Temple Beth El

01 / The story of this place

Make time for these

Temple Beth El, organized in 1850 as Detroit's first Reform Jewish congregation, moved to its current Bloomfield Hills campus at Telegraph and Fourteen Mile roads in 1973, after outgrowing an earlier Albert Kahn-designed building on Woodward Avenue. The congregation commissioned architect Minoru Yamasaki, the Detroit-raised designer later famous for New York's World Trade Center, to design the new complex, which includes a thousand-seat sanctuary, an administrative wing, a museum of sacred objects, a chapel, a religious school and a library. Yamasaki gave the sanctuary a tent-like poured-concrete form meant to evoke the portable meeting tents of the ancient Israelites, with two hundred structural panels symbolizing the number of times a day observant Jews traditionally give thanks. The building went up around the same time as the World Trade Center towers, and models of the two projects reportedly sat side by side in Yamasaki's studio. Temple Beth El remains an active Reform congregation on the site today.

1. Detroit's oldest Reform Jewish congregation, founded in 1850
2. Current Bloomfield Hills building completed in 1973
3. Designed by architect Minoru Yamasaki
4. Tent-like poured-concrete sanctuary with 200 symbolic panels
5. Yamasaki designed it around the same time as the World Trade Center