Chelsea History, part 5 of 6. Earlier: the Winnisimmet Ferry, Lewis Latimer, the fire of 1908 and the Naval Hospital.
In 1890 there were 82 Jewish residents of Chelsea. Twenty years later there were 11,225, nearly a third of the city. Those two numbers, from the Walnut Street Synagogue’s nomination to the National Register of Historic Places, describe one of the fastest transformations any Massachusetts city has seen.
A new community
Before 1890, the nomination says, the immigrants who came to Chelsea were mostly Irish and Polish Catholics. Between 1889 and 1920 the largest wave was Jews from Russia and Eastern Europe. By 1910 more than half of the city’s immigrants and their children were Jewish, and the community had become “one of the most important and cohesive ethnic enclaves of the early twentieth century in Massachusetts.”
The fire of 1908 accelerated the change. As downtown was rebuilt, ownership shifted from longtime residential owners to Jewish families of the middle and working class, and downtown Chelsea became, in the nomination’s words, “the most densely populated Jewish settlement in the United States.” Jewish investors and architects took part in the rebuilding. Between the world wars the city supported fourteen congregations, along with the Chelsea Hebrew Free School and other institutions. The Walnut Street congregation’s own history counts eighteen synagogues in the city over the years.
The congregation’s timeline records a moment that shows how large the community had become: in 1915 Louis Brandeis, the future Supreme Court justice, gave the keynote address of a national Zionist conference to a crowd of 5,000 on Everett Avenue.
The Queen of Synagogues
The congregation now on Walnut Street began as small groups praying in private homes. The earliest, Ohab Sholom, formed in 1890, and by 1901 it had raised enough money to buy the corner of Walnut and Fourth streets. It merged with Beth HaMidrash HaGadol and at least one other group into Congregation Agudath Sholom, the Congregation of Peace, the largest Orthodox congregation in the city. Its building was nearly finished when the fire of April 12, 1908 destroyed it.
The congregation rebuilt to a new design by Harry Dustin Joll, one of the three main architects of Chelsea’s reconstruction after the fire. The choice of an architect who was not Jewish, and the size of what he designed, reflected the congregation’s place as the leading Jewish institution in the city. The sanctuary on the second and third floors seats 1,109, and the building was called the Queen of Synagogues and reputed to be the largest Orthodox synagogue of its time in New England. Its walls and ceilings carry a complete set of frescoes painted by Jewish immigrant artists, which the nomination calls an extremely rare survival.
Decline and survival
Chelsea’s population peaked in 1925 at 47,247 and declined for decades after. The construction of the Tobin Bridge cut through the city just north of its center, right along the back of the synagogue’s lot, and in the postwar years many congregations dissolved and their buildings were converted to other uses. The fire of 1973 destroyed several more synagogues. When the Walnut Street Synagogue was listed on the National Register in 1993, it was the only synagogue left in Chelsea from before World War I, and the only building of its era still used for its original Jewish purpose.
A restored sanctuary was rededicated that year after a two-year fundraising campaign. Today the synagogue, at 145 Walnut Street, describes itself as one of the oldest continuously operating synagogues in Massachusetts and runs a museum and historic site; its sanctuary is intact and, it says, “appears just as it did when the shul opened in 1909.” The other remaining congregation, Temple Emmanuel on Tudor Street and Cary Avenue, won a permanent historic preservation restriction from the City Council in October.
More photographs of Chelsea’s synagogues, including several that are gone, are on the site’s Chelsea’s Synagogues archive page. Visiting hours and programs are on the synagogue’s website.
Last in the series, for Veterans Day: the Soldiers’ Home on Powderhorn Hill, which Civil War veterans have called home since 1881.