Sephardic Bikur Holim Congregation (SBH) is an Orthodox Jewish congregation and synagogue in the Seward Park neighborhood of Seattle, in the US state of Washington, that practices in the Sephardic tradition.
Overview The name Bikur Holim (which can be transliterated various ways into English) means visiting or comforting the sick, an important mitzvah. The first official name of the congregation was Spanish Hebrew Society and Congregation Bikur Holim, shortened to "Sephardic Bikur Holim" ("Sephardic" to avoid confusion with Seattle's similarly named Ashkenazic congregation). For a time in the 1930s, after amalgamation with another congregation, it was known as Bikur Holim Ahavath Ahim Congregation.
SBH is one of Seattle's two Sephardic congregations, the other being Congregation Ezra Bessaroth. With about 4,000 Sephardim, Seattle is in contention with Miami for having the nation's third largest Sephardic population, behind New York City and Los Angeles. According to Aviva Ben-Ur, the influence of the Sephardim within the Jewish community has arguably been greater in Seattle than anywhere else in the United States. At their relative peak, Sephardic Jews constituted about one-third of Seattle's Jewish population; today, they constitute about ten percent. (another source says 18 percent); the Sephardic community in New York at the time made up less than 1 percent of that city's far more numerous Jewish Community; today, thanks to an influx of Syrian, Persian and Bukharian Jews, Sephardim make up a far larger portion of that metropolitan area's Jewry. Although both Seattle Sephardic congregations are Orthodox, many less observant members and even secular Jews attend, because they identify strongly with being Sephardic.
Roberta Noel Britt writes that the congregation got its name from its original synagogue in Seattle's Central District, the former synagogue of the (Ashkenazic) Bikur Cholim, now Bikur Cholim Machzikay Hadath, which was purchased in 1913. The congregation's own website says that the name was adopted from an identically named congregation in Tekirdağ, Turkey.
History
Origins
Solomon Calvo and Jacob Policar, both from the island of Marmara arrived in Seattle in 1902, the first Sephardic Jews to arrive in that city. Nissim Alhadeff followed close behind, as did several Jews from the island of Rhodes. Calvo and Alhadeff both went into the seafood business, with the former founding the Waterfront Fish and Oyster Co. and the latter founding the Palace Fish and Oyster Co., later Pacific Fish Co. They and their fellow Sephardim dominated the fish and produce stands in the early years of Pike Place Market. By 1910, Seattle's Sephardim included some from Tekirdağ (also known as Rodosto) and Constantinople (now Istanbul). Most early arrivals were young men, but some soon brought wives. By 1910 the city had about 40 Sephardic families.
The first Sephardic arrivals held services for the High Holy Days in a rented hall; an Ashkenazic rabbi came over to blow the shofar. After 1908 they split into two groups, one from Rhodes and one from the Turkish regions (Tekirdağ and Marmara), because of differences in minhagim (traditions). In 1911, the latter group purchased a Sefer Torah (torah scroll) from Palestine, and in 1913 raised $800 to buy the old 13th and Washington synagogue of the Ashkenazic congregation Bikur Cholim; the latter were moving to a synagogue at 17th and Yesler, now the Langston Hughes Performing Arts Center. They also purchased a section of the Bikur Cholim cemetery.The fundraising occurred in 1913, but the purchase was completed in 1914, according to the same source, the congregation's official site. Roberta Noel Britt, The role of Turkish and Rhodes Sephardic women in the Seattle Sephardic Community, 1981, p. 255 says that the congregation was formed by Jewish families from Rhodes, which would be the other side of the divided group. The official site says that initially "the Marmara group decided to maintain their own identity"; that same site had previously referred to a "Rhodes" group and a "Tekirdag and Marmara" group.
Rabbi Shelomo Azose, a hakham (Torah scholar) who had served in both Tekirdağ and Marmara, arrived in Seattle 1910; he became a combination rabbi, hazzan or cantor, mohel (performing circumcision), and shochet (kosher slaughterer of animals). He died in 1919; his brother, Isaac Azose, succeeded him 1919–1924.
In an effort to improve religious education, in 1915 SBH and other Seattle Sephardim formed a Sephardic Talmud Torah, with a Mr. Benezra from New York City as its first teacher. Benezra had a solid knowledge not only of Hebrew and English, but also of Ladino or Judaeo-Spanish, the traditional vernacular of Sephardic Jews.
By 1916 there were about 1500 Sephardim in Seattle. The Rhodes group had established a separate synagogue, Congregation Ezra Bessaroth. The Marmara group were also distinct, but lacked a synagogue of their own. World War I brought a further influx, mostly relatives of Sephardim already in Seattle, but some families left Seattle for Portland, Oregon and Los Angeles. In 1921, the Marmara group decided to build the Ahavath Ahim synagogue, completed 1922; some SBH members left to join them.
Also in 1921 Rabbi Chaim Nahum, former Hakham Bashi (Chief Rabbi of Turkey) visited Seattle to raise money for the Alliance Israélite Universelle. He remained in Seattle three weeks, and raised more money in Seattle than in Portland or Los Angeles.
Rabbi Abraham Maimon In 1923, Rabbi Abraham Maimon, who claimed descent from Maimonides and who had been the rabbi in Tekirdağ when many of the SBH members had lived there, indicated his interest in moving to Seattle. The matter was complicated by the Emergency Quota Act of 1921 and the Immigration Act of 1924, but matters were worked through, and in September 1924 he became the congregation's new rabbi. That same year, the congregation's Ladies Auxiliary was founded, with Estraya Chiprut as its first president.
