Temple Beth Zion

Temple Beth Zion Congregation in Buffalo 1850-1961

Temple Beth Zion has deep roots in the Buffalo community. Tracing its origin to the late 1840s in the Orthodox Temple Beth El founded by Polish Jews who worshipped in their native tongue, the congregation of Temple Beth Zion is one of the oldest religious organizations in the city.

During the Civil War, certain members of the parent body sought to establish a Reform Movement congregation. In so doing, they were following a national trend toward a more secularized form of Judaism. Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, the “father of the Jewish Reform Societies in America,” came from the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, which he had founded to promote the Reform cause, to give his blessing to the nascent Buffalo congregation. (“A Vision of Beauty,” Buffalo Express, September 12, 1890.)

Temple Beth Zion was, in fact, the fourth Reform congregation in America. The congregation chose as its first religious leader a reform-minded German immigrant, Rabbi Samson Falk. Rabbi Falk deemphasized the emphatic ritualism of Conservative Judaism. The leader of the new Buffalo Jewish community, remarked historian Selig Adler, believed "in linear human progress and was therefore typical of the early American reform Jews who were prime optimists because they found prosperity and tolerance in nineteenth-century America." (Selig Adler, From Ararat to Suburbia: the History of the Jewish Community of Buffalo Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1960, 139.)

Many Jews, like progressive Roman Catholics, saw Americanization as the path to greater acceptance in their predominantly Protestant country. "The Reform movement," observed architectural historian Charles Davis, "expanded in the United States as part of a broad search for appropriate forms of worship within American culture." (Charles L. Davis II, “Louis Sullivan and the Physiognomic Translation of American Character,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 76. March 2017, 71.)

At the time of Rabbi Falk’s investiture, a local newspaper reported that he "proclaimed the broadest principles of humanity and the implicit belief in the One God. Sectarian ideas were not to be inculcated and an important aim was to instruct the children of the congregation to be good men and women and good citizens of the United States." (“A Vision,” loc. cit.)

The new Temple Beth Zion quickly attracted members, especially among the more prosperous merchant class (Abraham Altman was an early adherent) of the city who were pleased to participate in "a modern service enhanced in interest by choir singing and edifying preaching of the word of God in a known tongue." (Ibid. The name derived from a former Society Beth Zion that agreed to join with the new congregation if the name were retained.) (Early services were performed in German and English.)

By 1865, the year after joining the secularized Reform Movement, the congregation purchased a former Methodist Episcopal church on Niagara Street. Within twenty years, the expanding congregation sold the Romanesque Revival structure and purchased land at 599 Delaware Avenue with the intention of erecting a new synagogue.

For the new house of worship, the congregation chose Buffalo architect Edward Austin Kent. His large Medina sandstone building embodied Romanesque and Byzantine elements, a style Kent’s contemporaries usually referred to as Moorish. In the late nineteenth century, many synagogues in the United States and in Europe gloried in such displays of Middle Eastern exoticism. Gottfried Semper’s Dresden synagogue of 1838, which drew upon Byzantine, Arab, and Oriental motifs, had been the fountainhead of this international Jewish architectural phenomenon. Henry Fernbach, America’s first prominent Jewish architect, adhered to this style when he designed New York’s Central Synagogue in 1872 (NR listed). Likewise, Adler & Sullivan, architects to Chicago’s Reform Jewish community, created designs in an overtly Moorish style for Zion Temple (1884) and Sinai Temple (1892) in that city.

The most direct inspiration for Kent’s Temple Beth Zion were surely Henry Hobson Richardson’s renowned Trinity Episcopal Church (NR listed) of 1872 in Boston, and Adler & Sullivan’s 1889 Richardsonian Romanesque design for Kehilath Anshe Ma’ariv Synagogue (NR listed) in Chicago. The latter building emulated Trinity Church and, in the words of architectural historian Charles L. Davis, powerfully "expressed the volumetric massing of the main worship space" and Richardson’s “constrained massing for urban civic space." (Davis, 70.) Davis also remarked that “Sullivan’s 1889 scheme for Ma’ariv Synagogue altered the religious association of the Reform synagogue by purposefully omitting the overt display of key religious emblems and Moorish ornamentation from the building’s exterior.

