded in 1872 as Anshe Jeshurun and built its neoclassical, Romanesque limestone building in 1902. A fire in July 2011, during minor renovations, destroyed nearly half of the sanctuary's forty stained glass windows, which were recreated using historical and forensic analysis; the $21 million rebuild added a two storey, 8,000 square foot education and fitness wing, a central entry shared with the school and an expanded lobby. The Ramaz School, founded in 1937 with the congregation's backing and named from the initials of Rabbi Moses Zevulun Margolies, shares the block.
Source · Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun, Wikipedia ↗
The limestone front with its round arched windows, pilasters and balustraded roofline, the three doors, the brownstone stoops and street trees of East 85th, the Ramaz lower school next door and its corridor, the lobby, the sanctuary with the U shaped gallery on columns, two tiers of stained glass, a central bimah with a brass rail, the ark under a round window, and the eternal light. Mood: a school afternoon on a rowhouse street. Everything is procedural geometry with painted surfaces; nothing is a scan or a photograph. The room is an interpretation, and it hangs the New Yorkers the census recorded at this place first.