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Our Architecture
Ideally it should be possible to experience holiness in a tent, a barn, a mall, or anywhere else. But a beautiful place makes it that much easier for the spirit to take wing – and Temple Israel is blessed with two such spaces.
 Our historic main sanctuary, whose groundbreaking was in 1927, is the oldest synagogue in Florida. The architects, Robertson & Patterson, which were also the architects of the building on South Beach where the Wolfsonian Museum is housed. The original Temple Israel – a Moorish-Gothic confection of stained glass and tropical tile – is in the style popular in Miami in the 1920s. The sanctuary is on the National Register of Historic Places.
The sanctuary – named the Bertha Abess Sanctuary for the matriarch of the family that founded City National Bank - retains its historic ambience, although it has also undergone several changes over the years. Its central podium was replaced with two podia after the temple hired its first cantor in the fifties. A massive restoration (which included the establishment of a center aisle, where congregants now sometimes dance during "Lecha Dodi") took place in the nineties.
Our other worship space, the 1969 Sophie and Nathan Gumenick chapel, is completely different – experimental where the sanctuary is classic, and intimate rather than grand. (Imagine a large, luminous igloo suffused with rays of sunlight and eye-popping color, and you begin to get the idea.) Architect Kenneth Treister – who also designed the Miami Beach Holocaust Memorial and Mayfair in the Grove - grounded his conception in Torah, particularly God’s commandment in Genesis, "Let there be light." The graphic on our home page is taken from the chapel’s brilliant blue, red and purple windows.
 Its architecture was the theme of a lavishly illustrated book, Chapel of Light: Jewish Ceremonial Art in the Sophie & Nathan Gumenick Chapel. Copies are available in the temple gift shop. In April, 2003, it was also the subject of a full-length article in "House and Garden" magazine, which described the chapel as an emblem of the revitalization of the neighborhood and also of Judaism itself. "Reform Judaism is, as much as anything, a search for truths rather than a recitation of them," wrote author Beth Dunlop. "The architecture of this chapel is intended to echo that quest." |
