333 E Portland St Synagogue Beth Hebrew

333 East Portland is a living monument to new life in a new land for survivors of Nazi Germany & Vichy France.

The building wouldn’t exist today if it weren’t for a series of people who put the needs of others before their own.

First, there’s Elias Loewy, who not only survived Nazi Europe but helped a thousand or more Jews survive as well. He’s known today as “the Jewish Schindler.” He came to the U.S. after the war with his wife and daughter and his son Fred, who fought in the Resistance; his other son, Max, also a member of the Resistance, had been killed in a skirmish with the Germans. Because his health was poor, doctors recommended Elias leave the East Coast and head west to a better climate. He wrote to several chambers of commerce looking for information; only Phoenix responded. He co-founded the Jewish Free Loan here in Phoenix, to help those who were struggling, and he in 1950 co-founded the first Orthodox congregation in the city: Beth Hebrew.

Second, there’s Max Kaufman, the architect of this building, constructed in 1955. There weren’t many Jewish architects in the United States in the 1950s. Those were still the days of quotas and restrictions. Kaufman was self taught. He was also an amateur but highly proficient astronomer and had a PhD in Egyptology. Unlike most architects of his time, he did not pattern his synagogue after a church. Instead, he looked farther back, to the more culturally appropriate temples of antiquity. This building combines elements of ancient Egyptian architecture with the minimal elegance that we’ve come to recognize as “mid-century modern.”

Third, there’s Rabbi Abraham Lincoln Krohn, spiritual leader of Congregation Beth Israel, which was well established when Elias Loewy and his family arrived in Phoenix in 1948. Like Abraham Joshua Heschel before him, Abraham Lincoln Krohn saw social justice, “doing the right thing,” as an integral part of Judaism. He founded the Jewish Family Service in Phoenix, now the Jewish Family and Children’s Service. He had a reputation as the guy to go to if you needed help, spiritual or financial. It is no surprise that Beth Israel donated a number of items – including the ark, chairs and books – to Beth Hebrew when it was first formed. And when Elias Loewy died suddenly before Beth Hebrew’s new building was yet a reality, Krohn stepped in and made it his personal mission to see the project through. He even donated his own torah, which had come over from Europe with his family.

Fourth, we have Steven Spielberg. He became a bar mitzvah in this building, as part of the congregation that Elias Loewy co-founded and of which Fred Loewy was a part. It’s not difficult to imagine that Spielberg would have heard Fred and some of the other European refugees who attended this synagogue speaking heavily accented English or even Yiddish. He would have absorbed their histories, even if only on an unconscious level. And Spielberg would, as we know, go on to make the movie “Schindler’s List,” which celebrated Jewish survival in the face of insurmountable odds. The making of that movie would inspire him to establish the Shoah Foundation, in order to record and preserve the testimony of survivors. According to Fred Loewy’s son Richard, Fred was inspired to give his own testimony after seeing “Schindler’s List.” So it is in large part thanks to Steven Spielberg that we know Elias and Fred Loewy’s story.

Fifth, there is Michael Levine, an atheist Jew from Brooklyn who believes that certain buildings hold our history and must be saved in order to preserve that history. If it weren’t for Levine, who is also responsible for buying and restoring some of the most remarkable buildings in the warehouse district, this synagogue would likely be rubble. But Levine refused to let the building go. He understood that the story of Phoenix’s survivors of the Shoah is not one that can be told with a memorial like those found in Europe. As Sarah Fenske put it in an article about the synagogue, “Our city's story is the story of Jews who lived. Those Jews survived the camps, left Europe, and managed to build a new life in a place that couldn't have been more alien…[They] lived to tell poignant stories of hope and forgiveness, of life after what surely felt like death. The synagogue they built at 333 East Portland is a symbol of that.”