Religious News in the Herald Tribune

The Service Men's Council of the New York City Federation of Churches was holding a conference Monday, April 29, to discuss "The Veteran at Work in the Church" at the Union Theological Seminary at Broadway and 120th Street. The Federation was made up of mainstream Protestant churches and had its headquarters at 71 W. 23rd Street. Invitations had been sent to 1500 churches in the city and Nassau and Westchester counties, Ministers were asked to bring one or two veterans from their churches with them. Conscientious objectors who had served in the war were invited to take part as well.

According to the Reverend Carl V. Herron, executive secretary of the Service Men's Council, this conference would not look upon the veteran as a "problem" to be addressed. Rather the purpose was to ask veterans what they wanted the churches to do in the postwar world. Herron said his conversations with returning servicemen led him to believe they wanted the churches to "be concerned with the whole business of living" rather than be simply be a place for Sunday worship. The program would include a panel presided over by Dr. Robert W. Searle, general secretary of the Greater Federation of Churches. The panel will be led by the Reverend Reuben W. Coleman, who was serving as executive secretary for the Federal Council of Churches' commission on ministry to returning service men and women. Several veterans, including ministers and laymen, were announced as participants.

The Salvation Army was marking Holy Week with noon meetings on the steps of the sub-treasury building in Wall Street from Monday through Thursday. It was also holding noon services at Temple Corps Hall at 130 West 14th Street. The organization announced that its postwar program would include youth activities, aid to veterans and service members and their families, an extension to their services in police courts and prisons and resumption of work in war-ravaged countries.

The newspaper also explained Passover and the Seder to its largely gentile readership. The story said that Temple Israel at 210 West 91st Street would be hosting guests from Riverside Church (Riverside and 122nd St.) and Second Presbyterian (W. 96th St.) for a symbolic Seder as it had the past few years. Several Jewish synagogues and temples were holding congregational Seders.

Temple Israel's history reflects the migration of the Jewish community in Manhattan. It was founded by German Jewish immigrants in Harlem in 1873 in a room over a printing shop. Most of its members owned and lived behind small stores in Harlem, which then was a brownstone community with a mix of Jewish-Irish-German- Anglo-Saxon residents. The congregation initially was Orthodox. It made a series of moves within Harlem as it grew and became associated with Reform Judaism. In 1907 it built a neoclassic synagogue on Lenox Avenue. In the early decades of the Twentieth Century, Harlem became increasingly working class as developers built tenements in the neighborhood and then it turned into the city's largest African American enclave. Much of the Temple Israel membership resettled on the Upper West Side. The congregation sold its Harlem edifice to the Seventh Day Adventists, although by 1946 the building was the home of its current occupants, the Mount Olivet Baptist Church. The Jewish congregation met at the Second Presbyterian Church on West 96th Street while its new neoclassic synagogue was constructed on West 91st. It opened its doors in 1920. In the postwar decades many of its now affluent membership moved across town and in the mid-Sixties Temple Israel followed to its current home on East 75th Street. The 91st Street location is now home to a congregation of Young Israel, an Orthodox movement with strong Zionist ties.

Second Presbyterian traces its history back to the 18th century. The congregation, originally known as the Scotch Church, once included a number of prominent New Yorkers in its membership and moved uptown several times in its history. It left West 14th Street in 1894 to take up residence on the Upper West Side. In 1928/29 it replaced its sanctuary with a "skyscraper church," one of several built during the building boom of the 1920s. The sanctuary is located within a 16-story apartment tower on the corner of 96th Street and Central Park West.

Riverside Church, built in the style of Chartres Cathedral, opened its doors in 1930. It had been founded by members of the Park Avenue Baptist Church with support from John D. Rockefeller Jr. and was headed by noted preacher and writer Harry Emerson Fosdick, a leader in the liberal, progressive wing of the Protestant church. Fosdick had a national radio broadcast on Sunday afternoons. He became minister emeritus in 1946. The imposing Gothic edifice is now a landmark.