Appalachian Churches Series – Jenkins United Methodist Church in Jenkins, Kentucky
The story of B’er Chayim Temple in Cumberland begins on a hillside above the city streets. On West Reynolds Street, where the ground falls away toward the river and the railroad yards, Eastview Cemetery holds the names of Jewish families who came to this Appalachian crossroads in the nineteenth century, bought a strip of ground along the Maryland Turnpike, and began to organize a religious life that has never quite let go. The cemetery was one of the first formal acts of the new congregation, created in 1854 for eighty four dollars on a slope that offered both a view and a measure of permanence.
The synagogue building followed in the next decade at the corner of South Centre and Union Streets in downtown Cumberland. It rose in a city that had become a classic transportation hub of the central Appalachians, where the National Road, the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, and the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal converged to carry coal, iron, and manufactured goods east and west. By the late nineteenth century that junction had helped make Cumberland the second largest city in Maryland and the commercial heart of the surrounding coalfields. In that landscape of depots, warehouses, and smokestacks, a modest brick synagogue became a different kind of marker, tying a small Jewish community to a mountain town whose prosperity and later decline would shape its fate.
Forming a congregation in a gateway city
Jewish presence in Cumberland can be documented at least to the early nineteenth century. The congregation’s own centennial history and the National Register nomination recall an 1816 subscription list for a Protestant church in which “one Hebrew” appeared among the generous donors, an early glimpse of Jewish participation in the civic life of the town. By the early 1850s the trickle had become a small community. In 1853 twelve Jewish families were known to be living in Cumberland, then a city of about 6,150 people.
That year they moved to formalize what had been an informal minyan. On April 27, 1853, this group met to organize a congregation. Less than a month later, on May 23, the Maryland General Assembly incorporated the “Hebrew Congregation Baair Cheiim (or Well of Life)” in an act that not only gave the community legal standing but also fixed a name that would echo across the next century and a half.
At first the new congregation followed Orthodox practice. Men and women sat separately, heads were covered, and services resembled those of German and Central European Jewry from which many of the founders had come. The 1953 anniversary history, later quoted in the National Register nomination, describes early members as Bavarian, Bohemian, and Austrian Jews who carried European customs into the mountains.
Yet almost from the beginning the movement toward Reform was strong. The centennial history remembers debates over mixed seating and head coverings that culminated in a vote around 1875 to end the requirement that men cover their heads in worship. By the early twentieth century B’er Chayim had joined the national Reform movement, becoming a member of what is now the Union for Reform Judaism in 1905 and adopting the Union Prayer Book soon afterward.
Building the temple at South Centre and Union
The legal charter of 1853 was followed almost immediately by a more practical step. On March 13, 1854, the congregation purchased a cemetery plot “fronting about 170 feet on the Maryland Turnpike” for eighty four dollars, securing a burial ground before it had a permanent synagogue. In August of that same year a cholera epidemic struck Cumberland, and the first burial at what became Eastview Cemetery took place shortly thereafter.
For nearly a decade worship took place in rented rooms on Baltimore and Washington Streets, including the Semmes Law Building, while the small congregation gathered resources and weighed its options. In October 1865 B’er Chayim purchased a lot at the southeast corner of South Centre and Union Streets, just uphill from the canal basin and the busy railroad district. Local contractor John B. Walton, already known for his work in the city, received the contract to build the new synagogue, which the National Register nomination dates to 1866.
The congregation’s own marker and later commemorative accounts agree that construction cost about seven thousand four hundred twenty seven dollars, raised through weekly dues of twenty five cents, offerings, and assistance from other Jewish communities. The building was dedicated on March 2, 1867, in a ceremony that drew notice in the Jewish press of the day and signaled that a permanent Jewish house of worship had taken its place among the churches lining Cumberland’s streets.
Architecturally, the temple is a compact brick structure whose original sanctuary front presents a pedimented gable with a box cornice resting on brick pilasters. The Maryland Historical Trust’s description highlights the way the building’s simple Greek Revival massing and restrained detailing reflect the orthodoxy of the founding congregation, while later additions introduce round arched windows, decorative mouldings, and a mansard roof that echo more Romanesque and late nineteenth century tastes. At the turn of the century a substantial rabbi’s house was added at the rear, followed by a kitchen wing in 1913 and a new entrance in 1925, all aligned with the original proportions so that the building reads as a single, evolving whole rather than a patchwork.
