A Walk of Faith

Temple Gates of Prayer, one of the churches on this walk, was a late arrival and a joint effort. Jewish merchants had come to New Iberia in the 1870s, and in 1885 about fourteen families kept a Torah in the Masonic Hall. The congregation organized in 1897 and planned a brick synagogue at Charles and Weeks streets, and local Catholics gave generously to the appeal. Rabbi Julian Miller, a Hebrew Union College student, dedicated the temple in 1904. The congregation has never had a full-time rabbi.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Shadows-on-the-Teche — 0.4 mi
  A National Trust site in New Iberia built 1831 to 1834 for sugar planters David and Mary Weeks, now interpreted around the 1,112 people the Weeks family enslaved, among them Charity Polk, Amos, Patty, Isaac and Louisa.
• African American Museum, St. Martinville — 7.9 mi
  A museum in the St. Martinville Cultural Heritage Center on the arrival of Africans in Southwest Louisiana, slavery, the free people of color and Reconstruction, with the fourteen-panel exhibit The Shackles of Memory.
• St. Martin de Tours Catholic Church — 7.9 mi
  The Mother Church of the Acadians, founded in 1765 on St. Martin Square in St. Martinville, with a late 1870s Lourdes grotto and, a block away, the Evangeline Oak on Bayou Teche.
• Jungle Gardens and Avery Island — 8.7 mi
  A 170-acre garden and wildfowl refuge on a Gulf Coast salt dome, founded by Edward Avery McIlhenny, on an island that was a Marsh sugar plantation worked by enslaved people before Tabasco and the 1862 salt works.

More markers nearby

• The Episcopal Church Of The Epiphany — steps away
• Lieutenant Colonel Francisco Bouligny — 0.2 mi
• Louisiana's First Black Female Physician Dr. Emma Wakefield-Paillet — 0.2 mi
• Kathleen Babineaux Blanco — 0.2 mi