Buildings
The congregation that became Mikveh Israel first gathered for services at a private home on Stirling Alley which was then between Cherry and Race Streets and Third and Fourth Streets in Philadelphia. When Mikveh Israel built its first synagogue in 1782, its location was moved because of protest that its proposed site next to a church would offend the Dutch Reform Protestant congregants. Prominent Philadelphians such as Benjamin Franklin and Robert Morris contributed to its building fund. In September 1782, the congregation dedicated the new building on Cherry Street near Third Street. The building sat 200 persons and had accommodations for the clergy adjoining it.
In 1829 the congregation built an Egyptian Revival synagogue on Cherry Street. Designed by William Strickland it is notable for having been one of the earliest Egyptian Revival buildings in the United States.
The Congregation announced in 1961 that it would return to Center City where it would construct a new building. Dr. Bernard J. Alpers, vice-president of the synagogue, persuaded his friend the Philadelphia architect Louis Kahn to engage in the planning of the new synagogue building. Kahn produced ten design versions between 1961 and 1972 of the new building. However, the Congregation decided that construction and maintenance costs were too high, and the synagogue was never built. A more modest building, shared with the Museum of Jewish History, was dedicated and opened in August 1976. The museum moved to a new building at 5th and Market streets on November 15, 2010. The synagogue is located at 44 North Fourth Street in Center City, Philadelphia, just north of Market Street.
The congregation is also responsible for Mikveh Israel Cemetery, the second oldest surviving Jewish cemetery in the United States.
Read more about this topic: Congregation Mikveh Israel
Famous quotes containing the word buildings:
“The desert is a natural extension of the inner silence of the body. If humanity’s language, technology, and buildings are an extension of its constructive faculties, the desert alone is an extension of its capacity for absence, the ideal schema of humanity’s disappearance.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
“If the factory people outside the colleges live under the discipline of narrow means, the people inside live under almost every other kind of discipline except that of narrow means—from the fruity austerities of learning, through the iron rations of English gentlemanhood, down to the modest disadvantages of occupying cold stone buildings without central heating and having to cross two or three quadrangles to take a bath.”
—Margaret Halsey (b. 1910)
“The American who has been confined, in his own country, to the sight of buildings designed after foreign models, is surprised on entering York Minster or St. Peter’s at Rome, by the feeling that these structures are imitations also,—faint copies of an invisible archetype.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)