Although Rabbi Maimon's tenure proved short—he died in January 1931—the congregation grew and prospered during those years. Attendance at the Shabbat services increased, and members of the congregation adopted stricter observance of Shabbat and of kashrut (kosher) practices. The congregation established the role of a gabbai to assist during services and a shamash to open and close the synagogue daily. Avram Barlia was to perform the latter function for over 50 years. In the days before the widespread availability of telephones, he went house to house, extending invitations for engagements, weddings, and so forth. SBH began to outgrow its facility at 13th and Washington and, in 1928, SBH bought a property at 20th Avenue and East Fir Street, and managed to raise the funds to build a synagogue in time for the 1929 Rosh Hashanah services. The new sanctuary was officially inaugurated Sunday, September 29, 1929.
Under Maimon, SBH began to heal the breach with the rival Sephardic synagogues. Representatives of congregations Ezra Bessaroth and Ahavath Ahim gladly accepted an invitation to participate in SBH's 1925 Fruticas (Tu Bishvat) celebration. The local Sephardic social welfare group Seattle Progressive Fraternity (SPF), founded in 1921, already had members from all three congregations, and held several meetings in 1926 to discuss unity in the Sephardic community. In 1927, the congregation elected as its president Henry Benezra, who in 1921 had become the first Sephardic Jewish graduate of the University of Washington. Benezra's central purpose in taking the office was to amalgamate the city's three Sephardic synagogues.
Benezra and Jack Caston got the SBH board's permission to attempt amalgamation with Congregation Ezra Bessaroth; the matter was discussed between the institutions for over half a year without finding a mutually acceptable basis to merge. The SPF and the local Jewish newspaper The Jewish Transcript would continue to discuss and urge amalgamation for many years, but without success.
Meanwhile, Rabbi Shabetai Israel left the Ahavath Ahim congregation in 1929, and they did not readily find a successor. The majority of the members of Ahavath Ahim voted in 1931 to amalgamate with SBH; a few joined Ezra Bessaroth and a smaller number decided to continue as an independent synagogue, with Morris Scharhon (who by now also operated the Talmud Torah) as their religious leader. For a time after this, SBH was known as Bikur Holim Ahavath Ahim Congregation; this was eventually shortened back to the original name.
The Depression and war years After Maimon's death religious duties were divided between Nessim Azose and Bension Maimon, along with Rabbi Isaac Azose. Around 1931 SBH first introduced a choir, trained by Samuel E. Goldfarb, recently arrived music director of Seattle's Reform Jewish Temple De Hirsch. Goldfarb, co-composer of the Hanukkah song "I Have a Little Dreidel", trained the singers and composed and arranged their liturgical music.
The Great Depression was hard on the Sephardic Bikur Holim Congregation and Seattle's Sephardic community in general, as on so many others. In the 1920s, Seattle had seen a good deal of amateur theater performed in Ladino, and the plays even helped raise money for the Sephardic synagogues. This era came sharply to an end in 1929. The Sephardic Talmud Torah could no longer pay Morris Scharhon, who attempted for a while to operate a smaller cheder out of his home and functioned as hazzan (cantor) for Ahavath Ahim. Albert Levy, editor of the Ladino newspaper LaVara moved from New York in summer 1931, and temporarily reinvigorated the Talmud Torah, adding women's classes and gaining recognition from the broader Jewish community, but finances nonetheless deteriorated, and Levy returned to New York in 1934.
Because of Maimon's purported descent from Maimonides, the congregation and his surviving family drew considerable attention in 1935, the 800th anniversary of Maimonides' birth.
Until 1935, Seattle had three separate Sephardic men's social organizations, the aforementioned culturally oriented SPF, the Ahavath Shalom, and Shalom Alehem. Ahavath Shalom—affiliated with the Ezra Bessaroth congregation, and nicknamed the "Havurah de Huevos" (huevos being Spanish / Ladino for "eggs"), because part of the 10¢ weekly dues went for a hard-boiled egg on Shabbat—served the burial needs of the Sephardic community, and had, in the 1920s, significantly expanded the Sephardic cemetery in the 167th Street area. Shalom Alehem had originated to care for the sick, and became more or less a health insurance plan. In 1935, the three social organizations merged into the Seattle Sephardic Brotherhood, still active as of 2009.
Leaders of the Brotherhood continued to be enthusiastic about the possibility of amalgamating SBH with Ezra Bessaroth and the independent Ahavath Ahim Congregation, and they managed to get the congregations talking, but responses were lukewarm. Still, when leading Sephardic rabbi David de Sola Pool of New York's Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue proposed that Rabbi Isidore Kahan, onetime Rosh Yeshiva in Rhodes and at the time a rabbi in Rome would want to move to seattle, synagogues, SBH and Ezra Bessaroth agreed to sponsor him to serve as the rabbi of both synagogues. He arrived in March 1939.
Rabbi Kahan was fluent in Italian, German, Hebrew and Hungarian. Unfortunately, at the time of his arrival he spoke little English and, despite his time in Rhodes, little Ladino. His English rapidly improved, but he proved unequal to the difficult balancing act of attending to the needs of two congregations. In 1941, SBH gave him a cash payment to terminate his contract; he remained in Seattle as rabbi at Ezra Bessaroth.
The Ahavath Ahim synagogue closed down by 1940, becoming more of a social club. Morris Scharhon joined SBH as its hazzan, and Albert Levy headed a revived SBH Talmud Torah, which he once again revitalized.