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Indiana Jews race to reclaim a synagogue that shaped the Reform movement
On South Seventh Street in downtown Lafayette, Indiana, a Star of David still crowns a synagogue built in 1867. In the mid-19th century, this congregation became an early laboratory of the Reform movement — and, historians say, the site of the first known egalitarian minyan in America.
Over the decades, it would serve as a proving ground for rabbis who went on to shape American Judaism. One of them, Julian Morgenstern, later rose to lead Hebrew Union College and helped secure visas for several Jewish scholars fleeing Nazi persecution — including Abraham Joshua Heschel.
The congregation moved to a new building in 1969. Since then, the old structure has housed churches, the Red Cross and other nonprofits. Now the building is for sale.
And a group of local Jews is trying to buy it back before it’s sold to someone else.
They have raised $9,751.
A sacred space
The campaign is being shepherded by Robyn Soloveitchik and Tanya Volansky. Both felt something when they stepped inside the old sanctuary last year during a tour.
“With the building being for sale, it is a giant question mark,” said Volansky, a medical massage therapist. “It would be wonderful not only to bring it back into the Jewish community. We want to guarantee it will be there for future generations.”
Soloveitchik, who works in auto manufacturing, looked up at the stained glass and wondered how it had survived. The sanctuary still dominates the upper floor. A wooden wall now covers the original ark.
The building is listed for $299,900.
If someone else buys it — a developer, a church, an investor — there’s not much they can do to change the facade. Exterior changes, including alterations to the stained glass windows, must be approved by the Lafayette Historic Commission. But the building’s landmark status does not control who owns it or how the interior is used. Its future purpose would be up to whoever signs the deed.
So the two women and a few others formed a nonprofit, the Ahavas Achim Cultural Center, and began making calls. They built a website. They launched a crowdfunding campaign. They reached out to preservationists and descendants of Lafayette’s early Jewish families.
They are not trying to reopen the sanctuary as a full-time synagogue. Lafayette already has two: Temple Israel, which is Reform, and a small Conservative congregation, Sons of Abraham. It also has a Chabad and Hillel connected to Purdue University. Roughly 1,500 Jews, including students, live in the Greater Lafayette area.
Instead, they imagine something else: a place for adult education classes, film screenings and community events — a visible reminder that Jews have been part of Lafayette’s civic fabric since before the Civil War.
A rich history
Ahavas Achim was founded in 1849, when Lafayette was still a bustling river town along the Wabash. Many of its Jewish families had arrived by way of the Erie Canal, joining the westward stream of peddlers and merchants pushing into the American interior. Many were from Bavaria, accustomed to life as minorities in small European towns. In Indiana, they found familiar rhythms: small communities, German-speaking neighbors and space to build. Lafayette later became a major railroad hub on the way to St. Louis and Chicago.
In 1867, the congregation moved into its home on South Seventh Street. Local newspaper coverage of the dedication spilled across two columns on the front page — speeches transcribed, dignitaries listed, the building described in loving detail — as if the city itself understood that something lasting had been built.
More than 150 years later, the structure is now considered one of roughly a dozen or so 19th-century synagogue buildings still standing in the United States. That history, said Michael Brown of the Indiana Jewish Historical Society, is what moves people. “They see how rare it is,” he said. “It’s pretty important.”
In 1919, the congregation updated its constitution and adopted a new name: Temple Israel. And in 1969, as members increasingly lived across the river in West Lafayette, it relocated — this time to a new building closer to the university community.
Temple Israel never disappeared. It simply moved.
A minor league for Reform heavyweights
In the early 20th century, Lafayette’s temple functioned as something like a minor league franchise for Reform Judaism.
Rabbi Julian Morgenstern served here from 1904 to 1907 before becoming president of Hebrew Union College. From that perch, he watched European scholarship with mounting frustration. As Jewish academics fled rising antisemitism in the 1930s, many gravitated toward the more traditional Jewish Theological Seminary.
“That enraged him,” said Brown.
Morgenstern compiled a list of promising European scholars he believed Reform must recruit. He worked with the State Department to help secure visas for several rabbis and thinkers fleeing Nazi persecution. One of them was Abraham Joshua Heschel.
In the United States, Heschel would later encounter another Indiana rabbi, Abraham Cronbach, who was one of the people who introduced him to the idea that a rabbi could be a public activist as well as a scholar.
Morgenstern was not the only future luminary to pass through Lafayette’s pulpit.
