Saturday, June 13, 2015

Ruins of the old temple


Today, Dennis and I had a bonus lunch at La Raza.  Juan gave me gift certificate for the Changes auction.

Then we went downtown to Temple De Hirsch Sinai to take a look around.  I can see the letterboxing has really prepared us for this work.  They had built a temple with a cornerstone ceremony in 1907.  Then, on the same block they built some more buildings culminating with their major temple built in 1960 seating 1000 people.  They must have owned the whole block.  In Capital Hill, a very nice neighborhood.

So I wondered, where is this cornerstone from the first temple.  I wanted to go down there and poke around, show a little effort before asking questions.  Beautiful day today.  Somehow everything that we had scheduled got cancelled.  When we got there, we were surprised to find that the front part of the building including the steps and columns had been spared.  They still stood though the rest of the building was gone.  I felt that they were still considering the site as consecrated land.  So, my feeling is that the cornerstone with the materials in it are still there.  We looked and looked but could not find it.  Definitely gives me a starting point.

We agreed, that this building was much smaller than the Mishkan Israel building of 1896 in New Haven,.  We walked around the whole block looking for some other cornerstone looking things.  We found something suspicious in the locked parking lot.

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