(JTA) — PENSACOLA, Florida — Mention the Jewish exodus to Florida, and people immediately think Miami Beach, Boca Raton or Aventura.

But it was here in Pensacola — along the Gulf Coast’s fabled “Redneck Riviera” — that German-speaking Jewish pioneers first put down roots in the Sunshine State. In 1876, when Pensacola’s Temple Beth El was founded, Florida had 200,000 inhabitants, just 2,000 of them Jews.

Today, Florida is home to 24.3 million people and a Jewish population exceeded only by New York and California. Most of the state’s 762,000 Jews reside in three South Florida counties — eclipsing much older congregations in Tallahassee, Jacksonville and Pensacola that thrived long before the advent of air-conditioning and interstate highways.

Pensacola is home to only about 1,800 Jewish adults, according to the American Jewish Population Project — a number that has remained constant for a century. Yet locals in this laid-back resort in Florida’s Panhandle, more than 600 miles northwest from the bustling Jewish communities of South Florida, say it is ripe for a Jewish renaissance.

“I’d like to make the case that this is also Florida, even though we’re only 10 miles from Alabama,” said Rabbi Joel Fleekop, 47, spiritual leader of Beth El since 2012. “The cost of living here is very low, we have no traffic or congestion, and there are plenty of good jobs.”

Pensacola also has three synagogues: a Chabad, an Orthodox-style congregation and Beth El, which this month is marking the 150th anniversary of its founding with a weekend of prayers, local art, Israeli music and dancing.

Beth El’s celebration began on Friday with a Shabbat service led jointly by Fleekop and Cantor Richard Cohen, former director of the Hebrew Union College’s School of Sacred Music and a and Pensacola native.

In a sermon, Fleekop told the story of the children’s book “Bone Button Borscht,” in which a wandering man helps the people of an impoverished town to create soup from their own meager ingredients that somehow taste far better together than separately.

“For 150 years, this temple — our temple, Temple Beth El — has thrived because similar to the people making soup in the story, its members have contributed and done what they could to nourish and enhance and better our community,” he said. “Our founding families like the man who set up the pot provided the vision that this little corner of the world could have a thriving Jewish community. Others provided the resources to build the sacred spaces our congregation has called home and to keep on the lights and, this being Florida, the air conditioning also on.”

Summarizing the wide range of contributions that members have made over the decades, Fleekop also noted changes that Temple Beth El experienced over the last 150 years: the number of stars on the American flag grew, the the Israeli flag was created, the amount of Hebrew in the service increased; and congregants are wearing “fewer neckties and fewer fancy hats” but more kippahs and tallits than they once did.

“Inevitably each generation had its own taste and so added their own ingredients, the spiritual equivalent of maybe some okra, or zaatar, or even some sriracha,” he said to laughs. “At 150 years, our congregation is no doubt very different from what was imagined at its inception. … The soup that is our temple has gone from a Bavarian borscht to a Gulf seafood gumbo to a gluten-free, Asian fusion matzoh ball soup. But in many ways, in the most essential ways, we are still the same congregation.”

The following evening, a gala dinner featured dancing and a live band. And on Sunday morning, congregants toured Pensacola’s Jewish cemetery, where the oldest tombstone dates from 1874 and many inscriptions are in Hebrew and German as well as English.

Among those buried in the cemetery is Florida’s first Jewish mayor, Adolph Greenhut, who served from 1913 to 1916 — two decades after his stint as Beth El’s president. Beth El also takes great pride in having been home to the nation’s first de facto female rabbi, Paula Ackerman, in the 1960s.

“There were really very few Jews in South Florida until the 1940s. People can’t believe there was a thriving Jewish community here at the turn of the century,” said Bill Zimmern, 74, a native Pensacolan like his mother and grandmother whose wife, Beverly, was once mayor of suburban Gulf Breeze.

That community was born after the Civil War, when Jews settled in Milton — a northwest Florida lumber hub — bringing their skills from heavily wooded areas of Bavaria and southern Germany. They began relocating to Pensacola in the 1870s as the city developed.

Zimmern added that nearby Naval Air Station Pensacola, home to the Blue Angels, has long welcomed Jews to the area, and that many Jewish men and women in uniform who were once stationed there eventually settled in Pensacola and joined the congregation.

Beth El’s first home was a wooden structure on Chase Street in downtown Pensacola, but it burned down in 1901 and all records of the shul’s first 25 years of existence disappeared in that fire. It was later rebuilt near what is today the on-ramp for Interstate 110, but closed in 1931 when its members inaugurated the current synagogue on nearby Palafox Street, and the previous structure became a roller-skating rink.

Soon after Beth El’s founding, Yiddish-speaking Jews from Eastern Europe — mainly traders and merchants — settled in the area, and they were not especially happy with its Reform services. So in 1899, they parted ways and established B’nai Israel as an Orthodox synagogue.

In 1923, congregants bought a house and converted it into a house of worship; by 1953, they had finally raised enough money to construct the building it currently occupies, according to Yehoshua Mizrachi, B’nai Israel’s rabbi.

