Congregation B'Nai Israel

The congregation began with a cemetery. In 1858, after yellow fever killed six Jews, a cemetery association bought land. The next year eight foreign-born men from Bavaria or Alsace founded the congregation, meeting above the Singletary Building. Union occupation stopped meetings; in 1877 it dedicated a former school at 5th and Laurel, lost it in a 1883 title suit and bought it back in 1885. In 1929 Rabbi Walter Peiser refused to give a legislative invocation to protest Governor Huey Long's corruption.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Capitol Park Museum — 0.2 mi
  The Louisiana State Museum in Baton Rouge: a shrimp trawler and a Civil War submarine, galleries on the slave market, resistance and Jim Crow, and the music from Armstrong to Chenier.
• Old State Capitol — 0.3 mi
  James Dakin's 1850 Gothic castle on the river bluff, gutted in the Civil War, nearly demolished in 1991 and reopened in 1994 as a free museum of political history.
• Louisiana State Capitol — 0.5 mi
  A 450-foot Art Deco tower Huey Long pushed through in 1930, finished in 14 months, and the hallway where he was shot in 1935; free to enter and ringed by 27 acres of grounds.
• LSU Rural Life Museum — 5.0 mi
  Four slave cabins moved from Welham Plantation and a working-plantation row of more than twenty saved buildings, on land the Burden family held as Windrush plantation since the 1830s.

More markers nearby

• Fort Sumter Saloon — steps away
• Baton Rouge Sit-Ins — steps away
• Garner v. Louisiana — 0.2 mi
• Bogalusa to Baton Rouge March — 0.2 mi