Nathan Krass later served for decades at New York City’s Temple Emanu-El, one of the country’s most prominent Reform congregations. Morris Feurlicht, who stood up to the Ku Klux Klan during the 1920s in its Indiana stronghold, once stood here. Bernard J. Bamberger, a prolific Bible translator, would become president of the Central Conference of American Rabbis. Joshua L. Liebman — whose bestseller Peace of Mind reshaped how rabbis approached counseling — also served in Lafayette before rising to national prominence.
Lafayette’s Jewish footprint extended beyond the sanctuary. The city was also the birthplace of Academy Award-winning director Sydney Pollack and home to Jewish merchants and civic leaders who helped shape the town’s commercial and cultural life.
A fragile model
Wendy Soltz, a history professor at Ball State University who led the federally funded Indiana Synagogue Mapping Project, has documented 66 purpose-built synagogues across the state dating back as far as 1865. Of those, 24 have already been demolished — including nine of Indiana’s original 19th-century synagogues.
The Lafayette building, she said, “has statewide and national significance,”
But she also offered a caution.
Across Indiana, she has seen former synagogues converted into small museums — projects that begin with enthusiasm but struggle to sustain long-term interest.
“You get that initial wave of visitors,” she said. “But then it really dramatically trickles off.”
Where adaptive reuse has worked, she said, is when buildings function as active community centers rather than static exhibits. In Terre Haute, a former synagogue now operates as the Wabash Activity Center, hosting senior programs and public events. In Evansville, a community center incorporates the surviving tower of a burned synagogue into its campus — even using it in the organization’s logo.
“If it’s just a museum, it likely won’t work,” Soltz said of the Lafayette project. “But if there are aspects serving the community, that has proven staying power.”
With Indiana synagogues, not every rescue looks the same. Sometimes preservation takes surprising forms.
When a new baseball stadium was built in 2012 in South Bend, the team owner had to figure out what to do with a 1901 Romanesque Revival–style synagogue on the property that was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The team spent $1 million restoring the building. It’s now where the gift shop is located. A mural on the wall of what’s now known as the Ballpark Synagogue riffs on the Sistine Chapel, depicting God passing a baseball to Adam along with words “Play Ball.”
Continuing a legacy
In 2024, during Temple Israel’s 175th anniversary, Rabbi Adam Bellows led congregants back into the old sanctuary for a commemorative tour.
“One of the highlights of my rabbinical career,” he said, was reciting the Shehecheyanu blessing there. Standing in the space, he felt connected “to all the past congregants and past rabbis and past prayer leaders.”
Bellows, the current rabbi of Temple Israel, is not formally involved in the buyback effort. But he supports it.
“I don’t think it’s counterproductive,” he said, even though his synagogue has room for events. He envisions the building as a monument to the long Jewish legacy in the region — a place for education and community gathering, even if regular worship remains across town.
“It’s a little bit of an underdog story,” he said. “But I believe in miracles.”
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In the Michigan Senate race, Jews should (and will) vote for democracy
Michigan Jews are feeling the ground shifting beneath us. For the first time, the Democratic candidate to represent Michigan in the United States Senate is not an advocate of unconditional support for Israel’s government. And he is one of a growing number of progressive leaders pushing the Democratic establishment to fight for the values it claims to stand on.
Many in our communities hoped for a different outcome in yesterday’s primary and feel destabilized by the shifting political terrain. Others feel hopeful, for the first time, of being represented on the electoral stage. Moving into the general election, when the stakes are so high, I would like to refocus the conversation on our shared values.
When I cast my ballot Tuesday, and when I cast it again in November, I do so with the wisdom of Pirkei Avot 1:18 in mind: on three things does the world stand — on justice, on truth, and on peace, as it is said: “execute the judgment of truth and peace in your gates” (Zechariah 8:16). Rabban Shimon ben Gamaliel and others of his generation were building communities out of the rubble of the Temple’s destruction. They asked themselves, as they rebuilt: what are our core principles? What values need to sit at the center of this new order? Out of the wreckage, what new world will we create?
Let those three pillars be our voting guide.
Din — Judgment. Who will fight for fairness? Who is beholden to corporate interests and who will stand for economic equality? A candidate’s record on wages, on housing, on the right to organize — these will show commitment to justice.
Emet — Truth. Who tells us the truth, even when it costs them? In the words of former Rep. Andy Levin, we are looking for “authenticity, bravery, and truth-telling.” Who can help to rebuild trust in our public servants and institutions?
