Identifer: CJF R 0483

Medium
-

Collections
University of Cincinnati Hillel Collection, Cincinnati Judaica Fund Research Collection

Description
From the United Hebrew Congregation, Newport, KY.

The Newport Synagogue (Agudat Yisrael) was founded in 1897 and was established itself at Fifth and Saratoga Streets in 1904.  The building housed the Newport Talmud Torah.  In 1905 the congregation moved into a former Christian church building at 117 East Fifth Street and remained there until 1966. For more than six decades, this building served as an Orthodox synagogue and then became a church again.
The proliferation of Kentucky synagogues in the half-century before World War II reflects the massive migration of East European Jews to America in the decades after 1881 and suggests that this migration had a profound impact on the nature of Jewish life in the commonwealth. The arrival of East European Jews not only significantly increased the size of Kentucky’s Jewish population but also altered the pattern of Jewish settlement and transformed the internals structure of organized Jewish life in the state.
During the 1920’s the address of United Hebrew Congregation’s synagogue was also used by the Newport Zionist Society, which supported the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, and by the Hebrew Emergency Association, the local Jewish community’s main charitable organization. 
The building was sold in 1969 due to the diminishing number of Jews in Northern Kentucky.