6. Yiddish Walk of Fame

Image Courtesy of Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, Harry Bubbins

In the early 20th Century Second Avenue in the Lower East Side used to be known as “Yiddish Broadway.” The area was rife with theaters that put on all kinds of plays in Yiddish. To keep that history alive Second Avenue Deli owner Abe Lebewohl installed the Yiddish Theatre Walk of Fame in 1984 on the sidewalk in front of his deli. Lebewohl’s walk is made up of two rows of granite stars that feature the names of icons of the “Jewish Rialto” including Molly Picon, the Thomashevskys, The Barry Sisters, Fyvush Finkel, Moishe Oysher, Joseph Rumshinsky, Maurice Schwartz, 32 stars in all. The walk of fame is located down the block from one of the few physical remnants of this area’s thriving Yiddish art scene, the Jaffe Yiddish Arts Theater, now Village East Cinema.

Lebewohl sadly passed away in 1996 and in 2007 The Second Avenue Deli moved uptown. Since then, the Walk of Fame has gone into disrepair. Thankfully, The Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation has created the Friends of the Abe Lebewohl Yiddish Theatre Walk of Fame along with Lebewohl’s descendants and a coalition of neighborhood groups. The Friends hope to raise enough money to remove the original plaque tiles from the sidewalk and exhibit them as part of a permanent or traveling exhibition and then “commission a recreation of the original plaque tiles to be reinstalled somewhere relevant and nearby.”