Fight to save historic but decaying chapel at Hartford’s Beth Israel Cemetery gets boost from national preservation listing

The fight to save the historic funeral chapel at Hartford’s Beth Israel Cemetery — threatened for years with demolition — got a heady boost Wednesday when the 136-year-old building was named to a prestigious listing of most endangered properties across the country.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation included the cemetery’s Deborah Chapel, at the corner of Affleck and Ward streets in the Frog Hollow neighborhood, among the 11 most endangered historic sites in the U.S. for 2022, an annual listing the nonprofit has compiled since 1988.

“Each year, the endangered list shines a light on significant examples of our nation’s complex, diverse and often undervalued heritage that have reached a turning point due to the possibility of irreparable damage or destruction,” Seri Worden, senior field director for the trust, said, at press conference in Hartford announcing the chapel’s listing.

West Hartford’s Congregation Beth Israel, which owns the 3-story, brick-and-brownstone structure has argued for years that the now-decaying building must be torn down. The chapel hasn’t been used for funeral services for 75 years and is a target of vandalism and break-ins, which have stripped the structure of its copper piping, the congregation has said.

Worden, speaking across the street from the chapel, indicated she — and the trust — view the situation differently.

“It is a rare and early American example of an intact Jewish funerary structure which embodies the strong leadership of women within the 19th-century Jewish and communal organizations,” Worden said.

The Romanesque Revival-style structure was built in 1886 after a fundraising campaign by the Ladies Deborah Society of Hartford, an organization of Jewish women dedicated to performing good works in the community.

A future use would still to be determined but one estimate places renovation costs at between $350,000 to $450,000.

The chapel was chosen from over 120 submissions from around the country, Worden said. Part of the criteria the trust considers are sites where there is a community having strong preservation advocates that can use the listing in their push to save historic properties, Worden said.

Worden said the listing has a good track record since 1988: less than 5% of the 300 properties listed have been lost.

Congregation Beth Israel could not be immediately reached for comment Wednesday.

Across the country, religious sites are increasingly endangered by “demolition by neglect” because congregations don’t have funds to maintain properties in the face of declining enrollment, Sara Bronin, a preservation expert and city resident, said, at the announcement.

“So the congregation either has to get creative, it might even have to sell the site,” Bronin said.

Bronin said she and her husband, Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin, strongly believe rehabilitating the chapel for a new use “is not only possible but essential.”

“Rehabilitation of this chapel and the site as a whole would signal to this community — to our community — that we are worth it,” Bronin said. “It would also honor those who are buried here.”

Congregation Beth Israel has faced off with the city and preservationists over the fate of the chapel for a decade. The latest confrontation came in 2019 when the city’s historic preservation commission refused to back demolition.

Congregation Beth Israel took the city to court and a Superior Court judge last year sided with the congregation. An appeal by the city is pending.

Marcus Ordonez, a neighborhood resident and member of the Frog Hollow neighborhood revitalization zone, said it might be easy to write off the building and the neighborhood, if you don’t live in Frog Hollow.

“But this building and neighborhood are not only special for their past,” Ordonez said. “This neighborhood is and always has been about embracing the future while respecting the past.”

In addition to the chapel, the trust named, among others, to its 2022 list: the Brown Chapel AME Church in Selma, Alabama, which played a pivotal role in the Selma to Montgomery civil rights marches; the Minidoka National Historic Site in Jerome, Idaho, the site of a Japanese-American internment camp during World War II; and the home and studios of Abstract Expressionist artists James Brooks and Charlotte Park in East Hampton, New York.

The Hartford Preservation Alliance, a leader in the fight to preserve and reuse the chapel, has listed the chapel on its annual endangered properties list, including the one released this year.

Mary A. Falvey, the alliance’s executive director, said she hoped the latest listing would inspire descendants of those buried in the nearby cemetery to join the push to save the chapel.

“In preservation, regret only goes one way,” Falvey said. “Once lost, this building, dedicated over 130 years ago to guard [this cemetery], will never return.”

Kenneth R. Gosselin can be reached at kgosselin@courant.com