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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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This Toronto street corner has been a site of anti-Zionist activism for months. Police just opened a hate crime investigation.
The Toronto Police Service hate crimes unit is investigating teacher Abbas Hamze for remarks about “Zionists.” Canadian Jewish groups, including the Jewish Federations of Canada’s advocacy arm and B’nai Brith Canada, have called his speech, which went viral online, “blatant antisemitism.”
Hamze’s remarks invoked antisemitic tropes, accusing “Zionists” of performing “black magic” as well as raping and killing children. He spoke at the intersection of Bathurst and Sheppard, in the heavily Jewish Toronto neighborhood of Bathurst Manor – Clanton Park.
According to his LinkedIn, Hamze works as an instructor at several Canadian colleges in the area, including the University of Niagara Falls and Georgian College. He does not specify what he teaches.
Hamze could not be reached for comment. The University of Niagara Falls and Georgian College did not respond to requests to comment, and the Toronto Police declined a request for comment.
UNF issued a statement addressing Hamze’s remarks, distancing the university from the instructor’s statements and stating that they have “zero tolerance for discrimination, hate, harassment, or any conduct that threatens the dignity and well-being of others.” They announced that they are “launching an internal investigation” into the matter.
In his speech, Hamze claimed that “British colonizers have planted this cancerous, false Zionist state of Israel … right in the heart of Islam.”
Later — wearing a keffiyeh and reading from his phone into a megaphone emblazoned with the Lebanese flag — the instructor repeated numerous antisemitic conspiracy theories, including the debunked idea that Jews have caused or deserved centuries of persecution.
“The Zionists have never had a country of their own because of their mischief,” Hamze said. “They are the most kicked-out people in the world who are making black magic and horrible things.”
He went on to say that Jewish corruption is “crystal clear in Epstein Island where they have the Jewish leaders from all around the world.” He accused “Zionists” of having “raped, and killed, and ate children at the same time.”
Finally, he unfoundedly blamed the actions of President Donald Trump on “Zionists” who “blackmail” and “control” people.
“That’s why you can see now a guy like Trump who caused this genocide in Gaza kidnaps the presidents of Venezuala, kills the supreme leader of Iran Imam Ali Khamenei, may God sanctify his soul,” he said. “This is because of them, the terrorist Zionists.”
It appears that people became aware of Hamze’s remarks after Casey Babb, an Israel and International Relations scholar, posted a video of him on X.
In a joint statement, Canadian Jewish groups described Hamze’s claims as “antisemitic blood libels that have been used for centuries to justify hatred and violence against Jews.”
The statement says that the intersection where Hamze spoke, Bathurst and Sheppard, has long been a site of “antisemitic harassment, intimidation and provocation, too often under the guise of anti-Zionism,” and called on Toronto’s police department to investigate the incident.
“Allowing this behaviour to go unchecked is to normalize antisemitism as an everyday feature of life in this city,” it stated.
The city’s police have opened an investigation. However, online, some said that Hamze had been speaking at the street corner for months without police intervention.
In Canada, public incitement of hatred is considered a criminal offense. The Canadian criminal code says that “communicating statements in any public place” that “incites hatred against any identifiable group where such incitement is likely to lead to a breach of the peace” is a breach of law, resulting in up to two years in prison.
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West Elm’s Russ & Daughters merch did something their in-house line could never
Figuring out one’s Judaica vibe can be a challenging endeavor for those of us who don’t have tastes in line with the colorful stained glass or embossed silver aesthetics that tend to dominate the category. Newer designers have introduced some minimalist options, but that’s also not really for me.
But for those of us with a tendency toward the whimsical or kitsch, furniture retailer West Elm is coming to the rescue with two new collections, geared toward the High Holidays and Hanukkah.
There’s a Russ & Daughters collaboration of blue-and-white ceramics, featuring serving platters with handpainted designs such as a fish or latkes, trinket trays with pickles and more fish, simple Delft-colored dinnerware and napkins with little cutlery printed in the corners.
And, separately, in an apparent attempt to capitalize on the Jewish market, West Elm also released a set of their own plates, bowls and tea towels printed with colorful “deli favorites” — pickles, brisket, hamentaschen, black-and-white cookies, and the like.
The concepts are pretty similar; both lean into the idea of decorating plates with food objects that may or may not be the food you actually put on them.
I do admittedly already have a large blue-and-white platter with a fish painted on it that I find charmingly eclectic, and just as suitable for serving foods that are not of the oceanic persuasion as it is for foods that are indeed from the briny deep. So I’m not inherently opposed to the concept. But I don’t feel as good about the in-house West Elm Jewish designs, like a bowl with a sort of mushy depiction of matzo balls at the bottom. Imagine eating anything else out of that. Honestly, imagine eating matzo ball soup out of it. It seems disorienting.
Everyone’s tastes vary, and if you want to eat a salad off of a plate with a colorful brisket sandwich painted on it, be my guest. But I think the Russ & Daughters offering is the better of the options. For the most part, the collection stays on the artful side of kitsch largely thanks to the simplicity of the designs and the color scheme. And, more importantly, the internal logic seems actually Jewish. The pieces are useful — perhaps with the exception of the latke platter — for multiple Jewish occasions. The matchbox with a challah on it may feel a bit random at first glance but it does conjure an image of lighting candles on Shabbat, and there are matching candle holders. The art kind of evokes Marc Chagall.
