At 85, restored Texas synagogue gets ‘Kinky’

To the 150 or so Jewish households on Galveston Island in Texas, Congregation Beth Jacob is akin to a national treasure. 

“We are our building, our building is us,” says Gary Druss, Beth Jacob’s gabbai and past president. “Our identities are tied to this building.”

The congregation’s 60 member families were all displaced from their homes by Hurricane Ike, and their to spiritual home suffered massive damage. But eight years later, the synagogue building is restored and the congregation is celebrating its 85th anniversary in style—with a March 26 benefit in Galveston’s 1894 opera house by singer-songwriter and novelist Kinky Friedman, a former gubernatorial candidate in Texas.

Beth Jacob has an eye on not only appreciating its past, but also bringing it to life, through its ongoing development of a plan to turn part of the Conservative synagogue’s facility into a museum. Galveston and Ellis Island were America’s two major immigration ports in the 20th cen-tury.

“Between 1906 and 1914 nearly 50,000 immigrants arrived at Galveston, including Bohemians, Moravians, Galicians, Austrians, Romanians, Swiss, English, Poles, Italians, Dutch, and some 10,000 Jews,” recounts an article on the Texas State Historical Association’s website. “By 1915, Galveston was considered a ‘second Ellis Island.’ The flow of immigration ceased in World War I, and the immigration center was demolished in 1972.”

Galveston’s rich history—and its preservation—isn’t lost on Friedman, who in the 1970s moved on from his second band, “Kinky Friedman and The Texas Jewboys,” to a four-decade solo career that included touring with Bob Dylan.

“Galveston is a special place. … With the big cities coming in to kind of homogenize and sanitize zones, Galveston still has a little bit of its old-time style going,” Friedman said.