The Synagogue in America

A Short History

Marc Lee Raphael

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780814777046
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Teologia ebraica

In 1789, when George Washington was elected the first president of the United States, laymen from all six Jewish congregations in the new nation sent him congratulatory letters. He replied to all six. Thus, after more than a century of Jewish life in colonial America the small communities of Jews present at the birth of the nation proudly announced their religious institutions to the country and were recognized by its new leader. By this time, the synagogue had become the most significant institution of American Jewish life, a dominance that was not challenged until the twentieth century, when other institutions such as Jewish community centers or Jewish philanthropic organizations claimed to be the hearts of their Jewish communities.

Concise yet comprehensive, The Synagogue in America is the first history of this all-important structure, illuminating its changing role within the American Jewish community over the course of three centuries. From Atlanta and Des Moines to Los Angeles and New Orleans, Marc Lee Raphael moves beyond the New York metropolitan area to examine Orthodox, Reform, Conservative, and Reconstuctionist synagogue life everywhere. Using the records of approximately 125 Jewish congregations, he traces the emergence of the synagogue in the United States from its first instances in the colonial period, when each of the half dozen initial Jewish communities had just one synagogue each, to its proliferation as the nation and the American Jewish community grew and diversified.

Encompassing architecture, forms of worship, rabbinic life, fundraising, creative liturgies, and feminism, The Synagogue in America is the go-to history for understanding the synagogue's significance in American Jewish life.

1
Building the Synagogue Community in Colonial America

The Earliest Years

FOLLOWING THE ELECTION of George Washington as president of the United States of America in 1789, laymen from all six Jewish congregations in the new nation sent him congratulatory letters. He replied to four of them—those in Charleston, New York, Philadelphia, and Richmond—with a single letter and to the Hebrew Congregation in Savannah and to the Newport congregation with individual greetings. Thus, after more than a century of Jewish life in colonial America, the 1,500 or so Jews present at the birth of the nation proudly announced their religious institutions to the country and were recognized by its new leader.

Synagogues have a history in America almost as lengthy as the history of individual Jews in the colonies. Expelled from Spain and Portugal in the 1490s, Jews built a thriving community in tolerant Amsterdam and then in the Dutch as well as English colonies in the New World. In these European outposts, their mercantile experience and networks of friends and family throughout the Atlantic world enabled them to play a significant role in the commercial revolution and in the territorial expansion that developed the New World and established the colonial economies.

Jews came to Recife in the seventeenth century after the Dutch conquered this part of northeastern Brazil from the Portuguese in 1630 and vigorously welcomed Jews. But, with the reconquest by the Portuguese in 1654 and the impending Inquisitions, twenty-three Jews fled on a ship, which, after being attacked at sea, made port in New Amsterdam. While they may not have been in actuality the very first Jews in North America, the Jews who stepped off this vessel are remembered as such in most histories. These Sephardic Jews—that is, Jews of Spanish and Portuguese heritage—formed the initial seeds of the community that would establish congregation Shearith Israel, the first in North America.

This book offers a history of the American synagogue. Using the records of approximately 125 Jewish congregations, it traces the emergence of the synagogue in the United States from its first appearance in the colonial period, when each of the half-dozen initial Jewish communities had just one synagogue each, to the proliferation of synagogues as the nation and the American Jewish community grew and diversified.

Promptly following the first arrival of Jews in colonial America, the synagogue became the most significant institution of Jewish life. Unlike in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, when other institutions, such as Jewish community centers and Jewish philanthropic organizations, often claimed to be the “central address” of the Jewish community, no other organization challenged the dominance of the early synagogues. In part, this was the case for two reasons: because, well into the nineteenth century, synagogues incorporated activities that later, as the Jewish population grew, could not all be contained within the synagogue or whose leaders did not want them to be part of the synagogue, and also because the Jewish community was so small. The first federal census of 1790 counted only 1,243 Jews in America out of a total population of 2.8 million, or less than one-twentieth of one percent. The synagogue, thus, was the Jewish community in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As American Jews slowly created philanthropic organizations, the synagogue enveloped them. As Jews ritually slaughtered kosher animals and sold the parts to coreligionists, locally and in the Caribbean, the synagogue employed the slaughterer, and its leaders routinely announced not only the time of prayer services and holiday celebrations but the availability (and price) of kosher meat.

