B'nai Jacob Synagogue

About this property

B'nai Jacob Synagogue is a former Conservative synagogue in Ottumwa, Iowa. The originally Orthodox congregation was established in 1898, and it constructed the E. Main Street synagogue building in 1915, and joined the Conservative movement in the 1950s. The building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2004. The synagogue closed as a space of worship in 2010 and the building is now preserved as a meeting and performance space. The first Jewish settlement in Ottumwa in the 19th century was dominated by German Jews, and in the early 1880s, there was an organized German congregation. By 1884, this had dissolved as most of the original German pioneers died out and their children left town. In 1886 there were about 20 Jewish families in town. The Ottumwa Jewish cemetery, founded by the Ottumwa Hebrew Association in 1876, was the lasting legacy of this period of Ottumwa's history. Edna Ferber lived in Ottumwa as a child in the 1890s. Her father operated The Fair, an Ottumwa department store. At the time, Ottumwa was a coal mining town, and the antisemitism of the town had a lasting influence on Ferber. She wrote of her years in Ottumwa: "I don't think that there was a day when I wasn't called a sheeny." By the turn of the 20th century, Ottumwa had fewer than 50 Jewish families, immigrants from Germany and across eastern Europe. Most were "in the junk and second-hand business", but there were also laborers, shoemakers, tailors and one prominent merchant. Some families were extremely observant, "wearing two types of phylacteries", while others believed "in no Judaism at all." One local Jew had a personal Torah scroll and a private mikvah, but there was no organized community. In the early 1900s, many people called the area around the 300, 400 and 500 blocks of Main Street "Jew Town" because the stores in the neighborhood were mostly owned by Jewish families, many of whom lived above their stores. The B'nai Jacob congregation was organized in 1898. In 1907, the congregation was located at 404 E. Main St., and had 15 members out of an estimated Jewish population of 150. The Hebrew school had 15 pupils and met once per week. By 1919, the Jewish population of Ottumwa had risen to 412 and the congregation had moved one block into the current building. The school still only had one teacher on staff, but there were 21 pupils and the school met daily. The B'nai Jacob congregation numbered around 250 in the 1930s and 1940s. The synagogue affiliated with the Conservative movement in the 1950s. The Jewish population of Ottumwa was 231 in 1951. By 1960, the Jewish population was estimated at 175, and by 1962, 150. For the next two decades, through 1983, the population estimate remained unchanged. By 2010, the congregation on a typical Saturday morning had shrunk to seven or so, and by 2018, as few as two. In August of that year, the congregation donated its Torah scroll "to a new synagogue forming in South America", and ceased functioning.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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