Inside, the National Register nomination dwells on the ark, a tall wooden ensemble of columns, pilasters, carved foliage, and amber glass that rises from the bimah to the ceiling and frames the tablets of the Ten Commandments. The effect is far grander than the modest footprint might suggest, and it reinforced the building’s role as a spiritual landmark in a city crowded with depots and factory sheds.
Today B’er Chayim is widely cited as the oldest synagogue building in continuous use as a synagogue in Maryland and among the oldest such buildings in the United States, a status confirmed by preservation lists and by scholars of nineteenth century American synagogue architecture.
Eastview Cemetery and the Civil War landscape
The story of Eastview Cemetery mirrors the congregation’s effort to root itself in local ground while remaining tied to wider currents in American history. The original 1854 deed granted a strip of land along the Maryland Turnpike, now West Reynolds Street, where the first burials during the cholera outbreak marked the cemetery as both a spiritual and public health necessity.
In 1873 B’er Chayim purchased an additional parcel for one hundred dollars to enlarge Eastview. That tract had previously been owned by the United States government and had served as the Cumberland Soldiers Cemetery, established in 1862 when the federal quartermaster bought land from the German Beneficial Society to bury Civil War dead. After the war the soldiers interred there were disinterred and moved to Antietam National Cemetery near Sharpsburg in 1867, and the vacant ground eventually became part of the expanded Jewish burial ground.
This layered history means that Eastview holds not only the names of Cumberland’s Jewish families but also the imprint of the Civil War and federal presence in the mountains. Recent preservation work, supported by local and statewide organizations, has tried to stabilize the hillside plots and emphasize the cemetery’s dual significance as both a Jewish and Civil War related site.
The burial register and plot map for Eastview, now digitized on the congregation’s website, function as a near primary genealogical source. Page after page of names document the families who stitched together Jewish life in Cumberland from the mid nineteenth century forward, including ties back to Central Europe and outward to younger generations who often left the city but returned to be buried on the hill.
Reform Judaism, radio, and the small town public square
By the 1920s the temple at South Centre and Union stood in a city whose population had grown along with coal mining and railroad traffic. The congregation’s own narrative describes the interwar years as a time when B’er Chayim “leveled off to the solid foundation of a sound, healthy religious life” even as the Great Depression shook the national economy. A newly organized Brotherhood helped launch a Community Forum lecture series that drew prominent speakers to Cumberland and made the temple a visible venue in the cultural life of the wider region, a role that fit the Reform emphasis on engagement with the broader civic world.
During these decades B’er Chayim’s membership stabilized at around fifty family units, with additional single and women members, and a religious school that enrolled about forty children. The rabbi conducted services over local radio and spoke in churches, civic clubs, and schools, extending the voice of a small congregation far beyond its walls. In 1938, for the eighty fifth anniversary of the congregation’s founding, the temple underwent a full interior and exterior beautification, and the community organized a Jewish Community Chest to coordinate charitable giving rather than relying on a series of overlapping appeals from outside organizations.
World War II drew many of Cumberland’s Jewish young men and several young women into the armed forces. The B’er Chayim history singles out Harold Yankelevitz, killed in the defense of Bataan, as one of the congregants who gave what it called “the supreme sacrifice,” a reminder that this mountain congregation shared directly in the sacrifices of the war. On the home front, the sisterhood and rabbinic leadership organized hospital visitation, support for army training schools, and shared use of the temple’s vestry rooms by the Red Cross and other wartime efforts.
In the 1950s and 1960s B’er Chayim continued to act as a small but active Reform congregation. The postwar years brought a youth group connected to the National Federation of Temple Youth, a discussion circle for young married couples, and new prayer books and ritual furnishings. One of the most visible changes inside the sanctuary was the installation of memorial stained glass windows that replaced earlier glass dating back to the 1860s.