This volume illuminates the changing role of the synagogue within the American Jewish community over the course of its history—from the sole institution in which nearly all communal functions took place to an entity focused primarily on worship and on children’s education. We also explore developments in the leadership, membership, worship styles, and architecture of the American synagogue. The format of this book is largely chronological, with each of a number of subthemes receiving attention within each broad time period. Care is taken both to acknowledge differences as they evolved among the major branches of Judaism and to attend to both differences within branches and similarities across them. Divisions among different Jewish movements and heritages are addressed particularly as we move into the late nineteenth century. These later chapters are organized by Judaism’s branches, sectors, or wings—what Protestants call “denominations.” But, for the first two centuries of Jewish life in America, congregations generally came without labels. In our discussion of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries and beyond, we focus particularly on rabbis, as congregants began to call the synagogue by the name of the rabbi (e.g., “Krauskopf’s” or “Zelizer’s”) as often as they used the actual name of the synagogue. For almost the first two centuries of Jewish life in America, however, no rabbi served a synagogue; laymen (rarely laywomen), paid or volunteer, dominated synagogue leadership.

This work draws not only on secondary literature but on surveys, interviews, and other primary sources. A note on how I have used and cited these sources appears in the bibliography. Although there are some exceptions, including one in Atlanta, one in San Francisco, and one in Washington, D.C., synagogue histories to this point have been overwhelmingly written by either the rabbi of the congregation, his spouse, or an interested layperson. Each has its limitations: the rabbi is usually primarily interested in discussing the years of his (there are as yet none by women) rabbinate; the laypeople are usually preoccupied with mentioning the good deeds of every layperson (or, in the case of rebbetzin histories, her husband). None devotes much attention to the issues that are of interest to a historian of American Judaism.

The answer to the question of why so many rabbis write about themselves—sometimes even in the third person—must remain in the area of psychology. But the practice has a long history. In the late nineteenth century, for example, Bernhard Felsenthal of Kehilath Anshe Ma’ariv, in Chicago, co-authored one of the earliest congregational histories, noting of himself that “Felsenthal delivered a scholarly sermon” that “was highly appreciated by the congregation.” A few years later, David Philipson wrote a history of the Cincinnati synagogue he served for many years, Bene Israel, and pointed out that, “with youthful vigor,” Rabbi Philipson “addressed himself to the work” and the “congregation advanced steadily onward and upward.” Julius Nodel, at Portland, Oregon’s Congregation Beth Israel, was a bit more discreet in the synagogue history he authored. He had a congregant write the last chapter; the collaborator made sure to note that Rabbi Nodel had an “intellectual originality all his own [sic],” a “sharp, uncompromising mind,” and a “rare combination of scholarship, sharp wit, rhetorical polish, and uncompromising conviction.” No surprise, then, that his sermons were “aesthetic gems,” bringing “an average of 450 persons” to the Friday-evening services, including “a large percentage of non-Jewish visitors who come once, twice, and often many more times to listen and to learn.” Rabbi Abraham Shusterman pointed out, in a history of the Baltimore synagogue he served for many years, that “Rabbi Shusterman has achieved an important role in community affairs as well as religious influence.”

Those interested in the history of synagogues in America are often most interested in “firsts.” But dating the precise beginning of any congregation is often difficult. Washington Hebrew Congregation of the District of Columbia, for example, celebrated its 150th anniversary in 2002, but the evidence for its origin in December 1855, not 1852, is extensive. It includes the date of founding submitted by the congregation in 1875 when it joined the national synagogue organization, the Union of American Hebrew Congregations; the date given by the congregation for the 1880 volume Statistics of the Jews of the United States; the date indicated in the original “Pen Written” history of the congregation, now behind a glass case in the vestibule outside the sanctuary; the date of origin noted in the Evening Star of June 5, 1897, and December 4, 1915; the “special citation” presented by the U.A.H.C. to the congregation for its centennial celebration in 1955; and, finally, the fact that Rabbi Abram Simon, who served the congregation for many decades as spiritual leader and (unofficial) synagogue historian, celebrated the 50th anniversary of the congregation in December 1905, the 60th anniversary in December 1915, the 70th anniversary in December 1925, and the 80th anniversary in December 1935, and that Rabbi Norman Gerstenfeld, his successor, led the 90th anniversary celebration in December 1945. But, like numerous other congregations that have used one date for a century or more and then suddenly adopted an earlier date, it is always possible that a few men began to discuss forming a synagogue prior to the year that they actually formed the congregation. Others may use as their date of origin the time when the first worship service—in a home or a rented room—took place or when congregational founders incorporated their institution. To judge only by synagogue websites, most congregations seem to prefer the earliest possible date. And, more and more, congregations have pushed back the date of their birth to the year that someone conceived of the future congregation, not the date of the first official meeting. Thus, for at least 100 congregations with websites, more than one date of origin appears in the print and the Web histories.

