Temple Emanu-El

Kilgore's Congregation Beth Sholom opened its synagogue in 1936, with Anne Rose leading the fundraising and Rabbi Benjamin Eisenberg of the Hebrew Theological College leading Rosh Hashanah services. Around 1945 Hyman Hurwitz bought a former bar and gambling house slated for demolition and had it moved beside the synagogue as a social hall and classrooms. In 1957 the congregation counted 96 families, 51 of them from Longview. The Longview temple took the name Emanu-El in October 1958, and the Kilgore building was sold in 1979 to Buster Dickerson, who made it an art studio and apartments.

What the plaque says

Temple Emanu-El During the early 1900s oil boom, many Jewish families settled in northeast Texas. Longview's Temple Emanu-El (God is with us) has its origins in the 1936 Kilgore Temple Beth Sholom (House of Peace). For two decades, Jewish families traveled to Kilgore for services until a new temple was built in 1957-58 in Longview with fifty-four charter member families. The sanctuary is an architectural representation of a menorah. During its existence, the members worked to serve the community through education, outreach and fundraising. As the Jewish communities in the region began to decline, Longview's Temple Emanu-El became the repository of Jewish activity and memory for the area. (2014)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• East Texas Oil Museum — 13 mi
  A Kilgore College museum that rebuilds the 1930s oil boom in a full-scale Boomtown with a general store, drugstore and newspaper office, plus dioramas, films and antiques given by East Texans.
• Starr Family Home State Historic Site — 21 mi
  Maplecroft, the 1871 Greek Revival house Frank Starr built in Marshall, with Ruth Starr Blake's glass and china, an 1880s kitchen restored in 2019 and a retirement home built for a formerly enslaved person.
• Harrison County Historical Museum — 21 mi
  Galleries in Marshall's 1901 courthouse that run from the Caddo to the present, with Wiley College, Lady Bird Johnson's inaugural gown and a military gallery across the square in Memorial City Hall.
• Texas and Pacific Railway Depot and Museum — 21 mi
  The only surviving building of the Texas and Pacific shops at Marshall, a 1912 Mission Revival depot saved from demolition in the 1990s, still an Amtrak stop, with a railway museum and a Mikado locomotive.

More markers nearby

• Winterfield Methodist Church — 0.4 mi
• Johnny Cace's Seafood and Steak House — 1.3 mi
• Site of Earpville — 1.4 mi
• The Grove — 1.8 mi