Temple Beth Israel

The congregation that built Mississippi's first synagogue grew out of German Jewish families who organized in 1860 and began by creating a cemetery. Its best-known rabbi, Dr. Perry Nussbaum, served from 1954 to 1973 and was active in the civil rights movement. In 1967 the congregation moved into a new synagogue on Old Canton Road, and the Ku Klux Klan bombed both that building and the rabbi's house the same year. The 1874 replacement of this corner's wooden building was for a time the oldest religious building in Jackson.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Old Capitol Museum — 0.4 mi
  Mississippi's Greek Revival statehouse of 1839, where the legislature voted to secede, Hiram Revels was elected to the U.S. Senate and the 1890 constitution was written, now a free state museum.
• Mississippi Civil Rights Museum — 0.6 mi
  A state museum in downtown Jackson, opened in 2017 beside the Museum of Mississippi History, that tells the movement from 1945 to 1970 through the people who made it.
• Farish Street Historic District — 0.8 mi
  Jackson's Black business and cultural center, where Medgar Evers kept the NAACP office and furniture-store owners recorded the blues, now a quiet National Register district.
• Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument — 3.8 mi
  A modest ranch house in Jackson's Elraine neighborhood where Medgar Evers was shot in the driveway in 1963, now a unit of the National Park Service.

More markers nearby

• Hal & Mal's — 0.2 mi
• Otis Spann & Little Johnnie Jones — 0.5 mi
• First Presbyterian Church — 0.5 mi
• Galloway Memorial United Methodist Church — 0.6 mi