By Nancy Miller Chenier
Beth Shalom means “House of Peace” and the synagogue that bears this name at 151 Chapel Street was closed at the end of March. The yellow brick building that housed the sanctuary was designed to be part of a joint synagogue and community centre. A gymnasium and facilities for the Talmud Torah, the Hebrew religious school, were added at a later phase.
The Beth Shalom congregation was formed by a merger of Ottawa’s two oldest synagogues located in Lowertown, Adath Jeshurun at 375 King Edward Avenue and Agudath Achim at 417 Rideau Street. At the beginning, it had about 850 families that gathered for worship and religious instruction in the Jewish faith.
The synagogue was designed by the Hazelgrove and Lithwick architectural firm and inaugurated on Rosh Hashanah in 1956. The chief architect was Sidney Lithwick, the son of Abraham and Dora Lithwick, who operated a wholesale and retail store on the Byward Market. After graduation from McGill University in the 1940s, he joined Hazelgrove, where his first major projects were schools for the former Ottawa Board of Education. By the end of his career, buildings reflecting his love of modern and of light were visible across the city.
The eight unique louvered windows in the sanctuary hold stained glass depicting Jewish holy days and festivals. They are the work of Theo Lubbers, a renowned European trained artist, who had his first Canadian studio in Ottawa during the late 1950s and who produced windows for several religious institutions in the Ottawa area.
The building was sited on valuable downtown property and was sold in 2011 to Claridge Homes. The closure and demolition of this historic building marks the end of more than a century of active synagogues in Lowertown. The Congregation has made plans for a procession to move the sacred Torah to its future site. Shalom.