Congregation Beth Israel
Photo: Congregation Beth Israel
On Sunday, April 30, 1911, a fire began on Broad Street in Bangor that would ravage 55 acres and destroy hundreds of homes, businesses, and public buildings. Among them was the Center Street synagogue of Congregation Beth Israel, the first purpose-built synagogue in Maine.
Bangor’s Jewish population began in the mid-1800s with a small number of German Jews. Thirteen men from this group formed Maine’s first synagogue in rented rooms in 1849, but it disbanded by 1856. But the pull of Bangor’s booming lumber industry attracted other Jewish immigrants, and by the mid-1880s, a larger group of Lithuanian and Polish Jews formed a mutual aid society to, among other things, help newly arrived Jews establish themselves. By 1888, that mutual aid society coalesced into a congregation, which, in 1897, erected the first purpose-built synagogue in Maine.
When that synagogue burned in the 1911 fire, the congregation rallied. It used insurance money and raised funds from congregants and Jewish philanthropists to start again. Learning the lesson of the Great Fire, the congregation designed a building whose exterior reflects a Byzantine Romanesque flavor but whose core is built with steel and reinforced concrete. Today, the synagogue still stands at 144 York Street, home to Maine’s oldest continuously operating Jewish congregation.
Author: Stephanie Bouchard