At the time, it also chose to affiliate with the Conservative movement, then the largest denomination in the United States. It remained part of the movement until about a decade ago, separating after the Conservative movement opted to ordain gay rabbis and sanction same-sex marriages.

“I am the 19th rabbi to hold this pulpit, and all but three or four of them were Orthodox,” said Mizrachi, 62. Originally from Lakewood, New Jersey, he said B’nai Israel’s membership consists of 60 to 70 families, compared to 185 families at Beth El.

“This congregation is independent, so they dropped their affiliation 10 years ago. When they hired me, I told them not to expect me to do anything to compromise my personal integrity as a Jew,” Mizrachi said.

Even so, the rabbi added, “we are not an Orthodox congregation. We have mixed seating and women are called to the Torah. In all other aspects, this shul operates according to the standards of halacha,” or Jewish law.

Rabbi Mendel Danow runs the Pensacola Chabad Jewish Center along with his Israeli-born wife, Nechama, from a 120-year-old house less than a mile from B’nai Israel. Between 500 and 600 people are on his mailing list, he said.

“A lot of Jews here are unaffiliated. They don’t have that natural connection,” said Danow, 30. The best way of drawing them in is by inviting them to Friday night services and Shabbat dinner; anywhere from 20 to 80 people usually show up, he said. “It’s laid back. Davening [prayer] is shorter, dinner is longer. It’s been a very important part of our community.”

Danow is clear-eyed about the challenges of living an observant Jewish life in Pensacola.

“There’s no kosher restaurant within a 400-mile radius. The closest is in Jacksonville or Atlanta,” he said. “Obviously we’re not the first destination for an Orthodox Jew looking to move to Florida.”

But he’s trying to make things easier. His Chabad recently opened Pensa-Kosher — a mini-market for the handful of locals who strictly observe Jewish dietary laws. He and his wife, who have six children together, run a Hebrew school with close to 20 students, as well as a preschool with 10 children. And they are trying to support the few Jewish students at the nearest university.

“When we moved here, one of the first things we noticed was a lack of Jewish life on campus, so we started a Chabad student club at the University of West Florida,” Danow said.

With Pensacola enjoying a relatively low cost of living and ranking high when it comes to job growth, beach quality and even the density of Waffle House restaurants, the city is growing — and Chabad is bursting out of its current home. Early next year, it will relocate to a larger complex two blocks down the street. Among other things, the new facility will include a synagogue, Hebrew school and Pensacola’s first full-service mikvah.

Danow said any antisemitism in the city is dwarfed by support for Israel and Jews.

“Three years ago, a gang of four teenagers threw a brick through our window, and ‘Heil Hitler’ was spray-painted on the brick,” he recalled. “But after Oct. 7, people began dropping off flowers and giving donations. There was such a sense of sharing in our pain. People would stop me on the street to say, ‘We’re praying for Israel.’”

Mizrachi shared similar experiences. “There’s a church on every street corner. People are very pro-Israel here,” he said. “Strangers stop me in the supermarket and tell me they love Israel. It happens all the time.”

The front lawn of Zimmern’s best friend, Charles Kahn, 74, a retired federal judge, boasts two signs: “Go Gators” — a reference to his alma mater, the University of Florida — and “We Stand With Israel.”

“Right after Oct. 7, I got that sign,” Kahn said while sipping coffee as he sat on his porch overlooking the Gulf of Mexico. “My neighbor on one side is a retired Navy captain. He asked for one also, and my other neighbor on the other side asked for one too — and then the people across the street, then two houses down. We ended up with five of them just on this street.”

Kahn is a past president of Beth El, as is his wife Janet. Their Reform synagogue is by far the largest Jewish house of worship in the city.

“We’re a full-function, mainstream Reform synagogue. We follow Reform rules, and our house of worship is a place where people who disagree on politics can still be friends,” said Fleekop, a Philadelphia native who grew up in Reno, Nevada, and moved to Pensacola 13 years ago. His wife, Andrea, runs the temple’s School for Jewish Living, which has 55 children enrolled.

“We welcome the LGBTQ community. Some gay and lesbian Jews who were rejected elsewhere have found themselves here at Beth El,” he said. “We also have a lot of Jews by choice.”

One of them is Nichole Friedland, 51, a Pensacola-born nurse who was raised Catholic but converted to Judaism 16 years ago — on Easter Sunday no less — under Fleekop’s guidance. She’s now the vice-president of Beth El and treasurer of the Pensacola Jewish Federation.

“Most of our congregants are either interfaith or have converted to Judaism,” said Friedland, who with her husband is raising a blended family of eight kids. “I wanted my children to have a good foundational religion, and Judaism made the most sense to me. It was, and is, the correct choice.”

The federation, based inside Beth El, is entirely volunteer-run and rarely publicizes events or occasions — a sharp contrast to the vibe in the Jewish metropolises of South Florida.

But Mizrachi sees potential for Pensacola in some of the same forces that are luring Jews to Boca and Aventure — including unhappiness among New Yorkers with the city’s new mayor, Zohran Mamdani.

“After Mamdani’s win, a lot of people are thinking of moving to Florida,” Mizrachi said. “But instead of going to Dade or Broward, they should consider Pensacola. There is Jewish life here.”

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