Kent’s Buffalo synagogue shared this secular treatment of the austere exterior with the Chicago religious structure. By downplaying overt religious emblems and exotic ornamentation from the exterior of his building, Kent and the congregation were presenting the more secularized view of religion that the Reform Movement favored. A similar non-religious appearance would also characterize the mid-twentieth-century replacement Temple Beth Zion that Max Abramovitz would design.

Kent’s centrally planned building was designed to seat 850 people and featured an immense copper-clad wooden dome 80 feet in diameter resting on four brick piers. "The building is the only one of its kind of such large roof span in the country," speculated the editors of the national Engineering News. (Eric Mendelsohn quoted in Richard Meier (ed), Recent American Synagogue Architecture (New York: Jewish Museum, 1963), 22.) Inside, the worship space appeared richly decorated with frescoed ornament in the Byzantine-Arab style. The predominant color was a deep reddish yellow tone. Colored light filtered into the auditorium through a variety of fenestration, including the cupola at the apex of the dome, a row of twenty-four yellow-glass windows around the drum, and several stained glass windows shaded by carved marble screens. At night, the octagonal auditorium became radiant with light cast from a series of gas lamps ringing the base of the dome. "How glorious it is," remarked a local clergyman at the time of its dedication. "It is an Oriental dream, noble form outside and the interior rising like the sky in soft tints, deepening into a glue vault. It lights up magnificently. It is the most beautiful building in Buffalo." His companion agreed; "The congregation of the Temple are to be envied," he confessed. Nevertheless, he lamented, "What a pity they are not Christians." ("A Vision of Beauty," Buffalo Express, September 12, 1890.) Kent’s Temple Beth Zion quickly became one of the landmarks of Delaware Avenue, a street which, by 1890, when the synagogue was dedicated, had become one of America’s premier addresses. It had become a major fixture in the life of the city.

Over the next decades, like many reform congregations around the country, Temple Beth Zion had developed educational and social programs that benefited its members and the wider community. "Reform Judaism," observed historian Dana Kaplan, "has historically emphasized what it interpreted as the central message of the prophets: the need for social justice." (Dana Evan Kaplan, American Reform Judaism: An Introduction. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003, 15.)

These non-liturgical social and educational initiatives required that the congregation fund additional facilities adjacent to the synagogue. By the 1920s, Temple Beth Zion maintained a complex of facilities for various related activities. Architect Eric Mendelsohn, a major figure in the twentieth- century evolution of Jewish architecture, stated that "today’s religious centers should comprise three units: the House of Worship—the House of God, the Assembly Hall for adult members—the House of the People, the School for the education and recreation of their children—the House of the Torah." It was, therefore, said Mendelsohn, the duty of the modern architect to bring these different functions into "organic plan-relationship, to express this material and mental unification in his structure." (Eric Mendelsohn quoted in Richard Meier (ed), Recent American Synagogue Architecture, New York: Jewish Museum, 1963, 22.)

Beginning in the late 1920s, Temple Beth Zion became known beyond the city due to the career of its dynamic leader, Rabbi Joseph L. Fink. A confidant to Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, Rabbi Fink enjoyed a reputation around the country as a fervent advocate for progressive ideals. He voiced these convictions to a wide audience on the Humanitarian Hour, a national radio program he produced for over twenty-five years. By the time of Rabbi Fink’s retirement in 1958, Temple Beth Zion had grown considerably in prestige and membership. In 1954, in response to the growth of the congregation in the suburbs, Temple Beth Zion opened a second location in Amherst, New York.

On the night of October 1, 1961, a tragic fire destroyed Edward Kent’s magnificent 1890 tabernacle and the attached ancillary facilities. Among them was a 1924 annex that contained Rabbi Fink’s large collection of rare religious books. The rabbi stood by along with hundreds of others watching helplessly as the fire raged. Kent’s great dome gave up the ghost in a burst of glory. Buffalo architect John Laping, a member of the congregation, remembered, "when the great copper clad dome collapsed into the surrounding walls it sent a huge burst of sparks into the October night sky. It was, like the whirlwind in Job, a clear signal that our history was about to change." (John Laping, “Temple Beth Zion: From 599 to 805 Delaware Avenue: Remarks on the Occasion of the 40th Anniversary of the Temple Dedication, April 20, 2007.” Buffalo as an Architectural Museum website, www.buffaloah.com, retrieved May 2017.) Happily, the Torah survived for future generations to read from at holy day services.