This time, with several days of chilly or rainy weather, we decided it was a good time to explore some historic structures, and the Congregation Mickve Israel synagogue seemed like a good place to start.
The congregation dates to 1735, formed by Sephardic Jewish immigrants of Portuguese and Spanish extraction from London. It is the second oldest Jewish congregation in the country and oldest in the South. Its current synagogue, rare example of Gothic-revival architecture for a synagoge, was consecrated in 1878. In 1980, it was placed on the National Register of Historic Places.
You can pick up of bits of Savannah history like this on virtually every visit, and on this visit, we learned that when the city laid out its 24 neighborhood squares, houses of worship were always given spots on the east or west ends, if they wanted to be next to a square.
Not every neighborhood square has a church, mosque or synagogue, but there are lots of houses of worships in the historic district. When I glanced at a Savannah map just now, I found that assertion is mostly true -- i.e., if a house of worship is on a square, it's on the east or west side. (One exception I found was the Independent Presbyterian Church, which is on the north west end of Chippewa Square.)
On an upper floor, Congregation Mickve Israel maintains a museum of relics from his vast history. Included among these are original congratulatory letters to the congregation from George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. A photo of the two-page letter from Washington appears elsewhere in this post; photos of the two other presidential letters can be found at the full gallery (see link in next paragraph).
Also in this post are images detailing the architecture (including stained-glass windows), the sanctuary, the relics and the museum. The third photo below is a shot of the church exterior taken in my first visit to Savannah in March 2017, a sunnier day than the overcast one when we toured the synagogue; all the other photos are from the recent visit.
As always, to view a larger, sharper version of a photo, simply click on it. This is particularly helpful if you access the blog using a mobile device. So see all my shoots from the day I visited Congregation Mickve Israel, follow the link in this sentence. The new folder on the small shops in the historic district are from this visit as well.
Photo geek stuff: All shots were taken with my Canon 6D and Tamron 28-300mm f/3.5-6.3 Di VC PZD lens and bracketed for three exposures to meld into one in post-processing using Photomatix high-dynamic range (HDR) software.
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