Temple Freda - Bryan, TX - Synagogues on Waymarking.com

"Bryan’s Jewish community was born in the 1860’s as an outgrowth of earlier central European immigration that began after the widespread but short-lived revolution of 1848. Immigrant Jews were some of the first settlers in the newly built town of Bryan, a product of the Houston and Texas Central Railroad. The Sanger Brothers followed the railroad north, building stores in each town along the way. In 1867, they built a store in Bryan, which was run by Lehman Sanger. Later immigrants also opened businesses. In 1870, the small group founded the Hebrew Benevolent Society and bought a plot of land from the city to build a cemetery. By 1873, eight Jewish families and a few single Jewish men called Bryan home.

In 1890, a sufficient number of Jewish citizens lived in Bryan for them to organize an official congregation, which for several decades met in member’s homes for worship services, primarily on the High Holy Days such as Yom Kippur. Without ready access to an official rabbi, services were frequently sporadic and often lay-led. However, by 1912 the congregation was incorporated and chartered and decided to build a synagogue.

That same year, Mr. J. W. English, downtown Bryan businessman and a member of St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, sold parts of lot 6 and 7 in block 117 of Bryan (a section fronting along Parker Street next to the railroad tracks) for the token sum of $10 to the Jewish community. His stipulation for the sale was that it must be used exclusively for “religious or benevolent purposes.” This site became the future home of the oldest Jewish institution in the Brazos Valley, Temple Freda Reform Congregation. The synagogue was named for Mrs. Ethel Freda Kaczer, late wife of the congregation’s president. It holds the distinction of being the only Texas synagogue, and one of only four synagogues world-wide, named for a woman.

Temple Freda was built out of many of the same building material as nearby St. Andrews, much of it donated by local citizens including many non-Jewish community members. In fact, Temple Freda and St. Andrew’s were built simultaneously, although St. Andrew’s was built along Gothic lines while Temple Freda was designed in the Greek Revival style. A third house of worship, nearby St. Anthony’s Catholic Church, is in the Italian Romanesque Style. A simple rectangular building, the front of the synagogue is finely detailed tan brick with a Classical entablature in pressed metal, a portico also of pressed metal, and two wooden Corinthian columns. The side and rear walls are red brick."