The Synagogues of Kentucky

Architecture and History

Lee Shai Weissbach

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780813187327
• Topic: Arquitectura
• Subtopic: Arquitectura religiosa

Lee Shai Weissbach's innovative study sheds light on the functioning of smaller Jewish communities in a state representative of many in the Midwest and South. The synagogue buildings of Kentucky tell much about the experience of Kentucky Jewry. Synagogues, especially in smaller towns, have often served as the only setting available for a wide variety of communal activities. Weissbach outlines the history of every congregation established in Kentucky and every house of worship that has served Kentucky Jewry over the last 150 years, considering such issues as the financing of construction, the selection of architects, the way synagogue buildings reveal congregational attitudes, and the way local synagogue design reflects national trends. Eighty-two photographs show every one of Kentucky's synagogues, including buildings that are no longer standing or have been converted to other uses. This pictorial record documents the variety, distinctiveness, and significance of these buildings as a part of the Commonwealth's architectural, cultural, and religious landscape.

Chapter 1

The Formation of
Kentucky’s Jewish
Congregations

FROM THE PERSPECTIVE of Jewish tradition, very little is required in order for a group of individuals to organize for public worship. Jewish practice does not require that prayer services be conducted with the participation of a rabbi, or within a synagogue building, or with the sanction of any hierarchical authority. Traditionally, the only fundamental requirement for Jewish public worship has been the presence of a minyan, a quorum of ten adult men, and in recent times even that requirement has been modified within some communities. Today, in some circles, women may be counted in the minyan, or the standards for defining a minimum number of worshipers may be ignored altogether. Since public readings from the Torah, the Five Books of Moses, form an integral part of Sabbath and holiday services, and since the Torah scroll is the focus of much religious ritual, the presence of this sacred object might also be considered a necessity for public worship. There is nothing in Jewish custom, however, that would prevent any group of individuals who wanted a Torah scroll from acquiring one.

Moreover, even though in other times and in other places local authorities both outside and inside the Jewish community have exerted a great deal of control over Jewish communal organization, in the United States over the last two centuries, Jews have enjoyed an almost complete freedom to organize their religious lives and their communal institutions however they have seen fit. Thus, in Kentucky as in other places where Jews have settled in the United States, any assembly of Jews that wished to establish itself formally as a congregation usually has been able to do so without encountering any inherent difficulties. The ease with which both Jewish tradition and American society have allowed for the creation of congregational bodies helps explain why no fewer than thirty different Jewish congregations have come into existence in Kentucky since the middle of the nineteenth century.

The lack of institutional barriers to the formation of new congregations, however, is only one factor to be considered in telling the story of Jewish congregational organization in Kentucky. Certainly the proliferation of congregations in the commonwealth is also due in part to the fact that over the years Kentucky’s Jewish citizens have distributed themselves rather widely throughout the state. The population figures presented in Table 1 make it clear that the largest concentration of Jews in the commonwealth has always been in Louisville, but the data also show that river towns such as Paducah, Owensboro, Covington, and Newport have had significant Jewish populations in the past as well. So have a few cities of the interior, notably Lexington and Hopkinsville. In each of these and a few other towns, Jewish assemblies have existed to serve the local community. All told, there are eleven different cities and towns in Kentucky where Jewish congregations have functioned at one time or another, though in some of these places organized Jewish life lasted only a short time (the prime example is that of Danville, where a local congregation functioned for only a couple of years in the late 1940s).

Another factor that helps account for the appearance of numerous Jewish congregations in Kentucky is the divergence of opinion among Jews over matters of religious belief and usage. Perhaps the central issue that has divided American Jewry since at least the middle of the nineteenth century concerns the alteration of traditional Jewish doctrines and practices in response to changing social environments. Disagreements over the maintenance of traditional beliefs and rituals has resulted in the segmentation of American Judaism into several branches. Orthodox Judaism, as it has come to be called, asserts that all Jewish practice is God-ordained, that it has the power of law, and that it is essentially immutable.

