"Our treasury is empty and our bank account is overdrawn": Washington Hebrew Congregation, 1855-1872

“The Washington congregation is neither rich nor numerous.”

Isaac Leeser, November 1860 ¹

Washington, D.C., in December of 1855, was quiet and rather parochial. The reports of the Indian wars in Oregon and Washington State, the war in Nicaragua, and the Crimea War did not receive as much attention as either the stoppage in construction of the Washington Monument or President Franklin Pierce’s launching of the steam-frigate, Minnesota, on the Potomac. John Gibbs, located in the Willard Hotel, offered hair-dressing, shaving, hair-dyeing, and wigs for gentlemen; Captain Jonas P. Levy ² sold groceries such as Harrison’s celebrated premium flour at $11.25 a barrel; and one could purchase 100 figs at M. P. King’s Drug Store on Pennsylvania Avenue for 62 cents. The steamer Thomas Collyer took Washingtonians to Mt. Vernon every morning at 9:00 for $1 (round-trip); the coach to the boat left the Capitol at 8:15 and added 10 cents to the trip. And for those who yearned to go further, the Baltimore and Ohio Rail Road offered a 27-hour ride to Cincinnati via its “greatly improved Western connections” for $16. Few people would have noticed when, in that same month, a group of Jews formed Beth El-Emeth, the First Hebrew Congregation of Washington D.C. ³

In thinking about how to write the history of a synagogue in the second half of the nineteenth century, I have been struck by how many authors of published synagogue histories seem to know a Reform from a Conservative from an Orthodox congregation with some certainty. The problem of identifying a Reform, Conservative or Orthodox synagogue in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is actually quite complex. I start with Leon Jick, whose 1976 study of a few (mostly) “Reform” congregations in the mid-nineteenth century remains a work of excellence. One passage will illustrate the problems involved:

“There were few congregations in America in which substantial reforms had not been introduced [by 1870] and in which an accelerating program of radical revision was not in process.” ⁴ First, I believe Jick is wrong—there was a substantial number of congregations in America in which “substantial reform” had not been introduced, and there were even more in which “radical revisions” had not taken place. Second, whether Jick is right or I am right has much to do with what constitutes “substantial reforms.” How many “reforms” = a Reform congregation, and which of the following 14 reforms—compiled by me from reading minutes of nineteenth century synagogue boards of directors—are “substantial,” which are “radical,” and which are just “reforms,” difficult to judge subjectively (insignificant? minor? major? gigantic?) 125 years later?

Adopting an organ

Eliminating the second day of holidays

Permitting non-Jews in choirs

Using a cornet for a shofar

Permitting women in choirs

Making the reader face the congregation

Introducing mixed seating

Eliminating head covering

Having a mid-day break during Yom Kippur

Eliminating the selling of honors

Introducing a revised prayerbook

Reading the haftarah in English

Reading rather than chanting the Torah

Introducing Sunday services

This, as well as some other methodological issues, I wish to explore as I reconstruct the first two decades in the history of this Washington D.C. synagogue. And already by 1857, when Lorenzo D. Johnson described the many churches and the single synagogue of Washington, D.C., the First Hebrew Congregation, though hardly a year old, was quite visible. Jews, unlike the synagogue, were not, constituting well less than 1 percent of Washington’s white population. Johnson, himself a pastor, observed the buildings and interviewed members of the institutions he visited; his brief summary of what he learned at the “Jews’ Synagogue” provides us with the earliest account of the congregation. ⁵

The synagogue occupied a “plain hall” on Four-and-a-Half Street, opposite the east end of the City Hall at the intersection of Indiana, a bit north of Pennsylvania Avenue. ⁶ Johnson went on to describe a typical “traditional” American synagogue of the 1850s...