The congregation marked its centennial in 1953 with regional conferences of both the Reform movement and the temple sisterhood, highlighting Cumberland’s role in a larger network of small town Jewish communities. A few years later, as the nation mourned the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, B’er Chayim hosted a public memorial service that filled the sanctuary, another moment when the temple served as a civic gathering space as well as a house of worship.
Mergers, demographic change, and being the last synagogue in Western Maryland
The later twentieth century brought demographic change that affected nearly every small Appalachian city. Cumberland’s broader population peaked in the mid twentieth century and then declined as coal, canal, and railroad employment faded or mechanized. Jewish population figures followed a similar arc. The American Jewish Year Book recorded a Jewish population of about 720 in Cumberland in 1927, a figure that has gradually diminished ever since.
Within that shrinking environment B’er Chayim adapted through mergers and shared institutions. A small group of members formed Beth El Congregation in 1925, then rejoined B’er Chayim in 1934. The Conservative Beth Jacob Congregation, established later, maintained its own building and religious school for much of the twentieth century. By the 1970s the two congregations shared a joint religious school and experimented with joint confirmation classes and alternating services under a single rabbi, even as they retained separate buildings and identities.
In 1979 the temple building on South Centre Street was listed on the National Register of Historic Places, formally recognizing its architectural and historical significance. Almost two decades later, in 1998, Beth Jacob formally merged into B’er Chayim. The Torah scrolls, memorial tablets, and other ritual objects from Beth Jacob were transferred, and the combined congregation emerged with a mixed heritage of Reform and Conservative practice that it has tried to honor in its worship life.
By the early twenty first century B’er Chayim had become the sole synagogue in Western Maryland, with roughly fifty family units on its rolls and a membership that ranged from long time Cumberland residents to newcomers drawn into the life of a very small but resilient community. Articles in the Baltimore Jewish Times and in “single synagogue city” pieces reprinted from Washington area Jewish media have used B’er Chayim as a case study in what it means to maintain Jewish life in a place where the nearest other synagogue is more than an hour’s drive away.
National reporting has told a similar story. A feature in The Washington Post in 2014 framed B’er Chayim as an example of the smallest Jewish communities that become most visible during the High Holidays, when visiting clergy, former members, and out of town relatives swell their numbers for a few days and remind both the congregation and the surrounding town that Jewish life is still present in the mountains.
Preservation, restoration, and a twenty first century rededication
By the early 2000s a building that dated to the 1860s and had weathered industrial smoke, highway construction, and shifts in downtown traffic patterns needed serious work. Moisture, settling, and age had taken a toll on the brick walls and interior finishes. Local reporting in the Cumberland Times News during 2011 and 2012 chronicled a major restoration campaign that involved structural repairs, roof and masonry work, and a complete refurbishing of the sanctuary, funded through a mix of congregational giving, state and local preservation grants, and broader community support.
During the height of this work B’er Chayim worshiped temporarily in other spaces, then returned to the restored building in 2014. Newspaper coverage of the rededication described the celebration as a community event, with civic leaders and neighbors joining congregants to mark not only the physical renewal of the temple but also its continuing role in the historic landscape of downtown Cumberland. The city’s Historic Preservation Commission recognized the project with an award, underscoring that the synagogue was not simply a religious site but an integral part of the architecture of the Canada Viaduct Historic District.
Those restoration years also deepened the congregation’s relationship with the Jewish Museum of Maryland, which already held many of B’er Chayim’s artifacts, photographs, and oral histories on permanent loan and had featured the congregation in exhibits such as “Cornerstones of Community: The Historic Synagogues of Maryland, 1845–1945” and “We Call This Place Home: Jewish Life in Maryland’s Small Towns.”
Scholars of American Jewish history have used B’er Chayim as an example when trying to understand how small towns outside major seaboard cities built and maintained Jewish institutions. Mark W. Gordon’s work on nineteenth century synagogue buildings points to the temple as one of a small number of surviving pre Civil War congregational structures that remained in use, while Jonathan Sarna and Lee Shai Weissbach’s studies of small town Jewish life draw on B’er Chayim’s centennial history to illustrate how Central European founders and later arrivals from Eastern Europe melded into a Reform congregation that still felt rooted in its local surroundings.
