The charred entrance to the front doors of the sanctuary at Congregation Beth Israel after an arson attack on October 31, 2021. Credit: Lori Adelman

By Paul Keeper 

When an arsonist torched Congregation Beth Israel’s front doors on Halloween night 2021, the Austin Fire Department responded quickly. Firefighters extinguished the fire by flooding the Temple’s exterior wall with hundreds of gallons of water. Behind that wall, CBI’s collection of historical documents lay only a few feet away. 

By luck, the documents were unharmed. But the experience raised CBI’s priority for protecting its 150-year-old archive of memories. 

Cathy Campbell and Jean Hughes, co-chairs of CBI’s Archive Committee, had been working for ten years to assemble, organize, and protect those historical materials.“We were simply lucky that night,” Campbell said.“ The walls that protected our documents were made of porous concrete block. Fortunately, the materials suffered no damage and have since been moved to a secure location.” 

In January 2023, Austin’s Tocker Foundation helped to improve that security. The Foundation, chaired by Barbara Tocker, made a generous donation to CBI to fund the scanning of the congregation’s historical materials. The executive director of the Foundation, Darryl Tocker, worked with CBI and the Austin Jewish Community Archive to expedite that process. 

With the Tocker Foundation’s funds, CBI’s historical materials will be preserved forever. Access to the digitized images will be available on the premier Texas online historical document website, The Portal to Texas History. Use of the Portal is free, available to anyone with a computer who wants to research Texas history. 

The digitization will be performed by Monocurate, an Austin professional archival service. 

Among the types of materials to be scanned will be copies of the temple’s handwritten board minutes from the 1870s, an invitation to attend a costume-themed fundraiser in the 1880s, and a 1930s-era photo of members of the Austin Jewish community meeting with then-U.S. Congressman Lyndon Johnson. Decades of printed temple bulletins will be available for anyone to use in reviewing their family’s celebration of life-cycle events. 

These materials were gathered by CBI volunteers, including Jeff and Bette Reichman, professional photographers. They contributed thousands of photographs of Temple celebrations. 

Jeff Cohen, the executive director of the Austin History Center Association, urges all Austin-area Jewish organizations to take serious note of CBI’s Halloween night experience by reviewing their own historical preservation protocols. “The events of Halloween 2021 in Austin came close to destroying a valuable part of Texas Jewish history,” he noted. Cohen also pointed out that the Houston Jewish community was not as fortunate. 

In 2017, Hurricane Katrina caused the loss of many historical documents maintained by Houston’s Congregation Beth Israel and the Houston Jewish Community Center. Each was located on the banks of Braes Bayou, where the floodwaters overflowed the bayou’s banks. “Those self-administered collections were seriously damaged by rising waters,” Cohen said. 

Since then, the Houston Jewish Archive, housed at Rice University, has become the main repository of documents chronicling Houston’s Jewish past. 

In Austin, the Austin Jewish Community Archive collects and preserves Austin’s Jewish history. The Austin Public Library’s Austin History Center provides a physical home for the materials. 

Two of the Archive’s volunteers, Sandy Dochen and Gaylon Finklea Hecker, have increased the Archive’s collection by conducting dozens of oral histories of Austin Jewish residents. These oral histories include some of Austin’s rabbis, leaders of Shalom Austin, Austin artists, and business owners. 

One early donor to the archive was Phil Spertus, a founding proponent of what became the Austin Dell Jewish Community Center Campus. The AJCA has been working with other Austin individuals, families, businesses, and organizations to preserve their place in Austin Jewish history. 

For more information or to become involved in the work of the Austin Jewish Community Archive, contact Paul Keeper at [email protected]