The West Elm deli hits sets on the other hand — which are separate from their collab with the iconic Lower East Side deli — feel as though they’re screaming their Jewishness. The tea towel mixes together hamentaschen and sufganiyot (or possibly a bagel, it’s hard to tell) on the same piece of cloth, despite the fact that these desserts correspond to different holidays. The drawings are cute, but the overall effect is frantic, like someone dumped every Jewish food they could name onto the same page and sent it off to the printers. It’s giving Target Rosh Hashanah decorations — the sort that have a menorah alongside the apples and honey.
A few years ago, Crate and Barrel had Jewish lifestyle influencer Rebecca Lowin curate a Hanukkah display, but it was done using items the store already carried in white, blue and silver; only the menorah was specifically Jewish. Now, a similar home decor store is creating entire lines catering specifically to Jewish holidays and culture. That’s a sign of an increased mainstream embrace of Jewish culture, and that’s a good thing — it wasn’t so long ago that it wasn’t possible to find much public recognition of the existence of the High Holidays, and every attempt featured a hanukkiah with the wrong number of branches or a loaf of challah for Passover. Today, if Jews want twee merchandise — and no judgment — there’s plenty. There are even Hanukkah gnomes, if your taste runs to that.
But there’s still a dearth of decor that feels elegant and thoughtful, instead of try-hard. Decor that feels actually rooted in Jewishness, instead of like a Jewish gloss on something that’s really for another holiday. The Russ and Daughters collaboration is rooted in actual Jewish history. Even if you don’t like a fish motif as much as me, that’s a step in the right direction.
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Sephardic and Mizrahi groups accuse New York Magazine of erasing Middle Eastern Jews. The editor-in-chief agreed to a meeting.
As editors of New York Magazine dug in their heels this week, defending the magazine’s viral “Habibi City” package published earlier this month, 14 Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewish organizations delivered an open letter on Monday night, accusing the magazine of erasing Middle Eastern Jews from its coverage.
On Tuesday, Editor-in-chief David Haskell invited them to meet in September, saying he wants the magazine’s coverage to reflect the multitude of perspectives in the region.
In addition to asking for a meeting, co-signers of the letter, convened by JIMENA (Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa), asked the magazine to acknowledge what they call the package’s exclusionary framing and provide more representative coverage of Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews going forward.
The dispute centers on the magazine’s August issue about the city’s burgeoning Southwest Asian and North African cultural scene known as SWANA. The package explores restaurants, cafes, cultural collectives and dance parties, tracing much of their growth to the war in Gaza that followed theHamas-led attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
“Out of that resistance,” the magazine writes, “a cultural ecosystem started to bloom.”
This week, the magazine published a statement standing by its use of the term genocide to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza, adding that “accusations of antisemitic intent were in fact obfuscating an overwhelming scholarly consensus, and that its use would be allowed in our pages.”
The open letter did not address the use of that term. Instead, it addressed the article’s framing.
The package describes membership in SWANA community in political terms.
“To be in SWANA community,” one article says, means “embracing a set of shared beliefs: that Palestinians deserve human rights. That what happened in Gaza in the aftermath of October 7 constitutes a genocide. That social justice and social welfare override capitalist concerns.”
The same article describes the place of Israelis within SWANA culture as “complicated,” in part because of the term’s “political framework.”
It also says SWANA New Yorkers “face xenophobia, Islamophobia and Zionism” in the city — language that drew particular ire from the coalition and online critics.
According to the letter, New York Magazine’s framing turns SWANA from a geographic and cultural identity into an ideological one, excluding many of New York’s Jews from the Middle East and North Africa unless they reject Israel — the country where many of their families found refuge after fleeing persecution and discrimination elsewhere in the region.
“A Mizrahi Jew whose grandparents were born in the region, expelled from their country of origin, and who carries the region in her language, liturgy, and kitchen belongs only upon disavowal of the movement through which her family survived,” the letter reads.
As the letter puts it, for a great majority of Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews to be represented “as we actually are” means representing them as Zionists.
The letter also faults the package for invoking Oct. 7 repeatedly without acknowledging the atrocities committed that day and erasing the region’s non-Muslim populations.
“When we read ‘Habibi City,’ we immediately saw that this wasn’t something one organization should answer alone,” Sarah Levin, JIMENA’s executive director told the Forward. “The feature made claims about who belongs in contemporary Middle Eastern and North African and ‘SWANA’ communities in NYC, so the response needed to come from the breadth of the communities being written out.”
After she read the package, she began contacting other Sephardic and Mizrahi organizations about writing an open letter. Within four days, all 14 organizations had signed on.
“Iranian, Iraqi, Syrian, North African and Sephardic communal organizations almost never act in concert, and they’ve united around one argument,” Levin said.
Signatories include the American Sephardi Federation, the Iranian American Jewish Federation of New York and the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York.
Levin said the groups had little difficulty reaching consensus. “When the argument is, ‘We exist, and we will not be defined out of our own region,’ there isn’t much for our communities to debate.”
What concerned Levin most, she said, was the size of New York Magazine‘s audience and cultural reach. The Pulitzer Prize-winning bi-weekly magazine boasts reaching 1.8 million readers each week.
“When a magazine that shapes American culture tells millions of readers that belonging to the Middle East requires renouncing Zionism, that is not a small thing,” Levin said. “That is why we responded the way we did.”
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