These thousands of small synagogues all over the country, of which there are now about eight hundred in New York, bear also strong marks of Slavic, especially Russian, influence. The only place where it was safe for Jews to gather and have intercourse in that country was the synagogue, which for that reason served not only as a house of worship, but also as a meeting room, and, to some degree, as a club house. Here it served all these purposes for the old-fashioned Jew, to whom the new social organizations which grew up here remained strange or became repugnant after a short contact. In addition to this, the――exceedingly unchurchlike――small synagogue is usually composed of members who come from the same town in the Old Country, or from the same district. The “♦landsleut” meet there, receive the newest arrivals and the latest news from home; it is not unfrequently made the headquarters for extraordinary charitable activity when the home town is visited by a conflagration or a “Pogrom.” The tendency is to break away from those little synagogues and to join larger ones in the more comfortable neighborhoods, as well as to enlarge them by admitting members who hail from other towns and even from other countries. But the changes are mainly accomplished by slow transition, the gaps which are left by departures are easily filled up by new arrivals; so that the transformation is much nearer to a slow process of evolution than to the “decay of Judaism in this country” of which many are complaining. The earliest manifestation of this new development was the first effort which was made, less than a decade after the beginning of the new immigration, to consolidate the Orthodox Jewish community of New York under the leadership of a great rabbinical authority, and to raise the expense of the new institution by the same method by which the Jewish communities of Russia are financed――by an income from the Kosher-meat business.