Newsday from New York, New York • 116

LASTO i sitting at an old wooden desk in a comer of the union offices on East Seventh Street, surrounded fay fading photos of the Yiddish greats. After this goes, we will have no signs that there was ever a Yiddish theater in New York. Rexaite said he had hoped that some rich Jews" in New York would step in and save the theater as a goodwill gesture. He said he was particularly upset that Martin Haynes, president of M. J.

Raynes the large real estate firm that owns the budding; had allowed it to pass into nwitliiwtriMl hands. Raynes father, the late Julius Raynes, was a major patron of the Yiddish theater and at one time owned most of the play-housea on Second Avenue. Martin Raynes declined to discuss the subject. In fact, however, it was not his firm, but the leaseholder, Square Productions, that sold the rights to the theater to City Cinemas, which operates about 10 screens around Manhattan. Square has held the rights to the theater since 1985, allowing outside production companies to put oh several shows, including Stagger Lee" and The Golden Land," a Yiddish revival in 1986.

But when the firm tried its own production, a musical version of Chaim Potoka novel The Chosen, it failed badly. The show dosed Jan. 9 after six regular performances, and the company decided to sdL Mitchell Max-well, president of Square, said he was convinced that legitimate theater, if not necessarily in Yiddish, could still draw crowds on Second Avenue. He said Sandra Bernhards stand-up satire was doing well a few blocks down at his firms Orpheum Theater (a former movie house; not, as Bernhard suggesta in the show, a room haunted by Yiddish ghosts). Square simply couldn't afford to retain the theater after the losses caused by The Chosen." We didn't abandon it for lack of need," Maxwell said.

After you do a show that takes you three years to do and it doses very quicklyand much to your diamqy theres only so many body blows you can take without taking a breather. Square had at one point drawn up plans to build a movie theater in the upper reaches of the building, while maintaining the legitimate Please see YIDDISH on Page 24 NEWSQAY, TUESDAY. AUGUST 2, 1988 NY Part 115 ater; they weren't built for anything Theyre all gone now. When this one goes, a part of us will go with it. And there isn't a very great part left." Her husband, Seymour Rexaite (it qaed to be Rechtzeit, but he changed it to make life a little easier), himself a familiar figure in many Yiddish productions, is best known the theater world as a longtime president of the Hebrew Actors Union, which all actors in Yiddish productions must join.

(His brother. Jack Rechtzeit, who was serving as president and was a well-known actin', died on Sunday, July 24.) Having fought unsuccessfully in past to keep other theaters open, he said watching this one pass was particularly galling. Its a terrible thing, what theyre doing to that theater, said Karaite, me in the theater, the Yiddish acton could walk fay and imagine a remnant of their glory, a direct connection to the crowds mid the adulation of their youth. If its a movie house, the cord is cut. This is it, this is the last one," said Miriam Kressyn, a star of Yiddish musical comedies since the 1930f- All those theaters on Second Avenue were built for Yiddish the.