Jackie Danicki

Plum Street Temple (aka Isaac M. Wise Temple)

Originally uploaded by dynamist.

What’s funny is that Antoine discovered this end of town before I did. He went for a solo walk during his visit last April so that I could get some work done, then came back all excited about what he’d found. The Byzantine-Moorish Plum Street Temple was one of the more intriguing buildings he encountered in the neighborhood I later moved into.

It was from this building that Rabbi Isaac M. Wise founded the institutions of Reform Judaism, which prior to his active career, had consisted of ideology without an institutional structure. The founding of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (1873), the Hebrew Union College (1875) and the Central Conference of American Rabbis (1889), representing the structure of Reform Judaism, was accomplished from the Plum Street Temple by Rabbi Wise who served as founder and president of these three institutions while Rabbi at K.K. B’nai Yeshurun until his death in 1900…The majestic synagogue continues to reflect Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise’s vision of Reform Judaism, a religious movement with a distinctly American look, so that “a religious Jew can also be a citizen of a free country, a member of society, a reasoner of modern thought.”

I’m not Jewish, as far as I know, though lots of people assume that I am. (Many Jewish Poles converted to Catholicism and changed their names when they saw what was coming, and for all I know my ancestors did too. My surname is very rare even in Poland, which suggests there is a decent chance that I come from Jewish rather than Catholic stock.)

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