Jewish NYC: Hanukkah and history

Museums and historic sites, the world's largest menorah, and a trendy new Tribeca restaurant inspired by an old-school Catskills resort. They're all part of Jewish New York, with a heritage that stretches back 400 years and a vital contemporary community that's reinterpreting old traditions for the 21st century.

New York City has the largest concentration of Jews in the world outside of Israel, according to the Jewish Databank, which put the city's Jewish population at 1.4 million in 2002. The stories of European Jews who arrived in the late 19th and early 20th centuries are relatively well-known and easy to find in places like the Lower East Side. But visitors with an interest in Jewish New York will also want to explore many other parts of the city, from the Jewish Children's Museum in Brooklyn to a 17th century graveyard on a Chinatown side street.

An obvious place to start is Ellis Island, where the ancestors of so many American Jews first set foot on U.S. soil. Boats run from Battery Park - schedules at statuecruises.com - to the National Park site in New York Harbor. The Ellis Island museum offers a wealth of artifacts connected to Jewish immigrants, including a photo of a kosher kitchen that opened on the island in 1911 and an eye chart with a line of Hebrew letters.

From where the boat lets you off on your return to Manhattan, you can walk to the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Battery Park City. Through summer 2012, the museum is hosting a fascinating exhibit about Emma Lazarus. Lazarus' sonnet "The New Colossus" with its famous line "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddles masses," is engraved on a tablet in the Statue of Liberty's pedestal, and Lady Liberty can be seen from the museum windows. Lazarus was born in New York to an old Sephardic Jewish family; a letter about religious freedom from her great-great uncle to George Washington is part of the show.

The Museum of Jewish Heritage was created as a memorial to those who perished in the Holocaust. Many of its permanent exhibits are related to life before, during and after the Nazi persecution of Jews in Europe during World War II. Admission, $12 (children 12 and under free); closed Saturdays; mjhnyc.org.

A little farther uptown you'll find a newcomer restaurant with nostalgic ties to New York's Jewish past. Kutsher's Tribeca, which opened in November at 186 Franklin St., is the brainchild of Zach Kutsher, whose grandparents ran Kutsher's Country Club, a popular Catskills resort in its mid-20th century heyday. The menu reinvents and updates favorite Jewish comfort foods, offering savory brisket meatballs, chopped liver made from duck, and yummy matzo ball soup with dill. You can even order caviar with your latkes - though the roe is not from sturgeon, which isn't kosher. (Kutsher's is not strictly kosher but it does not serve forbidden foods like pork or shellfish.)

Drinks at Kutsher's hark back to fun times at the resort with names like Bungalow Bunny, the term for a wife spending the summer with her kids in the Catskills while her husband worked in the city; and Bug Juice, originally a summer camp drink for kids made from a combination of leftover juices. The restaurant serves dinner from 5:30 p.m. on; beginning Dec. 20, lunch will be served at noon. On Dec. 25, Kutsher's will offer a special Chinese-themed menu in honor of the American Jewish tradition of going out for Chinese food on Christmas Day.

Next, head to Chinatown, where Jewish history is hiding in plain sight. Near the entrance to the Manhattan Bridge, just south of Chatham Square, is the oldest Jewish cemetery in the U.S., at 55 St. James Place. The graveyard was used from 1682 to 1828 by Congregation Shearith Israel, also known as the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue. Today, Shearith Israel's synagogue is uptown at 2 W. 70th St., but the congregation was founded in the 1650s by Sephardic Jews who settled in Lower Manhattan when it was New Amsterdam, a Dutch colony. Emma Lazarus belonged to the congregation, as did her famous relative, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Cardozo. (next page »)