Obj. ID: 48950
Jewish Architecture  B'nai Israel Synagogue, Detroit, MI, USA

From the Proposed East Ferry Avenue Historic District Final Report from the Historic Designation Advisory Board of the City of Detroit:

Congregation B’nai Israel, incorporated on June 19, 1871, was Detroit’s third oldest Jewish congregation, after Beth El (1850) and Shaary Zedek (1861). First holding services in a rented house and later in Funke’s Hall on Macomb Street, the small congregation built its first synagogue on Macomb between St. Antoine and Beaubien, around 1878. Its constitution “provided for a board of trusties [sic] cantor and sexton, but not for a rabbi.”5 Its members were Orthodox Jews from Poland and, as stipulated by the Constitution, that “the form of prayer to be read . shall be agreeable to the forms, customs and regulations of Minhag Polen,”6 meaning according to the Polish/Lithuanian/Prague text. B’nai Israel moved to its second permanent structure on East Ferry near Hastings in 1913, Located in what was originally built as a private home at 578 E. Ferry Avenue, the congregation turned this home into a synagogue, where they met for eleven years until 1924, when the new synagogue was completed next door at 582 East Ferry. Rabbi Judah (Yahuda) Lieb Levin (1862 -1927) became its first settled clergyman. Rabbi Levin helped support the needs of the Jewish community in Detroit during a period when it was experiencing tremendous growth. He was referred to in an article in the Journal of the Jewish Historical Society as, “unquestionably, the most outstanding Orthodox rabbi of the first quarter of this [sic] century . . .”1 1 Allen A. Warsen, The Detroit Jewish Community from the Founding of Congregation Beth El to the founding of the Jewish Welfare Federation of Detroit, Jewish Historical Society of Michigan, June 1980, 20: 2, 12. "