Phoenix synagogue celebrates reopening on Rosh Hashanah

For Jewish people around the world, Rosh Hashanah — celebrated Sunday — marked the beginning of the new year, starting a period of spiritual reflection until the holy day of Yom Kippur.

For a group in downtown Phoenix, the day also was a chance to celebrate the soft reopening of Phoenix’s first Orthodox Jewish synagogue and mark the 60th anniversary of its founding.

The Beth Hebrew synagogue, at Portland and Fifth streets, held the Rosh Hashanah service at sundown Sunday. The casual affair included a service by cantor Elliot Talenfeld.

“Tonight, this is a chance to hear something that hasn’t happened in this building in a long time,” said Michael Levine, the local developer who bought the synagogue building in March.

Black and white chairs were set across an open space, with attendants both young and old coming early to explore the building. A 1956 Nash Rambler and a 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air were parked outside to create a feel of the early days of the synagogue, which was founded in 1955.

Sunday’s gathering, which welcomed people of all faiths, offered a chance to remember the founders of the synagogue, who were Holocaust survivors.

Beth Hebrew was co-founded with help from the family of Elias Loewy, who moved to France during Adolf Hitler’s rise, Levine said. Loewy was known for helping Jews escape from a French concentration camp, and his sons were part of the French Resistance during World War II. Loewy’s son Fred was involved in many of the day-to-day operations of the synagogue.

Beth Hebrew sustained itself throughout the years — Steven Spielberg, now an acclaimed director, even had his bar mitzvah there, in 1960. But its congregation was absorbed into the Beth El congregation in north Phoenix in the late 1970s, according to the Jewish News.

The building was then rented out as a church, and in 1983, the Black Theatre Troupe moved into the location. The troupe then looked to sell the building after an attempt at renovation was scrapped about a decade ago.

Designed by architect and astronomer Max Kaufman, the building caught the eye of Levine, who specializes in adaptive reuse.

“Even boarded up, you could tell it was a really cool, progressive, ahead-of-its-time building,” Levine said. “And as you did more research, it was like decoding something.”

The structure was in danger of demolition, so Levine purchased the building for $850,000 in March.

Back then, the outside of the building was covered with graffiti. Levine and his team have removed layers of paint, replaced windows and worked to restore the synagogue’s original cedar walls.

Renovations on the building are far from over —­ tile will be laid down, doors and stained glass will be installed, and security cameras will be set up, Levine said. He envisions it as a multipurpose building, to be used for bar mitzvahs, bat mitzvahs and other events. The open space showed the potential of things to come, and Levine didn’t want to let the special occasion go by without a celebration.

“To honor these great men and women who founded this place and preserved it, I really took it seriously, so I celebrated the anniversary,” he said. The idea of having the unveiling on the 61st anniversary, he added, "didn’t seem as memorable.”

Fred Loewy’s 31-year-old grandson, Justin Finkelstein, had been waiting for this moment most of his life, in a sense.

“My grandfather would talk about this place when we were young,” Finkelstein said. “With something like this, it just reminds me that our roots are very much ingrained here for a long time.”