By Seth Stein
As our nation prepares for its 250th birthday, Traverse City’s Jewish congregation Beth Shalom is celebrating its building’s 140th birthday.
The simple white building on the banks of the Boardman/Ottaway river next to the Government Center dates to Traverse City’s earliest days. It is a state historic site, as the oldest continually operating synagogue in Michigan.
In 1847, drawn by pine forests covering the area, Horace Boardman built a home and sawmill near the river’s mouth on West Grand Traverse Bay, on lands of the Anishinaabek people. In 1851, Perry Hannah and partners bought 200 acres in what is now downtown Traverse City. They improved the mill and built a boarding house and store for its workers. Over the next years, the remote community grew. Although first accessible only by water, it became reachable by road in 1864 and by railroad in 1872. In 1881, it was incorporated as a village.
Perry Hannah, considered the founder of Traverse City, became its first mayor and held various offices, including serving as state representative which once involved a two-week snowshoe trip to Lansing. He donated land for many civic purposes, including parks, schools, Catholic, Methodist, and Baptist churches, and a synagogue. Three Jewish merchants, Julius Levinson, Julius Steinberg and Solomon Yalomstein, organized a congregation in 1882. Steinberg purchased land as a cemetery for its members. The synagogue’s cornerstone was laid in 1885, and the building was dedicated in March 1886.
Over the years, the Jewish community prospered, and by the turn of the century, there were more than 40 Jewish families in the region. They contributed to a wide range of business and civic activities in the somewhat isolated city, which in winter was sometimes “bottled up” when the train could not get through and cars were “put up for winter” until the roads were passable.
After World War I, Traverse City became increasingly engaged with the wider world. In 1939, the congregation helped resettle a Jewish family fleeing Nazism and raised funds to aid in rescue and resettlement efforts. The synagogue was given a Torah scroll salvaged from a synagogue in Czechoslovakia that the Nazis destroyed. In the 1970s, the congregation mounted a campaign to help Jews persecuted in the Soviet Union.
The synagogue was renovated in 1960 to accommodate its growing membership. In 1977, a plaque marking the building as a State Historic Site was dedicated by Gov. William Milliken.
A major change, starting in the 1970’s, was the congregation’s move to gender equality, symbolized by its first woman president in 1973 and the present practice where men and women sit together and participate equally in all aspects of worship.
The synagogue’s 140th birthday has special significance, because the biblical character Job lived for 140 years after his trials.
In its next 140 years, the congregation seeks to continue being inclusive, warm and participatory, to make Jewish ideas relevant to modern life, and to work with our neighbors to improve life in the region.
About the author: Seth Stein is professor emeritus of geophysics and retired associate of the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University. He is a member of the boards of directors of Congregation Beth Shalom and the Grand Traverse Chapter of the North Country Trail Association, and serves on Traverse City’s Brown Bridge Quiet Area Advisory Committee.