1921
The year the land for our current home was purchased.
The congregation moved to larger quarters on Union Park Street in the heart of the South End. The Union Park structure is now home to St. John the Baptist Hellenic Greek Orthodox Church.
Ohabei Shalom’s home was located downtown in what now is the Charles Playhouse.
For the first time, women were permitted to sit with their relatives in newly installed family pews.
The congregation, having grown to eighty families, erected its first building on Warren Street (now Warrenton Street) in Boston’s South End, the first synagogue built in Massachusetts, consecrated in 1852. “Worthy fellow citizens of every Religious Denomination” and the “Israelites of the United States” responded to an appeal for donations.
On March 22, 1845, the forty member congregation obtained a charter of incorporation from the Commonwealth. Among early meeting places were a room in Rabbi Saling’s house on Carver Street in Boston and a rented house on Albany Street.
As a primary obligation of a Jewish community is to provide a burial ground, the fledgling Ohabei Shalom congregation purchased a parcel of land in East Boston creating a cemetery, officially establishing Ohabei Shalom as a religious institution.
Our history begins with a few families who began meeting at the home of Peter and Julius Spitz on Fort Hill in the early 1840’s.