By Cindy Mindell

TBI today.

DANIELSON – This eastern Connecticut community isn’t even a town – it’s a borough of Killingly, 30 miles north of Norwich. But for Jews, Danielson is a picture of inclusiveness and pluralism. In the ‘50s, the single local synagogue, Temple Beth Israel, was built with the help of Jews and non-Jews alike. Now, the Temple Beth Israel Preservation Society of Danielson has just received a Special Projects Grant from the National Society Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) for repairs to its 53-year-old building. The society was sponsored for the grant by the Sarah Williams Danielson Chapter of the Connecticut Daughters of the American Revolution, in Killingly.

An odd coupling? So it may seem on the face of it. But, truth be told, this is a typical collaboration for a community long committed to interfaith relations.

Temple Beth Israel was founded by the Danielson Jewish Community Club – a small group of Jewish families who had lived in the area since the ‘20s – and 40 Holocaust survivors and their families who had been resettled in the town after World War II by the Jewish Agricultural Society. With financial and moral support from the community at large, the temple was built in stages from 1951 to 1961, and served some 80 Jewish families at its peak.

Danielson Jews like to tell stories about their non-Jewish neighbors who helped raise funds to build the temple: Adrian Herkots, owner of the local newspaper, the Windham County Transcript, publicized the effort. In response, local Christian clergy urged their congregations to lend their support. When J.W. Powdrell, former head of Alexander and Powdrell Curtain Company, was approached, he had already prepared a check for $1,000. Hugh Gorman, a local farmer and president of the Windham County Agricultural Society, and former first selectman of the Town of Brooklyn, auctioned off one of his cows to make a donation. Many local citizens gave a dollar or two to the fund. The synagogue building was designed pro bono by Danielson native, Boston architect William Riseman.

The generosity flowed in the other direction as well, says Dr. Elsie Blumenthal Fetterman, one of six children born to the first Jewish couple to settle in Danielson.

“My father, Nathan Blumenthal, was on the Danielson Industrial Foundation and the local Chamber of Commerce, and raised funds for the town’s first ambulance,” she says.

When the town had to raise $300,000 to keep the local Knox Glass Bottle Company plant from closing, Nathan handed Elsie a personal check for $3,000 and a list of 99 Danielson business-owners. She made the rounds with the check, collecting $3,000 from each person on the list. As an adult, Elsie would become a founder of Temple Beth Israel and now serves on the preservation society board. She wrote the DAR grant application.

Temple Beth Israel served not only as a center of Jewish religious and cultural activity, but also as an interfaith gathering place. A local newspaper report from the groundbreaking in July 1951 noted the “Jews and their many Christian friends” present at the event. In 1955, Rev. Edith Wolf of the Federated Church of Christ in Brooklyn, Conn. and Dr. Herbert Schneider, an optometrist in Danielson, organized an annual community-wide interfaith Thanksgiving service. Now in its 58th year – one of the oldest events of its kind in the state – the program alternates between the temple and the church. This year, High Holiday services drew 55 participants, with 115 people taking part in the interfaith community Passover seder.

But it didn’t always seem to synagogue founders and members that the building would survive. Gradually, after mid-century, with grain costs rising and chicken costs falling, small family farms in Danielson and beyond couldn’t compete with the larger farms. The second generation grew up and left for college.

By 2003, with only a handful of members left, Temple Beth Israel merged with Sons of Zion Synagogue in nearby Putnam to create Congregation B’nai Shalom, with weekly Shabbat services held in Putnam and High Holiday services in Danielson. A few years later, a group of Putnam congregants purchased land adjacent to the Sons of Zion building in an attempt to preserve and expand their synagogue. In response, several Danielson members formed the Temple Beth Israel Preservation Society in 2009, taking over ownership and maintenance of the building and committing to establish a community center.

TBI Hebrew Class late 1960s.

In 2013, the temple building was listed on the State of Connecticut Register of Historic Places and the National Register of Historic Places. That same year, on the eve of Yom Kippur, two men from outside the community smashed several windows in the sanctuary, the third instance of vandalism in the synagogue’s history. In 1983, a group of teenagers broke into the sanctuary and stole the Torah crowns, which were returned. In the mid-‘90s, several teens sprayed a swastika on the synagogue door.

“In every case, the community stood up and said, ‘Not in our town,’” says Fay Sheppard, a preservation society board member who grew up in Danielson. In response to the broken windows, Rev. James Ziobro of Westfield Congregational Church, United Church of Christ in Danielson and his wife, Lisa, printed signs with the world “Shalom” and distributed them throughout the community. At the time, Ziobro told the Ledger, “Whether an act of ignorance or a premeditated hateful act, the result is the same. The feelings it dredges up and the fear it creates – we can’t let it go and not respond to it. It affects all of us.”

This community-wide support is what has always defined Temple Beth Israel and what Elsie Fetterman drew upon when completing the DAR grant application.

“Everyone said, ‘Don’t waste your time,’ but I’d been talking to a woman on the national level at DAR and she was impressed that, at my age, I would be working on this, so she walked me through the application process,” Fetterman says. The tireless 87-year-old also has a personal connection to the DAR: as a high school senior in 1945, her fellow students nominated her for the annual DAR college scholarship. In 2010, Fetterman’s granddaughter was awarded the same scholarship.

The grant will fund repairs to Temple Beth Israel’s upper patio deck and structural support beams. Fetterman’s son and daughter-in-law, David and Summer Fetterman, donated the $10,000 in matching funds required for the grant. Summer Fetterman was able to secure matching funds from her employer, Google.

David Fetterman grew up in Danielson through middle school, when his mother was offered a teaching job at a high school in Storrs and moved the family there. He and his wife, who live in San Jose, Calif., came back to Beth Israel last year for the National Register of Historic Places induction ceremony.

“We were so impressed with Beth Israel’s interfaith aspect as well as the deep respect for the Jewish roots I grew up with there that we were moved to make the donation,” he says. “The board works to maintain the physical structure of the building and more importantly, the cultural aspect of the temple, which is very powerful symbolically. Even though we’re 3,000 miles away and can’t go to the preservation society meetings like my mom and sister Judy [Engel], we can contribute something and we’ll continue to do so as long as we can.”

As a spiritual center and house of worship, Temple Beth Israel symbolizes religious freedom and pluralism, Fetterman says. At the same time, it is an important place for Jews and non-Jews alike. “Temple Beth Israel has drawn support from the entire community in part because it symbolizes what we all cherish and hold sacred – the freedom to pray and congregate as we choose,” he says. “It is tied to the heart and soul of our American dream. Temple Beth Israel symbolizes what is great and sacred about our nation and needs to be preserved. It is an integral part of our history.”

To learn more visit www.templebethisraelct.org.

Comments? email cindym@jewishledger.com.