L'Shem: Our Events

Stanley Cohen, the recently retired international chair of the B’nai B’rith International Cuban Jewish Relief Project, will speak at Temple Shalom,
Friday, Sept. 16, during Shabbat Services, which start at 8 p.m.

Cohen, who served in this position for 15 years, has made some 40 trips to the island, facilitating projects to enhance Jewish life there and acting as an unofficial ambassador to its small but active community. On many of those trips he led groups of American Jews so they could see for themselves conditions on the island and how American assistance could make a difference in Jewish life there.

   Cohen brought medicines, food, clothing and other necessities to Cuban Jews that were otherwise difficult or impossible to obtain in a country where the average wage is $15 per month. He helped refit the island’s only kosher butcher shop with refrigeration equipment and a grinding machine. And he was instrumental in delivering four Torahs to the Jewish community.

   The Cuban Jewish community numbers approximately 1,500 and supports three large synagogues in its capital, Havana. Smaller communities exist around the island.

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   Temple Shalom will formally install its new slate off officers, Friday, July 16, during its Shabbat services, which start at 8 p.m.
   Amy Humphrey is the new president of the congregation; Karen Kangisser is vice president; Bob Wiseman is treasurer and Sherry Rosenberg, the secretary. In addition, Janice Meister and Myra Talenfeld join the board of trustees

About our Congregation

Temple Shalom was founded in 1849, which means the congregation predates West Virginia statehood. (West Virginia broke away from Virginia during the Civil War.)

The Congregation has evolved since being chartered by its earliest members, mostly German Jews. Its first permanent home was the historic Eoff Street Temple, in downtown Wheeling. By 1958, though, the congregation moved to the peaceful Woodsdale neighborhood of town, taking up residency in a new single story building along the Bethany Pike with a domed sanctuary (which became the signature feature of the synagogue), and took the name Woodsdale Temple. By 1970, as the Wheeling Jewish population declined. the Woodsdale Temple merged with the Conservative Synagogue of Israel on Edgington Lane. The new congregation, housed in the Woodsdale Temple building, adopted the name Temple Shalom to reflect its new beginning, though it continued to use the historic L'Shem Shomayim name in its correspondence, its semi-annual directory, to name just a few uses.

Temple Shalom has seen its share of history. Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, the architect of Reform Judaism in America, visited the Wheeling community in the 1850s and wrote about the experience. Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, one of the most influential American Zionists of the 20th century, began his rabbinate at the Eoff Street Temple, and Rabbi Jacob Rader Marcus, the father of American Jewish historical research and the founder of the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati, grew up in Wheeling and was confirmed at the Eoff Street Temple.

Today, Temple Shalom is a small congregation, approximately 75 families, but it remains a vibrant community with an active religious school and adult education program. Its members routinely reach out to the Greater Wheeling community of which they are an integral part, and the Shabbat services and Saturday Torah study are always well attended for the size of the community.

Unlike other small town congregations which have closed their doors, Temple Shalom has no intention of fading away. It was a test congregation for the new Mishkan T'filah siddur; it has experimented with parents and children learning together at Sunday religious school, and it is the only Jewish congregation in northern West Virginia or Western Pennsylvania to regularly welcome lecturers and entertainers sent to America by Soul Train, an Israel-based program, the mission of which is to bring Jewish culture to outlying Jewish communities.