The Reform Judaism that developed in the nineteenth century, on the other hand, has come to treat the requirements of the Jewish legal code, the halacha, as mere custom, and it has abandoned many of the usages maintained in the Jewish faith for hundreds or even thousands of years. Conservative Judaism has taken a position somewhere between that of Orthodoxy and that of Reform. It accepts the binding character of halacha but tends to be somewhat lenient in its interpretation of Jewish law and rather flexible in recognizing its evolution. In very recent years the new designation Traditional has been adopted by some American Jewish congregations, denoting a position somewhere between that of Orthodoxy and that of Conservatism. Reconstructionist Judaism, occupying a place somewhere between Conservatism and Reform, also exists as a variant of American Judaism, but it has never been officially represented in any of Kentucky’s Jewish congregations.

Because American Judaism has become divided into various branches with different attitudes toward Jewish law, liturgical practices and ritual observances vary quite widely from congregation to congregation. In Orthodox assemblies, for instance, men and women sit separately; heads are covered; and the men generally wear prayer shawls at morning services. Orthodox services, which are primarily in Hebrew and unaccompanied by musical instruments, are conducted exclusively by males. In Reform congregations, by contrast, families sit together; heads may be bare; and the services, often accompanied by an organ and a choir, tend to be shortened and altered versions of older forms, frequently translated into English. In Conservative and Traditional congregations, much of the Orthodox liturgy is retained and there is no organ, but families sit together, and women may or may not participate in conducting worship services. While the centrality of Saturday morning worship has been maintained in Orthodox, Traditional, and Conservative congregations, Reform congregations have increasingly tended to hold their main Sabbath services on Friday evening. This is mainly because Reform Judaism has dropped the age-old prohibition of labor on the Sabbath and has recognized that for most American Jews, Saturday is no longer a day of rest reserved for prayer, study, and relaxation. In the past, some Reform congregations even experimented with a Sunday observance of the Sabbath.

Although it is very common to find that individual congregants do not adhere to the theological positions supported by their congregations, synagogue members have nonetheless always tended to believe that, as institutions, their congregations should identify closely with one or another of the various branches of American Judaism. Thus, even in rather small Jewish communities, a single congregational body has not always been able to cater to the requirements of all the local Jews, and this has created the need for additional assemblies. In Kentucky, the existence of two congregations side by side in both Lexington and Ashland was the result primarily of theological division rather than demographic pressure.

Besides population growth, statewide dispersal, and ideological distinctions, other factors also help explain the appearance of more than two dozen Jewish congregations in Kentucky. In a few cases the creation of a new congregation was the result of the restructuring and renaming of an older body. This was probably the case in Lexington, where the Adath Israel congregation organized at the beginning of the twentieth century seems to have taken over the congregational functions of the older Spinoza Society. Similarly, Adath Jeshurun in Louisville appears to have been a new and more liberal entity, following what today would be called Conservative practice, formed specifically to replace the Orthodox Beth Israel assembly that disbanded in 1894.

In America’s larger Jewish communities throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, the existence of various affinity groupings and social circles often helped account for the creation of new congregations. In Kentucky’s largest city, too, internal social structure seems to have played a role in congregational formation; as early as the mid-nineteenth century, members of Adath Israel were already worried about “the possible admission to the congregation of an undesirable element.”¹ The fact that two different Reform congregations and four different Orthodox bodies were functioning in Louisville during the 1920s can be explained only with some reference to factors that had little to do with practical considerations or basic disagreements over religious ideology.

One specific factor that often drew certain groups of individuals together to form their own congregations was their European place of origin. In Louisville, for example, it was Jews of Polish derivation who created the Beth Israel congregation in 1851. Beth Israel was actually chartered as “the Polish House of Israel,” and as late as 1868 its place of worship was still identified in the Louisville city directory as the “Polish synagogue.” Before 1851 Louisville’s Polish Jews (most of whose roots were probably in the Prussian-controlled province of Posen) had been members of the city’s Adath Israel congregation. But Adath Israel was dominated by Jews who hailed from western Germany, and although the founders of Beth Israel differed little from these German Jews in basic religious philosophy, they went their own way in order to perpetuate some of the specific local customs and liturgical nuances that they had brought with them from Europe.

