Beth Am Synagogue - Baltimore MD - Synagogues on Waymarking.com

From the Baltimore Sun website below:

Baltimore's Beth Am Synagogue, the amazing House of the People in Reservoir Hill, gets an upgrade
By JACQUES KELLY
THE BALTIMORE SUN |
APR 20, 2019

One of the neighborhood’s oldest spiritual centers, Beth Am Synagogue, at Eutaw Place and Chauncey Avenue, has embarked on its own $5 million investment. The effort will preserve and update this amazing 1922 house of worship.

It was designed by Joseph Evans Sperry, who gave Baltimore the Emerson Drug-Bromo Seltzer Tower and the old Provident Bank headquarters (Howard and Saratoga streets), among other city landmarks. Sperry was a world traveler, and members of the Beth Am Congregation observe a similarity to the Great Synagogue of Florence, and its Byzantine-Moorish design Sperry specified that the sanctuary’s soaring and gracefully proportioned arches be fitted with the gravity-defying work of the Valencia-born Spanish tile maker and architect Rafael Guastavino and his son, Rafael Jr.

The light-colored interlocking Guastavino tiles are something of a rarity in Baltimore, although they are used in the landmark Oyster Bar in New York’s Grand Central Terminal and at the Biltmore Mansion and St. Lawrence Basilica in Asheville, N.C.


“Sperry designed the acoustics to come outward, toward the congregation,” said Rabbi Daniel Cotzin Burg, who since January has been honoring a pledge not to shave his beard until the construction work is completed in September. “The sound does not project as well from the congregation outward.”

Jonathan Fishman, the congregation’s incoming president, said, “The building had not not been meaningfully improved since it was constructed.”

Beth Am’s sanctuary had never been air-conditioned. The effort to cool the place requires new duct work to be unobtrusively passed through the U-shaped balcony overlooking the sanctuary.

“It’s like threading a needle,” said Fishman. “It’s very hard to find pathways for the new services.”

Another congregation, Chizuk Amuno, built this structure and worshiped here until 1974. A new group, led by Dr. Louis Kaplan, the retired president of Baltimore Hebrew University, bought the structure and founded a new congregation. They named it Beth Am, Hebrew for the House of the People.

Status: Active house of prayer Denomination/Group: Conservative Address: 2501 Eutaw Place Baltimore, MD United States 21217 Relevant Web Site: [Web Link]

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Date Logged Log User Rating   09/04/2021 Don.Morfe visited it