In the case of New York’s Shearith Israel, there is a 1695 map of the city with the site of a “synagogue” marked, so worship certainly began no later than that year. The first native-born American to serve as a quasi-clergyman or “reader” (mostly conducting worship, not having significant pastoral duties) or hazan was Gershom Mendes Seixas, appointed by Shearith Israel in 1768. One of his tasks was to supervise the exporting of kosher meat to West Indies congregations and to Surinam, in South America; another was to administer the modest income or “treasury” for the care of the poor, sick, and elderly members of the congregation, including old-age pensions. Generally, the congregation hired an additional salaried man, as Shearith Israel did in 1762, when it brought in Abraham Abrahams to teach Hebrew, English, reading, and writing. Like many other colonial educators, Abrahams often called himself “minister” or even “rabbi.” The 1790 constitution of the congregation (which begins, “Whereas in free states all power originates and is derived from the people”) is obviously modeled on that of the nation; it laid out the Duties of the Rabbi, even though there was no ordained rabbi at that time.¹

With minimal documentation, Jeshuat Israel, later known as the “Touro Synagogue,” in Newport, Rhode Island, dates its beginning to 1658. Yet, we are much safer in concluding that Shearith Israel, which we can date back to 1695, was the first congregation (as distinct from synagogue building) in colonial America, as it possesses more compelling evidence. Isaac Touro, a native of Holland, was appointed hazan in 1758, becoming the congregation’s first spiritual leader, and by 1763 the congregation had a synagogue building, dedicated in the presence of the Reverend Ezra Stiles, future president of Yale College. A few years before hiring Touro, the community’s leaders, in 1754, appealed to the London Sephardic congregation Shaarei Shomayim for financial aid, and this appeal was so successful that by the end of the year the congregation had dedicated a building, which is still standing.

Congregation Mickve Israel of Savannah dates its origins to the year the Jews arrived there from England (1733), apparently assuming that the earliest Jews created a religious congregation immediately. More realistically, its origins date from the early 1790s. Beth Elohim of Charleston began in 1749, incorporated more than forty years later with fifty-three families (more than 400 persons), and dedicated an existing building as a synagogue in 1794.

Interior of Mickve Israel in Savannah, Georgia. Courtesy of the Georgia Historical Society Foltz Photography Studio (Savannah, Georgia), photographs, 1899–1960.

Philadelphia’s Mikve Israel had a Torah scroll by 1761. Its leaders hired Ezekiel Levy in 1776 as ritual slaughterer of cattle and fowl, hazan, and Hebrew teacher—following a common practice in which an individual assumed every “professional” role in the congregation. In Richmond, Virginia, Beth Shalome’s leaders adopted a constitution and a name in 1789, just in time to write to the new U.S. president.

While the precise “origins” are often vague, we can say with certainty that three of these six congregations definitely had synagogue buildings by the time the new nation was born: New York’s Shearith Israel (1730), Newport’s Jeshuat Israel or “Touro” (1763), and Philadelphia’s Mikve Israel (1782). Only the Touro Synagogue building still stands.

These six congregations were all Sephardic (Spanish-Portuguese) in their ritual and organization, although, already in the eighteenth century, Ashkenazic Jews immigrating primarily from Germany had become a majority. Following a pattern similar to that in the twentieth century in which many Reform congregation members became more traditional while the ritual of their congregations remained, sometimes for lengthy periods, less so, the Sephardic ritual in this early period continued to dominate in many of these congregations well after the Jews whose ancestors lived in Spain or Portugal in the fifteenth century ceased to be a majority. In fact, more Ashkenazic Jews than Sephardim served as parnas, or president, of “Sephardic” Shearith Israel in the colonial period, 1654–1790.

“Sephardic ritual” refers to the practices related to prayers, cantillation (ways of chanting Scripture), pronunciation, and standing-sitting patterns (and much more) that differ from those of Jews of central or east European ancestry, the Ashkenazic Jews. For Sephardic ritual, the model was the European or Caribbean Sephardic congregations (e.g., those in Holland or Curaçao), especially London’s Bevis Marks and Amsterdam’s 1675 magnificent synagogue, which are still standing. The early nascent U.S. synagogues looked to these older, more established synagogues for aid and counsel. In 1757, the “Elders and all the members” of New York’s Shearith Israel resolved that the officers should ask the “parnassim [presidents] and mamad [sic; mahamad or trustees]” to write to the Sephardic congregation Shaarei Shamayim in London and request that its leaders send them “a proper hazan.” Mordecai M. Mordecai of Philadelphia’s Mikve Israel sought approval (with letters in Hebrew, a language of scripture and liturgy rarely used for correspondence or speech) from both London and Amsterdam for the Sephardic design of the synagogue’s 1782 buildings—a design quite similar to those of the synagogues in Newport and New York—featuring a women’s gallery upstairs, the ark against the east wall, columns (usually Corinthian) on two sides of the rectangular basilica, and podium and reader’s table in the middle of the men’s floor, rather than against the wall housing the ark and Torah as was common in Ashkenazic settings.