The predilection of modern Jews to divide themselves into different congregations and then to develop fierce loyalties to their own assemblies while disdaining other bodies (even those located within their own communities and very similar in ideology and practice) is so much a feature of Jewish life that it has become a recurrent subject in Jewish humor. Perhaps the best-known joke on this theme is the one about the Jewish survivor of a shipwreck who spent several years on an uninhabited island. When he was finally discovered, the marooned Jew offered to take his rescuers on a tour so they could see how he had been living while waiting to be found. Over the years he had erected several rude structures out of materials available on the island: a dwelling, a workshop, a storehouse, a cabana by the beach, and two huts to serve as synagogues. “Why two synagogues?” asked the rescuers. “All these years you’ve been here completely alone.” “Well,” answered the shipwreck survivor, pointing to one of the huts, “this is the synagogue I go to, and the other is the one I wouldn’t set foot in.”

Table 2, page 150, provides a complete list of all the Jewish congregations that are known to have existed in Kentucky since Jewish settlement began in the state over a century and a half ago. The table is arranged chronologically by the date of each congregation’s founding. As even a quick review of the table reveals, the congregations included are not only those well-established assemblies that functioned in the commonwealth’s major cities over many decades but also less firmly rooted ones (such as the Blue Grass Judean Society of Danville) that lasted for only a few years and that may never have had a resident rabbi or a synagogue building of their own.

It should be noted, however, that Table 2 does not include informal associations that never organized officially or whose members assembled only occasionally to hold worship services. Not listed, for example, are two Louisville prayer groups that got as far as adopting names, but apparently did not survive for more than a few months; each appears only once in documentary sources. They are Shaar Hashomaim (Gate of Heaven), which is reported to have held services at the corner of Brook and Hill Streets in Old Louisville in the fall of 1931 for the High Holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur (the Jewish New Year and the Day of Atonement), and Machzikai Hados (Supporters of the Faith), which was listed in the 1932 Louisville city directory as meeting at the residence of Rabbi Asher Zarchy at 507 East Chestnut Street. Zarchy was for many years the most important Orthodox rabbi in the city, overseeing the Louisville Hebrew School and several congregations. It is likely that Machzikai Hados was a circle of worshipers that gathered around Zarchy in the final year of his life, and then disbanded.

Also not listed among Kentucky’s Jewish congregations is the collection of families in Frankfort that for a time after World War II arranged annual Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services. Similarly excluded is a small body of individuals who worshiped together on Saturday mornings at Louisville’s Jewish day school in the 1950s and 1960s (they did so out of a desire to hold Orthodox services in the Highlands neighborhood at a time when most of Louisville’s synagogues were still downtown). A northern Kentucky group that gathered once in a while to observe Jewish holidays during the early and middle 1980s is also absent from Table 2.² The thirty congregations that are included in Table 2 are listed again in Table 3, a city-by-city inventory prepared as an additional reference guide.

It has generally been the custom for Jewish congregations to choose Hebrew names for themselves, and Table 2 provides a translation of the name of every Kentucky congregation that had a Hebrew designation (in those cases where a congregation has generally been known by its English name, the Hebrew name appears in parentheses). Most of Kentucky’s Jewish congregations chose names that were straightforwardly descriptive: Congregation of Israel, House of Israel, Assembly of Israel. Others chose names that alluded to the values they sought to represent: peace, brotherhood, uprightness, scholarship.

The English word “temple” is found in the names of several Kentucky congregations, and for Reform Jews, at least, the use of this word has its origins in a specific theological tenet. Traditionally, the Jewish concept of Messianic times has included a vision of the ingathering of the Jewish people to its ancient homeland and the restoration of a central Temple in Jerusalem. Reform Judaism, which promoted the integration of Jews into the societies around them, rejected the concept of a redemption centered on the Land of Israel, however, and Reform congregations often adopted the use of the term “temple” in the names of their congregations and places of worship in order to emphasize that they had no longing for the restoration of a central Temple in the Holy Land. Reform Jews may also have preferred to use the term “temple” for their houses of prayer because it sounded less alien than the Greek word “synagogue.” Some congregations that follow a more traditional variety of Judaism have used the word “temple” in their names as well—the Temple of Israel in Covington is an example—but this practice has not been common, and it has certainly been adopted without embracing the theological implications Reform Judaism had attached to it. In the case of Covington’s congregation, the name “Temple of Israel” may have had its origin as a direct translation, perhaps not the best, of the Hebrew designation “Hechal Yisrael.”

When they adopted their names, different congregations sometimes used variant spellings of the same Hebrew word. For ...