From Cumberland to Lake Chapala
One of the clearest signs that B’er Chayim’s story reaches beyond its brick walls and hillside cemetery came in 2018 and 2019, when the congregation sent one of its Torah scrolls to a Jewish community thousands of miles away. By that point B’er Chayim possessed six Torah scrolls, the result of at least three congregational mergers over many years. When the Lake Chapala Jewish Congregation in Ajijic, Mexico, learned of this surplus, it approached B’er Chayim about the possibility of receiving a scroll that could be used in its own services.
The Torah chosen for the journey had originally belonged to Beth Jacob and carried a breastplate donated by a Beth Jacob family in honor of their granddaughter’s bat mitzvah. In late 2018 the B’er Chayim board approved the loan, and in October 2019 a delegation of congregants traveled to Mexico to accompany the scroll to its new home. The Union for Reform Judaism’s account of the event describes a joyful procession through the streets of Ajijic, with music, dancing horses, and a chuppah held aloft as members of both congregations took turns carrying the scroll into the lakeside synagogue.
That journey linked a historic Appalachian synagogue to a contemporary diaspora community and extended the legacy of Beth Jacob’s Torah into another small congregation that, like B’er Chayim, lives at some distance from major urban Jewish centers. It also illustrated how the accumulated material heritage of a place like Cumberland, where multiple congregations once flourished, can sustain communities elsewhere after local numbers decline.
A well of life in the Appalachian story
B’er Chayim’s own sources often translate its name as “Well of Life,” a metaphor in which Torah is likened to water. The name fits the geography as well as the theology. Cumberland itself emerged at a natural gap in the mountains where the National Road, canal, and railroads converged to carry the coal and timber of the interior to eastern markets. The Jewish families who organized a congregation there in the 1850s tapped that flow, working as merchants, professionals, and small business owners in a city that promised opportunity but also demanded constant adaptation.
The founding act of buying a cemetery plot and, later, a temple lot was one way of claiming that the mountains were not merely a place to pass through but a place where Jewish life could endure. The synagogue’s simple brick facade, its later additions and stained glass, its role as a lecture hall and wartime meeting space, and its continued use as the only synagogue between Hagerstown and Morgantown have all reinforced that claim over more than a century and a half.
Today B’er Chayim stands at a crossroads of memory and survival familiar to many small Appalachian congregations. Membership is smaller than it was in the mid twentieth century. Younger people often leave the region for education and work, and visiting rabbis or part time clergy remain the norm. Yet the congregation continues to gather for Shabbat and High Holiday services, to teach children in its religious school, to maintain Eastview Cemetery, and to care for a building that has outlasted many of the industries that once paid its members’ bills.
Placed in the wider context of Appalachian and small town Jewish history, B’er Chayim is more than a local curiosity. It is one of the oldest continuously used synagogue buildings in the country and a rare surviving example of nineteenth century Jewish architecture in a coal and railroad city. Its archives, cemetery records, and oral histories speak to patterns of migration, adaptation, and persistence that run from the Bavarian and Bohemian villages of its founders to the Mexican lakeshore where one of its Torahs now rests. For Appalachian history, it stands as a reminder that the region’s story has always included small but significant Jewish communities whose wells of life were dug alongside mines, canals, and tracks, and whose presence continues to shape the cultural landscape of the mountains.
