The synagogue has sat in shambles for more than five years. Its destruction is the result of an unconventional deal that many congregants once saw as their salvation, though some were skeptical from the outset.

Image The center, built in 1938, has been languishing in disrepair for over five years. Credit... Katherine Marks for The New York Times

And as with so many real estate deals during the boom years, it has devolved into a long fight with a bank.

“This congregation has been through so much — it was founded by people fleeing atrocities in Europe,” David Libchaber, the center’s president. “For them to die without the synagogue they spent their life building, I can’t stand it.”

When Rutherford Thompson, known as Ruddy, showed up at the synagogue’s door in 2005, membership had dwindled to a few dozen and it was a struggle to get the required 10 people for a minyan to hold services. But what the synagogue still had was a valuable perch in Washington Heights, at the edge of a cliff between Fort Washington Avenue and Overlook Terrace, with its grand sanctuary built on stilts.

Mr. Thompson, an apartment rehabber with no high-rise experience at the time (he has since built one in the Bronx), had bought the land on both sides of the Fort Tryon Jewish Center along Overlook Terrace to build a 23-story condominium tower. But he still needed some air rights and, more important, a second entrance on Fort Washington Avenue. That would allow residents to enter on a grand street across from a lush park — the highest point in Manhattan — rather than wedged between the 181st Street subway entrance and a parking garage more than 100 feet below.