Galveston synagogue survives Ike, now rebuilding

TAKING THIS reporter on a recent tour of Galveston Island’s Congregation Beth Jacob, the synagogue’s staff and lay leaders show remarkable attention to detail.

The shifting locations of specific furniture and ritual items from the 1930s to the present. The water line on the Torah ark, a reminder of the devastation wrought by Hurricane Ike in 2008. Even the intricacies of the electrical work and the air conditioning system.

But why does all this detail matter? For this Texas city’s small Jewish community — an estimated 150 to 175 households — the Conservative synagogue’s facility is akin to a national treasure.

“We are our building, our building is us,” says Gary Druss, Beth Jacob’s gabbai (ritual assistant) and past president. “Our identities are tied to this building.”

The congregation’s 80 member families were all displaced from their homes by Hurricane Ike, not to mention the damage suffered by their spiritual home.

But eight years later, the synagogue building is restored and the congregation is celebrating its 85th anniversary in style — organizing a March 26 concert by popular singer-songwriter and novelist Kinky Friedman, a former gubernatorial candidate in Texas.

Beth Jacob has an eye on not only appreciating its past, but also bringing it to life, through its ongoing development of a plan to turn part of the synagogue facility into a museum. Galveston in general has broader historical significance as one of America’s two major immigration ports in the 20th century.

“Between 1906 and 1914 nearly 50,000 immigrants arrived at Galveston, including Bohemians, Moravians, Galicians, Austrians, Romanians, Swiss, English, Poles, Italians, Dutch and some 10,000 Jews,” according to the Texas State Historical Association’s website.

“By 1915, Galveston was considered a ‘second Ellis Island.’ The flow of immigration ceased in World War I, and the immigration center was demolished in 1972.”

Galveston’s rich history — and its preservation — isn’t lost on Friedman, who in the 1970s moved on from his second band, “Kinky Friedman and The Texas Jewboys,” to a four-decade solo career that has included touring with Bob Dylan.

“With the big cities coming in to kind of homogenize and sanitize zones, Galveston still has a little bit of its old-time style going,” Friedman tells JNS. “I just feel kind of a bond with the place, one of the few places in America that I do.”

The outspoken musician, whose nickname comes from the texture of his hair, has a difficult time answering a question without cracking a joke. About the opera house that will host his upcoming concert he says, “I don’t know whether that’s older than the synagogue, but they’re both older than I am. And that’s good because I’m 71, though I read at the 73-year-old level.”

Fact check: The Grand 1894 Opera House, the concert’s venue, is older than Beth Jacob itself but younger than the synagogue’s roots.

BETWEEN 1868 and 1930, Galveston was home to two Orthodox synagogues. In the spring of 1930, those synagogues merged to create Congregation Beth Jacob, which was chartered in 1931. Beth Jacob’s current building was dedicated in 1932 and expanded in 1962. By 1970, the congregation took up egalitarian practices in the Conservative Jewish tradition.

In 2008, the same year when the synagogue nearly met its demise during the hurricane, part-time spiritual leader Rabbi Todd Doctor took on Beth Jacob’s pulpit as a full-time position. With the storm, Doctor was “informally knighted,” says Kathleen Sukiennik, the synagogue’s former executive director.

With about 50 to 60 member families today, the congregation no longer prays in the larger sanctuary that arrived with its 1962 expansion.

Yet David Rockoff, Beth Jacob’s current president and executive director, hopes that Galveston’s historic significance as well as its increasing appeal for beachgoers and cruise ships will rejuvenate the synagogue community in the post-Ike era.

“Our congregation, although small, has a very large, very usable facility,” Rockoff says. “What we’re looking to do in the future is to utilize our buildings to further strengthen Jewish identity and understanding of the congregation and of Galveston, and of the history of the immigration of Jews to the United States through Galveston.”

Rockoff’s grandfather arrived in the US from Russia through the Galveston port  in 1905, then moved to New York two years later. The family eventually found its way back to Texas, settling in Houston. Rockoff, a career fundraiser for 45 years, completed the circle by moving to Galveston in 2013, when he started his job at Beth Jacob.

Doctor’s grandfather also immigrated to the US through Galveston, moving to Wharton, Texas. Doctor said he was drawn to the pulpit by his strong feeling that a synagogue shouldn’t close, as happened with his childhood synagogue, Congregation Shearith Israel of Wharton, which shut down in 2002.

“We’re trying to maintain a presence of Conservative Judaism on the island,” says Druss, the gabbai.

In the decade after the hurricane, the congregation’s membership is transforming. Before Ike, almost all of the members grew up in the Beth Jacob community, but now it’s just the opposite. Many Galveston residents who were displaced by flooding left for Houston and never returned, and storm-induced stress led to a spike in local deaths among the older generation.

Indeed, the hurricane was a “galvanizing force” when it came to planning Beth Jacob’s future, says Druss, immediately realizing his unintended pun.

“Nobody was going to give up on the shul,” he says.

Kathleen Sukiennik remembers going through the floodwater and the gunk, pulling apart the Torah ark. Doctor reconstructed part of the ark himself. With about 75% of the island flooded, Sukiennik recalls feeling “like kids” chasing an ice cream truck upon seeing Salvation Army trucks delivering food to Galveston residents in need.

“We were all homeless,” Sukiennik says. “This island was homeless.”

Yet it was never an option to tear down the synagogue, says Druss, explaining that with the help of a disaster-recovery expert who performed $90,000 of work free of charge because of his “obligation as a Jew,” the synagogue was able to rebuild within the context of its historic home.

IN A more recent stroke of good fortune, Rockoff ran into Kinky Friedman last year at a restaurant along Galveston’s boardwalk. He bought Friedman a cup of coffee, and the rest is history, culminating in Beth Jacob’s March 26 “Evening with Kinky Friedman”at the opera house.

Friedman, who in 2006 finished fourth in the six-person Texas governor’s race as an independent candidate, says politics will have “very little place” — but still somewhat of a presence — at his concert.

“Jews in America have a decision to make” in the 2016 presidential election, he says.

“I don’t think the Democrats have treated Israel very well,” says Friedman, who describes himself as a “Democrat most of my life, and definitely now an independent at best, and maybe a Republican.”

About Galveston, he says, “Many of the people that have been through there are very colorful types, and there are a lot of misfits there, and I say that in a positive way . . . This looks like it’s shaping up to be quite a show.”