Month: July 2025

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Temple B’Nai Jeshurun 1866 Leavenworth Kansas

Kansas Historical Society

Betty Kohn Wollman portrait

Dates: 1932

Creator: Gordon, Boris B.

Oil painting of Betty Kohn Wollman (1836-1927) done by artist, Boris Barnhard Gordon (1890-1976). Jonas and Betty Wollman were early settlers in Leavenworth, Kansas, known for their anti-slavery views. The Wollmans hosted a dinner for Abraham Lincoln during his visit to Leavenworth in December 1859. Late in life, Betty Wollman assisted in the model selection for the ?Pioneer Woman? statue in Ponca City, Oklahoma.

The Landing Retail District - Our Jewish Heritage

Andrew Reach’s  Great Great Great Aunt  Betty Kohn Wollman

 

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Beth Jeshurun - Leavenworth
Beth Jeshurun-1 - Leavenworth
Beth Jeshurun-3 - Leavenworth
Leavenworth, Jewish Cemetery -1 Sons of Truth
Leavenworth, Jewish Cemetery -2 Sons of Truth
Leavenworth, Jewish Cemetery -5 Sons of Truth
 The first Jewish place of worship in the state of Kansas was built. After a large Jewish community established residence in Leavenworth City, Kansas Territory. Temple B’Nai Jeshurun was constructed in 1866.  Initially, the first group of Jewish worshipers assembled in the home of Jonas Wollman, prominent Leavenworth businessman, in 1852.  The congregation was formally organized with about 45 families living here in Leavenworth, in May 1859. The original frame building was razed in 1916 and replaced by the present structure. It served as a place of worship for the Jewish congregation of Leavenworth until the 1970’s. Its presence affirms the American principles of freedom of religion and assembly.
The Leavenworth County Historical Society
The Jewish American Society for Historical Preservation 2012
The Landing Retail District – “Our Jewish Heritage”
Leavenworth – Gateway to the West and Headquarters of the Department of the Missouri – was the supply base for settlers and emigrants to the vast region lying west to the Pacific Ocean. Selected because of the excellence of its site, the navigability of the Missouri River and the protection offered by the military stationed at the nearby Fort, merchandise and commodities of every type and description arriving by boats from the east were deposited at the Landing. Upon receipt goods were loaded on wagon trains and later on railroads moving westward or transferred to nearby retail and wholesale business locations for storage and sale. By 1870, Leavenworth, with a population of over 25 thousand, the largest city between St. Louis and the Pacific Ocean, was a major commercial center with a paved levee at the river bank, miles of graded and macadamized streets and long rows of three and four story brick and iron buildings along Cherokee, Shawnee and Delaware Streets.

A diverse group, men and women, both native and foreign born, some acting on their own behalf and others as agents of eastern business houses, arrived at the Leavenworth Landing attracted by the opportunities presented by the commercial activity. Prominent among the entrepreneurs settling here, dedicated to making Leavenworth the most important business community west of St. Louis, were many Jewish merchants, mostly well educated immigrants, from Central Europe – Germany, Austria and Hungary. While men of different ethnic backgrounds engaged in various occupations and professions, the Jews of Leavenworth predominated in selling clothing and dry goods ordered ready made from eastern establishments or tailored in Leavenworth from bolts of fabric. Many were quite successful, playing important roles in the growth and development of Leavenworth, serving in numerous public and charitable positions.

Among the more prominent Jewish merchants were Simon Abeles, George Einstein, Simon Kohn, Philip Rothschild, Jonas Wollman and Samuel Woolf. Jews of Leavenworth were elected to City Council, appointed to City offices, participated in organizing the Free State Party, and served as officers of the Board of Trade, Mercantile Library, Hook & Ladder Society and Masonic Lodges. Colonel R. N. Hershfield, a jeweler, commanded the Leavenworth Militia during General Price’s incursion into western Missouri in September 1864.

These early merchants built a Jewish community, established a Jewish cemetery, founded Congregation Bnai Jeshurun and organized a B’nai Brith Lodge. They were proud of their city and wanted Leavenworth to be an integral part of their lives and the lives of their children. As enthusiastic volunteer civic leaders the Jews of Leavenworth generously contributed their time, effort and money to their community. They personified what America and Leavenworth offered to the diverse ethnic and religious groups settling here. They met the challenges presented and they prospered, always giving back to the community that had provided them opportunities found nowhere else but in America. The Jews of Leavenworth Landing are forever an important part of the history of this community.

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MODEL CITIZEN – Sculpture on the west side of Cleveland – Part of Ariel Vergez’s “The Art Garden”

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I am so proud of my husband. With all the pain from his illness, he just keeps going on and pushing himself in to wonder.

