When the 1895 cornerstone of San Francisco’s historic Congregation Ohabai Shalome was removed last month, local Jewish history buff Felix M. Warburg was waiting in anticipation.
The cornerstone of the disbanded synagogue on Bush Street contained a time capsule with items dating back to the Lincoln assassination and the pre-Gold Rush era.
Among them were American and Chinese coins, Anglo-Jewish publications, a mezuzah believed to be from the synagogue’s previous home on Mason Street, and, most mysterious of all, an 1847 letter in Yiddish that was sent from Hamburg, Germany, to someone in Mississippi.
“I was absolutely amazed,” said Warburg, a San Francisco architect. “I always expected that there would be a time capsule, but what was a real surprise was how much older some of the documents were.”
Calling the Sept. 21 find “a treasure,” Warburg said, “Each discovery helps us to understand our history, who we are, and how we arrived here.”
Ohabai Shalome — meaning “Lovers of Peace” in Hebrew — is the oldest standing synagogue building in San Francisco. The building, also known as the Bush Street Temple, is now undergoing renovations by the Japanese American Religious Federation, its current owner.
Warburg’s knowledge that the synagogue’s cornerstone would contain a time capsule was based on prior experience. When the cornerstone from the old Congregation Beth Israel on Geary and Fillmore streets was extracted some years ago, it, too, held a time capsule.
He was the first to examine the contents of the Ohabai Shalome time capsule, and he found more than 40 items inside a zinc box, measuring about 7 by 8 inches.
They included front pages of newspapers, synagogue bylaws, and other documents dating back to 1865, when the Mason Street synagogue was built.
The capsule included two Anglo-Jewish publications of the time, including The Gleaner, dated May 26, 1865, and The Hebrew, dated May 19, 1865, which features a section devoted to the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, only a month earlier.
“We should always be aware that history is all around us waiting to be uncovered,” said Warburg. “It’s like a puzzle with an unknown number of pieces. We don’t know where the next one will come from. or how many there are, but it’s important for people to know their own history and that of their community.”
Warburg turned the collection over to the Western Jewish History Center of Berkeley’s Judah L. Magnes Museum, of which he is a board member. Susan Morris, executive director of the Magnes, then took the artifacts to art preservationist Karen Zukor in Oakland.
The documents in the capsule had been folded up several times and compressed to fit inside the box. They had been well-preserved until recently, Zukor said, when some water must have leaked inside the box. Some of them needed to be treated with an alcohol solution, and dried in the sun, to get rid of the mold. There was also quite a bit of sand in the bottom of the box.
Morris observed that creating a time capsule to fit inside the cornerstone of a synagogue is a common practice, noting that San Francisco Congregation Sherith Israel has one inside its cornerstone dating from 1904, when its home on California Street was built.
But none of those at the Magnes suspected that the time capsule would contain anything from earlier than 1895.
And actually seeing the documents “opens up new avenues of research,” she said. “We will find out many things we didn’t know before.”
One example was a pamphlet from the “Friends of Zion” dated 1861. “We had no knowledge of this society, that it existed,” said Seymour Fromer, founding director of the Magnes.
Although the Magnes has a list of items from the minutes of the synagogue’s first meeting in 1865, the Oct. 20, 1847 letter from Germany to Solomon Lichtenstein in Mississippi was among several items not logged on that list. Nobody at the Magnes had any idea who the man was.
Wearing white cotton gloves to inspect the letter earlier this week, Fromer surmised that it was written in a condensed script, to conserve space.
Whatever the original color of ink, it is now brown, and the paper itself is sepia-toned with age. The envelope was also included in the capsule. Although a few fragments of it are missing, Morris said, “It’s well-preserved and lengthy.”
Guessing that the letter had been received in Mississippi and then hand-carried to California, Morris said that many German Jews, mostly merchants, had settled in Mississippi in the 1840s. Now it falls upon the Magnes staff to have the letter translated, find out who the recipient was, and why the letter was included in the capsule.
