Congregation Rodeph Shalom (Philadelphia)
Congregation Rodeph Shalom, is a historic Reform Jewish congregation and synagogue located at 615 North Broad Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in the United States. Established in 1795, it is the oldest Ashkenazic synagogue in the Western Hemisphere. It is noted historically for its leadership of the Reform movement among American Hebrew congregations, for its spiritual influence upon international Jewry, and for its unique 1927 Byzantine and Moorish Revival synagogue building, with Art Deco finishes, on North Broad Street, listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 2007.
Origins and early history
Founded informally as a minyan of ten worshipers in 1795 by Jews from Germany, Holland, and Poland, Rodeph Shalom adopted its first Articles of Association in 1802, and in 1812 was the first synagogue in Pennsylvania to receive a corporate charter. Its records were kept in Yiddish until 1810 and in German until 1830, and it was known mainly as the congregation of recent immigrants until 1840. The congregation differentiated itself from Congregation Mikveh Israel mainly by offering Philadelphia Jews of northern European origin membership at reduced rates and, in cases of hardship, gratis. Welfare provisions were prominent features of Rodeph Shalom's constitution; rabbis were permitted to extend aid of up to five dollars to any sick or poor person, for example. But there was a price for these amenities: absence from Friday evening or Saturday morning services was punishable by fine, excused only by sickness or travel out of town.Services were held during the congregation's first seven decades in a variety of locations: initially in a building on Margaretta Street before Second; after 1820 at 1 Bread Street; by 1830 at 7 Pear Alley ; and until 1840 at 15 Vine Street and at Fifth and Cherry. Relatively late in its history, then, the congregation finally built its first building in 1866, a Moorish Revival sanctuary on North Broad Street designed by Philadelphia architect Frank Furness.
Lay readers conducted services at Rodeph Shalom during its first decades. Mayer Ullmann, co-writer of the congregation's first by-laws in 1810 that made no provision for a paid leader, or hazzan, was the first appointed baal tefilla, or leader of services. He was joined in 1818 by Abraham Levy, who conducted Sabbath and holiday services. The first formally appointed hazzan of Rodeph Shalom was Charleston, South Carolina, native Rabbi Jacob Lippman, who was forced to supplement his annual salary of $30 for part-time service by keeping a second-hand clothing store on South Street.
Of course in this era, the number of Philadelphia Jews was relatively small. In 1822, only 225 foreign-born, mostly Ashkenazic Jews resided in Philadelphia and were outnumbered by those born in America. Recent immigrants did not outnumber native-born Jewish Philadelphians until 1830, but these Jews, far fewer than one thousand in the burgeoning town, assimilated so handily to life in America that they presented few problems to either their adopted city or to their Jewish neighbors.
Becoming Reform: Marcus Jastrow
The Reverend Isaac Leeser, chosen by Congregation Mikveh Israel in 1829 as its hazzan, began to preach in English in 1831, inviting other Hebrew congregations to share his vision of Jewish ecumenism and beginning a period of institutional adaptation to the changing physical, educational, and economic circumstances of modern Jews in America and around the world that would lead directly to the rise of the Reform movement. Leeser founded the first Jewish Sunday school in 1838 and the Occident and American Jewish Advocate, a monthly international Jewish periodical, in 1868.A new brand of Jewish spiritual leader, the ordained rabbi with a university doctorate of divinity bearing the title "Reverend Doctor", arrived on the Rodeph Shalom scene in 1853, when the congregation was the first in the city to hire one of the new breed, Rabbi Bernard L. Illoway, as rabbi, preacher, and Sunday school principal. Illoway worked alongside the Rev. Jacob Frankel, who had joined the staff in 1849, but later departed in 1862 following his appointment as the first official Jewish chaplain in the US Army, in part through the efforts of the Board of Delegates of American Israelites.
The 1850s and 1860s were marked by Leeser's call for a synod of Philadelphia congregations and by Congregation Keneseth Israel's Rabbi David Einhorn's denunciations of slavery as contrary to Biblical and Talmudic law. In 1866, Rodeph Shalom called Warsaw's scholarly Rabbi Marcus Jastrow to its pulpit in acknowledgment of his heroic activism against the Russia-dominated Polish government. Leeser and Jastrow then helped form a short-lived rabbinical seminary, Maimonides College, at which Jastrow taught philosophy, history, Biblical exegesis, and Talmud and eventually succeeded Leeser as provost.
