By Leyna Krow, Assistant Editor, JTNews
Near the dawn of the 20th century, five young men from Skopishok, Lithuania arrived in Whatcom County. As local legend has it, the men were on their way to Alaska to join the gold rush. Once in Bellingham, however, they flipped a coin to decide whether they would remain in the tiny frontier town or continue north. The coin said to stay and the men became Bellingham’s first practicing Jewish residents.
Of course, the motivation behind the coin flip, or if it actually even happened, is unclear. But regardless of what truly forced them to stay, their contribution of the Bellingham community remains the same.
“Presumably, they got stuck in Bellingham to a certain degree,” said Tim Baker, a 30-year Bellingham resident and Congregation Beth Israel’s unofficial historian. “But they stayed and made a living outfitting others who were going north.”
Not long after their arrival, Bellingham’s original Jewish settlers were joined by a second wave of Jews from Lithuania, who immigrated to the United States and then made their way west to Washington. Between 1904 and 1906, some 25 families arrived from Skopishok and the neighboring town of Rakishok in hopes of escaping the traps of poverty and anti-Semitism in Russia (of which Lithuania was a part until World War I).
Bellingham’s first Jews lived in the lettered street neighborhood, north of downtown, attending shul at a nearby facility called the Odd Fellows Hall. In 1906, congregants bought a vacant church on F St. for $905 and in 1908, Congregation Beth Israel was formally established.
The congregation held regular Shabbat services and was home to a religious school for both boys and girls.
According to Baker, these first Jews assimilated fairly smoothly into the larger Bellingham community.
“There was not extreme anti-Semitism,” he said. “They were kept out of some social organizations for a while, even as late as the 1950s. There was some name-calling of kids at school. The first generation had accents and things like that, which marked them as immigrants, but otherwise they got along pretty well,”
As the city grew, so too did the synagogue. However, as the Jewish community drifted away from its Lithuanian roots, the shul began to shift from traditional, Orthodox practices to a more Conservative bent.
“Over the years, as they became more assimilated, there were more intermarriages, and gradually by the ‘20s, ‘30s, people weren’t preserving a lot of those old traditions anymore,” Baker said.
Under the leadership of Rabbi Fred Gartner, who was hired in 1952, Beth Israel did away with separate seating for men and women. When Gartner retired in the early ‘80s, the synagogue found that its philosophy hewed most closely to the Reform movement, so Beth Israel joined what was then the Union of American Hebrew Congregations and hired its new rabbi from the Reform ranks.
This month, Congregation Beth Israel will reflect on its roots as it celebrates its 100th anniversary.
The centennial celebration will include a slide show presentation by Baker called “A Century of Jewish Life in Bellingham” on Sept. 21 as well as a commemorative service on Nov. 21 and a “centennial gala” on Nov. 22.
Rabbi Cindy Enger noted that, more than focusing on the way things were, the celebration is about looking to the future.
The biggest change that the congregation is anticipating in the coming months is the construction of a new facility on San Juan Boulevard.
The land for the new synagogue was purchased several years ago, but the planning and fundraising phases have been slow going, so it is only now that the congregation is ready to start building, according to Enger. The new synagogue, including a larger main building as well as an education center, will be set on 14 acres of land.
“There is some hope that it will have a campus-type feel,” Enger said.
She estimates the construction will take around two years to complete, and fundraising efforts are still underway.
Enger has been with Congregation Beth Israel for three years. In that time, she said, the congregation has grown from 155 households to more than 200. She attributes the increase both to the general growth of the Bellingham community as well as the closure of Eitz Chaim, Bellingham’s Conservative synagogue. Of course, she said she also likes to think that this is “truly an inviting time” in the temple’s history, and as a result, new members are being drawn into the fold.
She also noted that, as Whatcom County’s only Reform synagogue, Congregation Beth Israel draws families from throughout the region, from a variety of different backgrounds.
“We hope to continue to deepen our exploration of what it means to be Jewish today,” she said. “For members of our synagogue, that can mean a lot of different things and we want to encourage different approaches to living Jewishly.”