No. 21532 Temple Beth El, 100 Fowler Street
Also known as the Fowler Street Street Shul, the temple on Fowler Street was the vision of a congregation named Avath Achim, which held a Chanukah festival in Norfolk Hall at Four Corners on January 1, 1911. The Boston Globe reported that the congregation had purchased land at Fowler and Greenwood Street to erect a synagogue. In 1911, the congregation changed its name to Beth El. On September 2, 1912, the Congregation Beth El dedicated its new temple on Fowler Street. The newspaper article published in The Boston Globe that day described the building as one of the handsomest structures in Dorchester and mentioned that the congregation had held services at Mt. Bowdoin Hall for many years. This hall was located at 215 Washington Street with the Collins building. In 1965, the congregation moved to Newton. In 1997, the building at 100 Fowler Street was sold, and it was demolished the following year.
The following is from the National Register of Historic Places description, 2018.
Changing Demographics in Franklin Field North and Esmond Street Historic District 1910-1967
The second and third decades of the twentieth century brought substantial change in the demographics of the Franklin Field North neighborhood, as it did to much of Dorchester. The Franklin Field North neighborhood gradually transitioned from one that was a combination of multi-generational American families and first and second generation Irish families, to one that was home to a thriving Jewish immigrant community. The vast majority of Jewish immigrants to Boston came from Russia, fleeing state-sanctioned repression of their faith and culture under the Russian Tsar in the late 1880s and early 1900s, though many also came from Poland, Germany, and Austria. These immigrants initially settled in the North End, then moved into the West End between 1895 and 1905 which remained the largest Jewish district in Boston until about 1910. Typically, these immigrants arrived as skilled tradesmen. Many found employment in Boston’s textile and shoe industries, often beginning as peddlers and accumulating enough capital to open their own small businesses. Beginning the 1890s and continuing through 1917, many of the Jewish immigrants who had become successful in their trades began moving to less dense areas of the city like Dorchester, Roxbury, and Mattapan, which were just beginning to blossom into attractive streetcar suburbs.
While the Esmond Street Historic District and adjacent side streets did not absorb these upwardly-mobile Jewish immigrants in the first decade of the twentieth century, there were signs of change in the vicinity beginning in 1912 with the construction of the first synagogue in Dorchester just a few blocks north on Fowler Street. The Temple Beth El (no longer extant) was constructed at a not insignificant cost of $45,000, raised by Dorchester’s Jewish residents who had clearly achieved financial security. As increasing numbers of Jewish immigrants moved into Dorchester and Roxbury, apartment buildings and multi-family houses were constructed on vacant lots in established neighborhoods to accommodate the demand for housing.
What originated as a small movement of the more elite Jewish population out of the North and West Ends became a mass exodus by 1918; in 1920 approximately 44,000 Jews were living in Dorchester and Upper Roxbury. However, this second wave of Jewish immigrants moving into Dorchester differed from their predecessors as the population was typically working class. At this time, many of the more affluent Jewish settlers of Dorchester began to move to Boston’s outlying suburbs of Brookline and Newton. However, the working class Jewish population of Dorchester, Roxbury, and Mattapan continued to thrive in the second quarter of the twentieth century, increasing their numbers to 77,000 by the early 1930s.
See Carol Clingan. “Massachusetts Synagogues and Their Records, Past and Present.”
https://www.jgsgb.org/pdfs/MassSynagogues.pdf
Solovetchik, Joseph B.
Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik. When he arrived here from Europe in 1932, he was installed at Beth El (see attached.) While his rabbinical publications consist of only a few slim volumes, he is considered to be the father of modern orthodoxy. He founded the Maimonides School, which was the first to allow boys and girls to learn together. He is buried at Beth El Cemetery in West Roxbury. Known as the Rav, he is revered by orthodox Jews.
The following is from Wikipedia:
Joseph Ber Soloveitchik was born on February 27, 1903, in Pruzhany, Imperial Russia (later Poland, now Belarus). He came from a rabbinical dynasty dating back some 200 years: His paternal grandfather was Chaim Soloveitchik, and his great-grandfather and namesake was Yosef Dov Soloveitchik, the Beis HaLevi. His great-great-grandfather was Naftali Zvi Yehuda Berlin (The Netziv), and his great-great-great-great grandfather was Chaim Volozhin. His father, Moshe Soloveichik (note different spelling of last name), preceded him as head of the RIETS rabbinical school at Yeshiva University. On his maternal line, Soloveitchik was a grandson of Eliyahu Feinstein and his wife Guta Feinstein, née Davidovitch, who, in turn, was a descendant of a long line of Kapulyan rabbis, and of the Tosafot Yom Tov, the Shelah, the Maharshal, and Rashi.
In 1932, Soloveitchik emigrated to America and settled in Boston, where he referred to himself as “The Soloveitchik of Boston”. In that year, he opened a yeshiva known as Heichal Rabbeinu Chaim HaLevi or the Boston Yeshivah. Initially it mainly served lay people and their children, but starting in 1939 it was augmented by advanced students and staff who had fled the outbreak of World War II in Europe.
Soloveitchik pioneered the Maimonides School, one of the first Hebrew day schools in Boston in 1937. When the school’s high school was founded in the late 1940s, he instituted a number of innovations in the curriculum, including teaching Talmud to boys and girls studying in classes together. He involved himself in all manner of religious issues in the Boston area. He was at times both a rabbinical supervisor of kosher slaughtering – shechita – and an educator, gladly accepting invitations to lecture in Jewish and religious philosophy at prestigious New England colleges and universities. Rabbi Soloveitchik was also the head of Boston’s Council of Orthodox Synagogues (also called the Vaad Ha’ir). His son-in-law, Isadore Twersky, was an internationally renowned expert on the writings of Maimonides, and succeeded Professor Harry Austryn Wolfson to the Nathan Littauer chair of Jewish History and Literature at Harvard University.