Jastrow became active on the national stage as editor-in-chief of the Jewish Publication Society's Holy Scriptures and author of a classic Aramaic-English scriptural dictionary. He was asked to open the United States House of Representatives in Washington, D.C., with prayer in 1869, and hosted the meeting of Philadelphia philanthropists at Rodeph Shalom that resulted in creation of the city's United Hebrew Charities, which later became the Federation of Jewish Agencies.
With Jastrow's thoughtful and scholarly sermons attracting larger audiences and wider membership, Rodeph Shalom erected its first dedicated building in the Moorish style at Broad and Mount Vernon Streets, six blocks north of Penn Square, in 1869. Jastrow moved the congregation closer to Reform by instituting a mixed choir, installing an organ, abolishing the women's gallery, and ending the sale of mitzvot, although he maintained separate male and female seating in the sanctuary.
But the tide of greater spiritual reform was sweeping the country, and by 1892, Jastrow was looked upon as a conservative and dismissed. The Pittsburgh Conference of 1885, presided over by Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, had settled upon a group of eight principles that defined Reform Judaism until 1937. This platform rejected the atavistic elements of Mosaic law, including dietary restrictions and special garments; it accepted modern science, preached the need to teach morality, defined Judaism as a religion rather than a nationality, welcomed all faiths in a rational, ecumenical fraternity, and affirmed the need for social justice and social action.
The titans of Reform: Berkowitz and Wolsey
Jastrow was replaced in December 1892 by the Rev. Dr. Henry Berkowitz, formerly spiritual leader of congregations in Mobile, Alabama, and Kansas City, Missouri, and Philadelphia's first American-born rabbi. Following the lead of his close friend, Keneseth Israel's Joseph Krauskopf, Berkowitz created a library at Rodeph Shalom and began publishing his sermons in English, making the study of German at the religious school optional and soon abandoned. Congregational singing and a children's choir became regular features at worship services. In 1893, Berkowitz was instrumental in creating the Jewish Chautauqua Society for the promotion and dissemination of studies in Jewish history and education of non-Jews about Judaism. In 1894, Berkowitz replaced Jastrow's prayerbook with the newly published Union Prayer Book, and by 1897, he had re-made the congregation in his warm and empathetic personal image.Berkowitz's activities were not circumscribed by his religious ties. He was an executive member and honorary vice president of the Playgrounds Association that brought recreation and social services to children in Philadelphia's underprivileged neighborhoods. He served on a Vice Commission that worked to end prostitution among immigrant girls. He vigorously opposed those who insisted that contemporary Judaism demanded creation of a national Jewish state in Palestine with his widely publicized statement, "Why I am Not a Zionist". During World War I, he lectured widely to raise funds for relief for war victims and toured army camps, lecturing to service men.
Berkowitz's failing health and eventual death in 1924 brought interim rabbi Harry W. Ettelson and associate rabbi Ferdinand Isserman to the pulpit at Rodeph Shalom that year. In 1925, Louis Wolsey arrived from Cleveland's Euclid Avenue Temple with a national reputation for pulpit oratory, and a new chapter of the congregation's history began. Wolsey moved quickly to move the religious school, long conducted off campus at a remote facility at Broad and Jefferson, to the congregation's main edifice at Broad and Mount Vernon. Immediately elected president of the Central Conference of American Rabbis and then chairman of the Conference's Committee on Synagogue Music, Wolsey published the third edition of the Union Hymnal that notably and for the first time included hymns from every competent Jewish composer of the era.
In 1928, needing a larger sanctuary and additional meeting and office areas, the congregation, under Wolsey's leadership, built its present magnificent Moorish Revival synagogue. The interior, including its star-burst skylights, stained glass windows, bronze-and-enamel doors of the Aron Kodesh, walls, ceiling, dome, carpet and ornamentation are by D'Ascenzo Studio.
Like Berkowitz, Wolsey was a leader of the Anti-Zionism movement in Reform Judaism that in 1937 repudiated an attempt by the Central Conference to institute a theme of Jewish peoplehood and allow for Zionist sentiment within the Reform movement. Also like Berkowitz, Wolsey's social activism transcended religious and geographical boundaries; he established the Mount Vernon Center for underprivileged children in the neighborhood surrounding the congregation's Mount Vernon Street edifice and created the Well Baby Clinic to teach young mothers homemaking and preventive medical care. In 1937, he became chairman of Philadelphia's Vice and Crime Commission and made recommendations that helped change Pennsylvania's outmoded criminal parole system.