The Tolliver Temple (formerly SBH) earned a unanimous vote of support from the City of Seattle Landmarks Preservation Board to become a City of Seattle Landmark. The board voted to designate the property under all six landmark standards. Only a select group of landmarks are designated under all six standards, a major reflection of the property's significance to Seattle’s history. Located in the city’s Central District, once the principle neighborhood for the city’s immigrant Jewish population from both the Ottoman Empire and Eastern Europe, the building was constructed in September 1929 as the second house of worship for the city’s fledging Turkish Jewish community, principally from the regions of Marmara, Tekirdag, and Brusa.
The synagogue remained the active hub of Turkish Jewish life in the city along with its sister congregations Ahavath Achim (which later merged with Sephardic Bikur Holim) and Ezra Bessaroth (the Rhodesli community). When the synagogue was first dedicated, it made both local and national press, including in flagship Ladino newspaper La Vara with a local Seattle Correspondent (edited by Albert Torres, a Brotherhood member in New York). As the community began to leave the Central District in the late 1950s, Sephardic Bikur Holim was moved to its current location in the Seward Park neighborhood and the original building was sold in the early 1960s. Today, the building is now owned by an active community church and still has much of the original exterior structure intact from its construction in 1929.
コメント