“I believe that the best miracles are the miracles we make with our own hands, and this is such a miracle,” Rimma Kharlamov, the coordinator of the Council of Jewish Émigré Community Organizations, said while standing before the bimah, the raised prayer dais in the middle of the sanctuary.

The synagogue was built a century ago by a congregation of Jews who had moved to Corona from the Lower East Side. Even though the Queens site was surrounded by open space, the congregation chose to construct a long, narrow two-story building, much like the synagogues that had been crammed between tenements and commercial buildings in their old neighborhood.

By the 1960s, Corona’s Jews began to move away, and over the decades, the area became one of the city’s most diverse, with African, Chinese, Mexican, Filipino and Puerto Rican residents, among others. The yeshiva affiliated with Tifereth Israel was shuttered and converted into a basic residence and music studio where Madonna lived briefly in the late 1970s, the conservancy said.

Rabbi Khaimov moved into the neighborhood in about 1997, saying he wanted to be with the poor, instead of the more successful Bukharan community flourishing in nearby Lefrak City. He held prayers in his living room and then the basement of Tifereth Israel, amid peeling paint and no heat. But the old guard at the synagogue did not like what felt like a takeover by Bukhori-speaking strangers with very different ways of praying. The last remaining member locked them out, until ordered to allow them back.