Ariel Vergez, one of 7 awarded a grant for the City of Cleveland Transformative Arts Fund for his multi-pronged public art project “The Art Garden”, invited me to collaborate on the “Plant Monumental Sculptures” part of the grant. I’m excited to be a part of his beautiful vision. Scheduled to be completed in September, my MODEL CITIZEN will occupy a vacant lot on Storer Avenue on the West side of Cleveland. Fabricated in aluminum and painted with the vibrant Valspar color “Tangy”, it sits on a concrete plinth that doubles as a bench. Cleveland Metroparks will be transforming the lot into a micro-park. MODEL CITIZEN will be in dialog with two other sculptures, Ariel Vergez’s Spina Florae on an adjacent lot, and GeoBird by Arlin Graff on a lot across the street. About THE ART GARDEN: The Art Garden (TAG) is a transformative initiative spearheaded by the Black Brain Group, aiming to rejuvenate and empower the West Cleveland communities through a creative synergy of public art, mentor-ship, and cultural revival. Guided by an overarching vision of artistic expression and collaboration, TAG is designed to intertwine community engagement with innovative art installations including a vibrant series of murals co-created with community input and sculptural installations reinvigorating vacant lots. TAG fosters the growth of emerging artists by providing mentor-ship, skill-building workshops, and real-world experience. This ensures the development of local talent while embedding a sense of ownership and pride in the community. More about TAG on the Black Brain Group website: https://www.blackbraingroup.com/home-1

Andrew Reach

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EMPYREAL TOWER

Andrew Reach, His new work of art

EMPYREAL TOWER

Andrew Reach is my husband of 44 years. He never seems to stop pushing himself to keep going on . Even with all his pain, his mind will not rest or his desire to create art and architecture. He lost his career of architecture to illness. He began doing art for healing his soul. It took almost 20 years and his architecture and his art have merged to do public art. Here is his new work. It will be built somewhere in the world. Its only a matter of time and what is next for him in his quest towards his art to be in places for people to feel the wonder of art and architecture.

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Why did I name this structure with the word Empyreal? The word evokes something celestial and inspiring awe. What is more awe inspiring than the concept of time? Time is a concept. It looms over everything, yet it has no shape, no structure, no physicality. There are no atoms in time. I think about time a lot. I have downtime when I can’t work. This is a conundrum because time also has no direction, no up, no down, yet humans refer to periods of rest or relaxation or pause in one’s life as downtime. Ok. Where am I going with all of this? During this ‘downtime’, my mind wanders. This is when most of my ideas come to me. During one of these meanderings, I thought about making a structure that spoke to time, not a precise timekeeping device like a clock but something that occupied an isolated realm of contemplation for meditation on its intangible nature. But it would track time, just in a more abstract way.

I remembered learning at Pratt about the Japanese art of wood joinery called Kigumi. It has ancient origins dating back 4,000 years. I haven’t thought about it for many years, but I wasn’t able to sleep, pain was keeping me up, my mind wandered, and it came to me that this would be the solution to build this structure. Its ancient origins emphasize the relativity of human existence. We say 4,000 years is ancient but to time, it is a meaningless number. Predating the iron age, Kigumi is the art of connecting wood with interlocking joints without the use of nails or adhesive. Wood joinery is done with hand tools. This is how Shinto Temples are built. But here, I’m combining the traditional with modern technology; with mass-timber wood members whose wood comes from sustainable forestry and all the cut-outs done with a computer-controlled router which would enable pinpoint accuracy for everything to align properly. The tower has 1,938 horizontal members, 952 vertical members and 4,832 dowels with a height of 82 feet high to the top of the wood and 105 feet to the top of the spire.

The tower is surrounded by a 10-foot-high mound topped by a circular promenade, that like time, has no beginning, no end. To ancient humans, the mound has housed the sacred. Here, a mound houses the tower in its own realm. One enters this realm through a corridor cut through the mound whose splayed walls are a result of them being radially projected from the towers origin point. As you enter this corridor, space compresses and greets you with a portal upon which passing through, space is released. Ramps (handicap accessible) connect the lower plaza to the upper promenade. Moving around this circular ring enables the tower to be viewed in the round.

The morphology of Empyreal Tower emphasizes tectonics, using wood members in a way that allows the structure to be visible and understood. With a grid off wood, a cubic module of four vertical and four horizontal members stack in an arrangement giving its eight inverted rhombus shaped sections. It’s not unlike building with Legos, except the blocks are hollow instead of solid. Horizontal voids in the tower’s forest of wood house an upper and lower glass disk. Embedded in each glass disc is a white arm illuminated with Polymer-Dispersed Liquid Crystals (PDLC) technology. The arm on the lower disk makes one 360-degree revolution per day. The arm on the upper disk makes one 360-degree revolution per year. The movement on the arm of the upper disk is so slow it is imperceptible to the human eye. But with patience, one taking the time to watch the arm in the lower disk which rotates 15 degrees per hour (360 degrees divided by 24 hours per day), this movement is perceptible. A spire rises from the solid cube that supports the upper glass disk, connecting time to the celestial.

The center of the structure has a monumental opening. Open on its four sides, it’s like a giant mouth. Time is like that, like a mouth. It swallows everything in its path. It’s all powerful.

Andrew Reach

Music: Andrew Reach