First Jewish Cemetery

The people buried here were organizing before they had a building. The Encyclopedia of Southern Jewish Communities dates regular services in a Shreveport home to 1857, led by Rabbi Julius Lewin. The congregation took the name Har-El in 1861, rechartered as Hebrew Zion in 1866 and built a temple on Fannin Street in 1869 and 1870, so the plot bought in 1858 came first. Members split in 1875 over practice and rejoined about 1877 under a Reform affiliation that stayed sympathetic to tradition.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Shreveport Municipal Auditorium — steps away
  The Art Deco hall of 1929 where the Louisiana Hayride went out over KWKH from 1948 to 1960 and where Elvis Presley first played Shreveport on October 16, 1954.
• Spring Street Museum — 0.4 mi
  An 1866 bank building downtown that also held a Freedman's Savings and Trust branch in 1870, now a free LSUS-run museum with a Victorian parlor and the original vault.
• Shreveport Water Works Museum — 0.6 mi
  An 1887 brick pumping station on McNeill Street where Worthington steam pumps ran until 1980, now a free museum and a National Historic Landmark.
• Louisiana State Exhibit Museum — 2.7 mi
  A circular Art Deco museum of 1939 on the Shreveport fairgrounds, with a 1,000-year-old Caddo log boat, rotunda murals and dioramas of early Caddo Parish.

More markers nearby

• Oakland Cemetery — steps away
• James Burton — steps away
• Justin Gras — steps away
• Bishop Leonidas Polk — 0.2 mi