Shalom — Peace. Which candidate will challenge the military-industrial complex? Who will work to reduce war and violence in our world, rather than fund more of it? At home and abroad.
In this election, we have an unusually clear lens for understanding a candidate’s values: immigration enforcement. Immigration and Customs Enforcement — ICE — is where our society’s authoritarian drift is most visible and most violent. So as we lean on the pillar of Shalom to consider candidates, we can ask a direct question: is this someone who will bakesh shalom v’radfehu — seek peace and pursue it — for the people in ICE’s crosshairs? Or will they support the expansion of a paramilitary force into our schools and neighborhoods?
Justice, Truth and Peace — these are the values upon which “the world stands.” But what does it mean for the world to stand? A classic rabbinic commentary interprets this as the preservation of human society. Which candidate will protect the environment, will put people over profit, will choose the survival of our communities over the balance sheet of the insurance, arms and oil industries? By this measure, the idea that Jews who want unconditional aid for Israel should therefore vote for a candidate who would strip away abortion rights, gut health care, and undermine the basic machinery of democracy is, to use a technical term, cuckoo banana-cakes.
And then there is the issue of antisemitism. My teacher Rabbi Mordechai Liebling explains that on the left, antisemitism is a bug and not a feature — a problem that can be and must be addressed. On the right, antisemitism is a foundational worldview. The real threat to American Jews is the far right. It’s they who promulgate conspiracy theories and it’s they who deploy ICE into our communities to kidnap our neighbors.
I personally think that Dr. El-Sayed is not antisemitic — certainly not any more than the general population. But I don’t need to convince you of that. What I hope you’ll hear is that Abdul is someone with whom we share core values — that he is someone the Jewish community can work with. What I hope you’ll hear is that a liberal-fascist coalition is out of the question, and that a liberal-left coalition is the only path forward. In November, we will elect a politician who will work with the people and not against us. Our loyalty is not to any party, but to the movement for a true democracy — and to the leaders who will work with us to advance it.
The ground doesn’t have to shift beneath us; we can be a part of moving that ground, of redrawing the politics of the possible. May Zechariah’s vision of justice, truth and peace come to pass, speedily and in our days, and may we merit to help make it so.
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On El-Sayed, Michigan’s Jewish Democrats aren’t all ready to unite behind nominee
Following Abdul El-Sayed’s narrow win of the Democratic nomination for Michigan’s open Senate seat, the state’s Jewish Democrats are reflecting on whether the divisions El-Sayed’s candidacy brought to the fore can be bridged before November.
Jewish voters make up just 1.4% of the electorate in Michigan. But the community had become deeply invested in the race, with Jews both in fierce opposition and fiery support of El-Sayed in an election that had become a proxy fight over the Gaza war and the U.S.-Israel relationship.
Jewish former Michigan congressman Andy Levin, who had endorsed El-Sayed, believes Democrats will get behind the nominee in the interest of defeating Republican Mike Rogers — a race that could determine which party controls the Senate. Pre-primary polls found Rogers leading El-Sayed by single digits.
“Shame on any Jewish Democrat if they’re going to go vote for Mike Rogers and put our democracy at risk because they can’t find their way to supporting Abdul El-Sayed, who is such a brilliant person, just because he doesn’t share their exact beliefs on Israel and Palestine,” Levin told the Forward. “That’s ridiculous.”
Levin lost his Senate seat to Rep. Haley Stevens after heavy spending against him by AIPAC, the campaign fundraising group advocating for unrestricted U.S. aid to Israel. An AIPAC-associated super PAC spent some $32 million in a failed attempt to get Stevens the Senate nomination.
Stevens endorsed El-Sayed for the general election Wednesday morning. But some Jews who voted for Stevens see no possibility for reconciliation. Rabbi Asher Lopatin of the modern Orthodox synagogue Kehillat Etz Chayim in suburban Detroit had endorsed Stevens in the primary, alarmed by El-Sayed’s association with the controversial Twitch streamer Hasan Piker and condemnation of Israel as a genocidal and apartheid state.
In a TV interview Wednesday, El-Sayed used the term “bloodthirsty” to describe Israel.
“To have so many people vote for someone who is so hurtful to the Jewish community, the things that the Jewish community values — I think it’s depressing,” Lopatin told the Forward.
Lopatin has made up his mind that he will not vote for El-Sayed in the general election, but he also isn’t yet sold on Rogers, the Republican nominee.
“I have to study him more,” Lopatin said. “But I will not vote for Abdul El-Sayed, definitely, and I would tell people they should not.”