Articles in the May 19, 1865 edition of The Hebrew include this report on the Jewish reaction to Lincoln’s assassination: “Below will be found accounts of the religious services, held in reference to the great National calamity in several of the Jewish synagogues in New York, and which show the universal love, admiration and esteem in which our late President was held among our co-religionists in the East.”
In the weddings section, the newspaper reveals that the Rev. H.A. Henry had performed several of the Jewish ceremonies. Henry was the rabbi of Sherith Israel at the time, and Morris said it was the norm for Reform rabbis to go by “Rev.” in the 19th century.
And then, announcements like the following reveal that the San Francisco Jewish community still had a small-town feeling: “Departure — Mr. Jacob Rich has left this city for the South. The best wishes of his numerous friends for his future prosperity follow him to his new home. May Almighty God speed him.”
But despite such good will, there were also ruptures. Ohabai Shalome was first founded in 1864 as a break-off group from Congregation Emanu-El, which, in turn, had split with Sherith Israel in 1851. Ohabai Shalome’s members felt that Emanu-El was more Reform than they wanted.
In 1895, 30 years after building the Mason Street synagogue, Ohabai Shalome built a new, Moorish-style synagogue on Bush Street near Laguna, to accommodate those Jews living in the western part of the city. Its auditorium and balcony could accommodate 1,000 people. Men and women sat together, and the congregation maintained a traditional ritual, reading the entire Torah portion on Shabbat.
The congregation disbanded in 1934, selling the building. For many years, it functioned as a Zen Buddhist educational center, but then it was taken over by the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency.
It was designated a city landmark in 1976, and in the late ’80s Warburg spearheaded an effort to turn it into a Jewish cultural center. But he couldn’t raise enough money.
After not being used for years, the building was granted to the Japanese American Religious Federation in 1996. Construction has now begun on an assisted-living center. However, the sanctuary of the synagogue, which still has its original redwood pews from 1895, will be kept intact.
Noting that Steve Suzuki, the architect in charge of the project, has been most cooperative, Warburg said he hoped that the sanctuary would be available to the public.
“The synagogue has some of the best natural acoustics ever seen,” said Warburg. “When we had control of it, we had several recording companies interested in the building to record music.”
It was the best he could hope for, since the cultural center idea never took hold.
Warburg voiced excitement about the finds in the time capsule, which also included things like the front page of the French Jewish magazine Archives Israelites.
Many of Ohabai Shalome’s membership came from the Alsace-Lorraine province of France, explained Morris.
While visiting Zukor’s studio earlier this week, Magnes museum archivist Aaron T. Kornblum noticed that some of the newspapers from 1865 had a red stamp in their corners saying: “Choynski, Antiquarian Books.”
Isidore Choynski was a bookseller who was known for being a leftist firebrand, Morris said. Kornblum guessed that those papers with his stamp on them must have been bought specifically to include in the time capsule and had not been saved by synagogue members themselves.
Morris said the inclusion of so many newspaper clippings from the city’s papers showed that the Jews “felt themselves very much a part of the community. They weren’t isolated.”
Of most interest to Kornblum was the inclusion of a Chinese coin, along with an American dime and one- and two-cent pieces, all dated 1865.
“The Chinese coin shows a confluence of Jewish culture with Chinese culture, which they wouldn’t have encountered anywhere else,” he said. “The Jews are embracing another minority culture within the greater community. Only in San Francisco would you find that.”
Some business cards were also enclosed, such as “Leipsic Bros. Dairy: Pure Country Milk” and a copy of a lithograph of Sir Moses Montefiore, whom Fromer called “the Edgar Bronfman of his time, a philanthropist as well as a spokesperson for Jews and humanity.”
The capsule also contained bylaws from several area synagogues as well as organizations like B’nai B’rith, as well the corner of a postage stamp, which had mostly disintegrated.
The Magnes staff hopes to be able to exhibit the documents soon, after researching them, and then they will become a part of the museum’s permanent collection.
Morris, who said the stash of documents made her feel like the proverbial kid in a candy store, was also excited for personal reasons: Her great-great-grandfather Henry Greenberg was the first treasurer of Ohabai Shalome.