Hebrew terms dominated the designations for the officers in these Sephardic congregations; parnas (president), hatanim (vice presidents or assistants), shamas (sexton or beadle), gabai (treasurer), mahamad (board of directors). A member was known as a yahid (pl., yahidim). Often, members did not wish to serve, so the colonial congregations levied fines on those chosen for office if they would not accept. This practice continued in numerous American synagogues into the second half of the nineteenth century. The earliest constitution (1728) of Shearith Israel exists in parallel columns of Portuguese and English (with some Hebrew). Sephardic custom required that the officers tightly control the members, primarily because they were so dependent on the support of these small communities for survival, and the congregants frequently called themselves kahal kodesh, sacred community, to position themselves as the synagogue-community. The leaders determined who received honors, approved all marriages and burials, fined members who did not attend important events or who gave “any affront or abuse, either by words or action,” set the order and time for worship as well as the choice of Torah readings, announced the beginning and end of the Sabbath, supervised the baking of matzah for Passover and the proper slaughtering of kosher animals, assigned and sold seats in the synagogue (what later was called “dues”), and carefully delineated precisely what the hazan and the sexton should do.

The hazan (sometimes called minister or reader or, a bit later, reverend) read and chanted the liturgy, facing the ark on the eastern wall, from a podium in the middle of the men’s floor, chanted the scriptural readings, officiated at all life-cycle events (with the approval of the parnas), and often instructed the children. The parnas attended all worship and life-cycle events and made sure the hazan properly conducted religious affairs. (After the eighteenth century, most synagogue bylaws continued to require the president—or a “designated replacement”—to attend worship services.) He was extremely powerful, having supreme authority during worship services over the other officers, and over the actions of members. Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, a nineteenth-century immigrant from central Europe who served congregations in Albany and Cincinnati, would later claim, with only partial exaggeration, that “the parnas was an autocrat in the congregation. He was president, shamas, chazzan, rabbi. . . . He was the law and the revelation, the lord and the glory.” Occasionally the officers would hire a mohel (circumciser), a shochet (slaughterer), a melamed (teacher), or even a mashgiach (supervisor of dietary observance and Passover matzah preparation). The shamas might make, light, and properly extinguish the Sabbath and festival candles, open and close the synagogue, and supervise life-cycle events, much as a wedding coordinator or funeral director would do at a later date. More than anything, the officers kept busy enforcing observances in general and decorum, specifically, in the synagogue, sometimes even using excommunication (prohibiting involvement with the congregation and burial in the Jewish cemetery) when desperate. When Manuel Josephson, a congregant of Mikve Israel who later was elected parnas, became angry at the leaders of the synagogue and said, according to a Revolutionary soldier, Benjamin Nones, “that the Parnas, the Juntas and the whole Congregation might be Damnd and that he would not send the Sophar [ram’s horn blown on the Jewish new year],” he was virtually excommunicated. Usually, fines and denial of honors did the job, however; in 1746, the minutes of Shearith Israel noted that members petitioned for the officers to punish those who “disturb the devotion and quiet of our holy worship in any manner of way whatever.”

As we will see, this concern for what Gershom Cohen of Charleston (1791) called “decoram [sic] and decent behavour” would be a constant theme in synagogues over the following nearly three centuries. The constitution of Shearith Israel sought punishment, within the ritual of the worship, for public violation of the ceremonies, customs, observances, and rituals of traditional Judaism by its members. Thus, a yehudi (member) who violated religious laws by “eating trafa, breaking the Sabbath, or any other sacred day, shall not be called to the sepher [Torah],” or receive any other honor or “be elgable [sic] to any office in the congregation.” The bylaws of Mickve Israel in Savannah, paralleling those of Shearith Israel, “deprived of every honor in the synagogue” a member who “violates the Sabbath or holydays.” Philadelphia’s Mikve Israel likewise declared that “if it is known that a person has desecrated the Sabbath, that person has no right to receive a religious courtesy in the synagogue until he hears what his sentence is to be.” In 1757, t...