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May 17, 2002/Sivan 6, 5762, Vol. 54, No.35
The past becomes present
FLO ECKSTEIN
Publisher
We are at the threshold of securing a rare community resource unburdened by the customary debates about purpose, location and price tag.
Within our reach and our means is a permanent site for gathering, preserving and displaying the documents, artifacts and photographs that tell the story of the Phoenix Jewish community from our mid-19th-century beginnings. Its importance is incontrovertible.
The site is the Jewish Heritage Center to be established in a tidy Mission Revival-style building at 122 E. Culver St. in Phoenix. The structure was completed in 1921 as the Hebrew Center Association and first home of Temple Beth Israel. Since 1949 it has sheltered Christian churches. It looks today remarkably as it did 81 years ago.
When the property recently went on the market, the Arizona Jewish Historical Society moved quickly to bring it back home.
The historical society has the hindsight to recognize the importance of our past and the foresight to safeguard it for future generations. It is now on a mission to raise $190,000 needed to close escrow on June 5.
The site's $540,000 total purchase price is well below the median sales price for a single-family residence in Paradise Valley. And our community has the capacity to fund the $4 million planners say is needed to restore and modernize the property and establish an endowment.
The Jewish Heritage Center is destined to be one of a diminishing number of Jewish institutions in central Phoenix. Dozens of synagogues and organizational offices have followed residential growth to Scottsdale, the East Valley and the West Valley.
Still, the site's location in an emergent cultural arts district positions it to draw Valley residents and to attract Jewish and non-Jewish visitors on tours that include the Burton Barr Central Library, the Heard Museum, the Phoenix Art Museum, the Arizona Science Center, the Phoenix Museum of History, Heritage Square, theaters and galleries, and the future Native American cultural center at Steele Indian School Park. It's very good company indeed.
Propelled by the June 5 deadline, AJHS fund-raisers are meeting with prospective givers over breakfast and lunch.
"We'll get it," volunteer Jerry Lewkowitz says about the initial funding. Planners also are pursuing a historic property designation that would enable applying for public restoration funds.
Meanwhile, project coordinator Beryl Morton focuses on what will go within the walls of a center honoring our ancestors and helping our children understand our splendid history: a restored sanctuary, a vault to protect precious archives, galleries devoted to aspects of our unique Southwestern Jewish heritage, a children's activity center, and group gathering spaces.
Lewkowitz says general community fund-raising will begin this fall. But why wait? Imagine what might happen if we were to call the historical society, at 602-241-7870, and ask, "What can I do to help?"
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