We welcome and invite you to share your memories of Detroit's former synagogues and Jewish sites.
Email your memories to us » and we will add them to the site. *PLEASE* be sure to cite the name of the synagogue or site.

The official name is called Issac Agree Downtown Synagogue. A Sabbath Service is held here every Sat. at 8:30 am. It functions as a local businessman's synagogue as well as one for tourists downtown. If a person was staying at a downtown hotel, it would be possible to walk to synagogue and take in a ballgame or other downtown activities, remaining "Shomer Shabbos" and not driving or riding a bus.
- Arnie P

My father Harry N. used to go to the Downtown Synagogue occasionally to observe yahrzeit for his father Samuel. One evening, walking up the stairs to the maariv service, my father heard an unusually beautiful voice coming from the sanctuary. When he entered the room, he saw Metropolitan Opera star Jan Peerce chanting from the Torah. Mr. Peerce was in Detroit with his Opera company, and he too was observing yahrzeit. It was an enchanting experience for my father, one which he shared with many people.
-Seymour

Our family went to the Downtown Synagogue (a kind of jazzy name for a synagogue) on the High Holidays. I remember a Rosh Hashanah in the mid-60s when we all emerged from synagogue ready for a break, but filled with fellow feeling by this brought-together-for-one-day community. The synagogue was free of cost and the people who came were an interesting, unaffiliated crowd. At that period in Detroit -- the early to mid-sixties, you could see the problems of racism, classism, corporatism, and pollution, that became urban disintegration in so many other places, as well. There was much that was wonderful -- the music especially from the Black community -- Motown -- was a green lyrical voice growing out of the sidewalks.

As Jews of Detroit we occupied a curious place. Not moneyed, but not poor. Books, our history, gave us the sense of a horizon that could include many futures. The unfolding political events were totally compelling -- the Civil Rights and Anti-war movements; the deaths, or murders, of a generation's leaders had already begun. (And without that leadership, we seem to have found ourselves not in the progressive future that was flowering then, but in a parallel future that seems to prefer fundamentalism to originality. There was little actually known of Judaism by our neighbors (and perhaps that was our faults, we didn't speak about it much to non-Jews); some of whom thought we had horns under our curly hair as a sign of an evil nature. Wefell into a nether world between Black and White. After all, just a decade and half before six million of our people died, in part, because they were not "white" enough. And Christianity, which was so strong in parts of the Black community, seemed both foreign and responsible and for a history of misery. Still, we were not brought as slaves to America, nor trapped in factories or mines. We lived as other immigrants who came of their own free will did, through our connections to others who preceded us. And because of that, we had a responsibility to help. Sadly, most families we knew fled instead, to the safe confines of the suburbs.

With that move, the financial base of the city was shattered. Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, is the only day a Jew goes down onto the ground to pray, though just for a moment. I remember the rabbi on that particular Yom Kippur lowering himself onto the floor of the center aisle as everyone sang and then men gathering around him and taking him by the elbows to lift him up again. He was small, vulnerable looking in his black gown, bird-like, but the act of humbling himself seemed to make the opposite happen, he became central and important in our vision; a kind of emblem that opposes man (the noun is purposeful) the tyrannical, invulnerable, and proposes man as equal and, sometimes, vulnerable. Later, when we crossed the street to rest and watch the river, the steely grey Detroit River, the sky was breaking open. The shafts of lights that shot through the clouds were at once a Hollywood moment and a real moment, because on that day it was Jewish in Detroit.
- Sari