Community Café

For its 2017 musician-in-residence program, taking place the weekend of February 24, Wise Temple welcomes Elana Jagoda and Saul Kaye, a San Francisco-based couple each pioneering a new style of Jewish music: Jagoda, folk, and Kaye, blues. The same weekend, in a separate event, Plum Street Temple places a world-renowned organist at the keys of its historic, 19th-century Rockwern organ for a special occasion that’s open to the general public.

On February 26, 1842, a small group of German-Jewish immigrants here in Cincinnati officially became a congregation. Eleven years later, they elected a man as their spiritual leader who would not only set their future course, but also that of Reform Judaism as the world now knows it: Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise.

There’s a folk wisdom saying, “If your mind can conceive it, and your heart can believe it, then you can achieve it,” which personifies the history of the Plum Street Temple.