Lopatin said he wishes Stevens would condemn El-Sayed rather than endorse him.
Still, others see El-Sayed as the best candidate to face Rogers in the general — and don’t want him to pull back on the issues that won him the nomination. Barbara Weinberg Barefield, a photographer outside Detroit who helped organize the group Jews for Abdul, said she has confidence El-Sayed will win the general — attributing the close primary race partly to the influence of outside money supporting Stevens.
“He was able to win this election in the face of close to $70 million of outside funding going to bolster his opponent,” Weinberg Barefield said. “This election is showing us, and elections around the country are showing us, that elections are not to be bought — they’re to be earned.”
Roslyn Schindler, a retired professor who taught Holocaust studies at Wayne State University, was also among El-Sayed’s Jewish supporters, even as she disagreed with him on his lack of support for a two-state solution. She stressed the importance of beating Rogers in November irrespective of disagreements on Israel.
“My motto is and will be: vote blue, no matter who,” Schindler told the Forward. “I am hoping that all Democrats realize that to do otherwise will be self-destructive and just plain wrong.”
Others are taking a wait-and-see approach. Decky Alexander, chair of the Michigan Democratic Jewish Caucus — which endorsed Stevens in the primary — isn’t issuing an endorsement in the general election yet.
She said the close margin El-Sayed won by, about 15,000 votes, gives her hope that El-Sayed will see the need to unify his party. A start, she said, would be focusing less on AIPAC during his general election campaign.
“There’s a lot of opportunity on Abdul’s side to be a better bridge maker versus kind of a bridge burner,” Alexander told the Forward. “The cards are his. It’s his responsibility to initiate.”
In his election night speech, El-Sayed didn’t mention AIPAC by name, instead speaking more generally about getting money out of politics.
On Wednesday, he addressed Jewish Michiganders directly: “I want you to know that my commitment to your safety, my commitment to Jewish safety, is the same commitment that I have to the safety of my own daughters.”
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‘The Yiddish Teacher’ (Poem)
One thing about the late Forverts staff writer and critic Miriam Hoffman — she cooked a heavenly eggplant in tomato sauce.
And why do I know this about one of our writers? Hoffman, a veritable lexicon-caldron of Yiddish sayings and terms she’d archived from her own mother’s distinct poylish dialect, was many things: A distinguished long-term professor of Yiddish at Columbia University; a theater critic turned playwright who turned the New York Public Theatre’s founding director Joseph Papp into a serious supporter of Yiddish culture; a child survivor of Siberian exile, and so much more.
As she encountered immigrant American life in da Bronx, the tiny dynamo that was Hoffman delighted in becoming American, freely advising everyone on the best consumer goods this country had to offer. A country that was a home and refuge to her, her parents, her husband and so many in her vast circle of Yiddishist friends, students, fellow writers, educators and chosen family. And then, once upon a time, she welcomed me into her Florida home for an overnight stay, so that I could record her jaw-dropping tales of how she and her beloved mameloshn Yiddish both survived the khurbn, the Holocaust. And talk into the video camera she did.
But first, there was lunch.
Rest in all your ferocious deliciousness, Miriam Hoffman, and thank you. For the eggplant, the advice on the best toothpaste, the stories — and for doing everything, everything, everything possible, to transmit your Yiddish to another generation.
The Yiddish Teacher
The Yiddish teacher bending saying:
In my book you’ll learn
the alefbeys through pictograms like so:
The gimel is a camel
The beys a house
You see?
The Yiddish teacher has an archive
in her bedroom closet
The folding doors open revealing:
shoeboxes filled with
stories and
poems and
songs she
wrote as a child
in the displaced persons camp
on paper donated to Jewish refugees
The Yiddish teacher was once
seated in back
of a transport truck
with all the other refugees
Trying to go over the Swiss Alps
to Mandate Palestine
The Yiddish teacher was born
in a Siberian prison camp
“people were starving, sure,
but there was sex”
The Yiddish teacher was the only
woman writer on staff
at the Forverts Yiddish newspaper
The Yiddish teacher remembers
the first time her family ate
Chef-Boy-Ar-Dee spaghetti and
meatballs
from a can
in the Bronx
We go shopping together
The Yiddish teacher loves Rao’s tomato sauce
“it’s the best”
The Yiddish teacher recommends
“Mavis Toothpaste”
It’s the best
The Yiddish teacher loves to
go fly fishing
The Yiddish teacher is short and slim
and round
I think
if I cup my hands together
I can
carry her around always
— Chana Pollack
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