Sources & Further Reading
Pratt, William, and Dave Dorsey. “National Register of Historic Places Registration: B’er Chayim Temple.” National Register of Historic Places Registration Form. Maryland Historical Trust, December 1977. https://apps.mht.maryland.gov/medusa/PDF/NR_PDFs/NR-584.pdf
Maryland Historical Trust. “B’er Chayim Temple.” Maryland’s National Register Properties, inventory no. AL-IV-A-110. https://apps.mht.maryland.gov/nr/NRDetail.aspx?NRID=586
B’er Chayim Congregation. “In the Beginning – 1850s.” B’er Chayim Congregation. https://berchayim.org/in-the-beginning-1850s/
B’er Chayim Congregation. “The Twenties, Thirties and Forties.” B’er Chayim Congregation. https://berchayim.org/the-twenties-thirties-and-forties/
B’er Chayim Congregation. “The Fifties, Sixties and Seventies.” B’er Chayim Congregation. https://berchayim.org/the-fifties-sixties-and-seventies/
B’er Chayim Congregation. “Beth Jacob Synagogue.” B’er Chayim Congregation. https://berchayim.org/beth-jacob-synagogue/
B’er Chayim Congregation. “Eastview Cemetery.” B’er Chayim Congregation. https://berchayim.org/eastview-cemetery/
B’er Chayim Congregation. “Jewish Museum of Maryland Exhibits.” B’er Chayim Congregation. https://berchayim.org/jewish-museum-of-maryland-exhibits/
Allegany County Tourism. “Historic Walking Tour of Downtown Cumberland.” Allegany County, the Mountain Side of Maryland, 2022. PDF brochure. https://assets.simpleviewinc.com/simpleview/image/upload/v1/clients/alleganymd/cumberland_historicwalkingtour_web_20220921_3c981825-84f5-4d03-abf3-7e3135b4833c.pdf
“B’er Chayim Temple.” The Clio: Your Guide to History. https://theclio.com/entry/14429
“B’er Chayim Temple.” The Mountain Side of Maryland. https://www.mdmountainside.com/listing/ber-chayim-temple/1737/
“B’er Chayim Temple.” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%27er_Chayim_Temple
“History of the Jews in Cumberland, Maryland.” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Cumberland%2C_Maryland
Preservation Maryland. “Cemetery Preservation: Why It’s Important + 2022 Workshops Recap.” November 22, 2022. https://preservationmaryland.org/cemetery-preservation-why-its-important-22-workshops-recap/
Jewish American Society for Historic Preservation. “Cumberland Maryland.” https://jewish-american-society-for-historic-preservation.org/mdpa/cumberlandmaryland/
Schwab, Doug. “From Maryland to Mexico: Rejoicing in the Torah.” ReformJudaism.org (Union for Reform Judaism), November 14, 2019. https://urj.org/blog/maryland-mexico-rejoicing-torah
Boorstein, Michelle. “As the Smallest Jewish Communities Fade, High Holidays Are a Time to Be More Visible.” Washington Post, September 23, 2014. https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/cumberlands-jewish-community-determined-to-hang-on-to-its-heritage/2014/09/23/2580ab8e-434c-11e4-b437-1a7368204804_story.html
Gordon, Mark W. “Rediscovering Jewish Infrastructure: Update on United States Nineteenth Century Synagogues.” American Jewish History 84, no. 1 (1996): 11–27. https://muse.jhu.edu/
Linfield, H. S. “Jewish Population in the United States, 1927.” American Jewish Year Book 30 (1928–1929): 101–199. https://www.bjpa.org/content/upload/bjpa/jewi/Jewish%20Population%201927.pdf
Meiselman, Louis. “Transcriptions of a Mohel’s Diary-Log, Hesse 1818–1852, Baltimore 1853–1867.” Manuscript, 25 pp. https://www.academia.edu/37073229/Transcriptions_of_a_Mohels_diary_log_Hesse_1818_1852_Baltimore_1853_1867
“We Call This Place Home: Jewish Life in Maryland’s Small Towns.” Exhibit catalog. Baltimore: Jewish Museum of Maryland, 2002. https://referenceworks.brill.com/display/entries/COCO/CC1698.xml
“Jewish History on Display.” Washington Post, March 25, 2004. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/2004/03/25/jewish-history-on-display/41d8732b-d1e7-4cc0-9988-37676b634123/
“Single Synagogue Cities.” Tota.world (excerpted from Baltimore Jewish Times), March 27, 2019. https://www.tota.world/article/3304/
Author Note: Writing about B’er Chayim Temple means widening the frame of Appalachian history to include small town Jewish life in the mountains. I hope this piece helps you see Cumberland’s synagogue and cemetery as part of the same regional story as coal camps, courthouse squares, and country churches.