The outspoken musician has a difficult time answering a question without cracking a joke, saying of the opera house that will host his upcoming concert, “I don’t know whether that’s older than the synagogue, but they’re both older than I am. And that’s good because I’m 71, though I read at the 73-year-old level.”

Between 1868 and 1930, Galveston was home to two Orthodox synagogues. In the spring of 1930, those synagogues merged to create Congregation Beth Jacob, which was chartered in 1931. Beth Jacob’s current building was dedicated in 1932 and expanded in 1962. By 1970, the congregation took up Conservative egalitarian practices.

In 2008, the same year when the synagogue nearly met its demise during the hurricane, part-time spiritual leader Rabbi Todd Doctor took on Beth Jacob’s pulpit as a full-time position. With the storm, Doctor was “informally knighted,” says Kathleen Sukiennik, the synagogue’s former ex-ecutive director.

The congregation no longer prays in the larger sanctuary that arrived with its 1962 expansion. Yet David Rockoff, Beth Jacob’s current president and executive director, hopes that Galveston’s historic significance as well as its increasing appeal for beachgoers and cruise ships will rejuvenate the synagogue community in the post-Ike era.

“Our congregation, although small, has a very large very usable facility,” Rockoff says. “What we’re looking to do in the future is to utilize our buildings to further strengthen Jewish identity and understanding of the congregation and of Galveston, and of the history of the immigration of Jews to the United States through Galveston.”

Along those lines, Rockoff says synagogue leaders are now developing plans to turn part of Beth Jacob into a museum, “as a way of preserving the congregation in the long-run.”