Temple Beth-El of Casper WY

Introduction___Services/Calendar___News___Location___History___Membership

Our History
As it does in most of Wyoming, Jewish presence and tradition extends back in Casper to the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The town of Casper began to flourish with the development of the oil fields of The Teapot Dome and Midwest in the first quarter of the last century. Casper became the administrative center of the oil and, later, the mineral industries in Wyoming.

Many of the pioneers in both fields were Jewish immigrants from Germany and the Benelux countries of Europe. With and following them came Jewish merchants who built the businesses which developed to service those operations and also supply the necessities of those longer established Wyoming families in ranching and farming.

The cohesive community of Jews in Casper covered the spectrum from mineral extraction to ranching to merchandising, and it interacted socially and politically with the non-Jewish community in the state of Wyoming. As time passed, the Jews built social and religious institutions emblematic of their heritage. Coming from northern Europe, Casper’s Jews were predominantly of Reform Jewish background with a sprinkling of Sephardic Jews who quickly absorbed themselves into the numerically dominant Reform Jewish majority.

The first formal association of the Jewish Community in Casper took place sometime in 1928. The congregation of Temple Beth-El itself (legally constituted and styled as the Jewish Community Association of Casper) has existed in one form or another for more than 75 years. It has been sustained through the foresight and generosity of several Jewish pioneers of Casper, among whom are counted Fred Goodstein (oil), Harry Yesness (merchant/landowner) and Sid Tolin (metals).

In 1982, Fred Goodstein endowed the Association with sufficient funds to permit the Association to be self-sustaining in the maintenance of its synagogue and to offer its membership weekly Shabbos services in addition to High Holy Day and other festival day services in the course of the Jewish calendar.

2007 marks the 50th anniversary of the building of the community’s synagogue on land donated by Harry Yesness on South Poplar Street to the south of Wyoming Boulevard.

Temple Beth-El’s place in the general community of Casper
Our congregation has consistently reached out to the general community of Casper. Twenty-odd years ago, when our neighbor church congregations of St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church and Shepherd of the Hills Presbyterian Church were building their sanctuaries to the north of the Temple, the JCAC made its synagogue available to those churches for Sunday prayer.

That tradition has continued and today is represented by a joint service of thanksgiving conducted by the priest and minister of the churches and the synagogue’s rabbi and held, not so strangely, during Thanksgiving week every year in one of the churches, either of which is large enough to accommodate the several hundred members of the three congregations. When the service concludes, the members adjourn to the common hall of one of the churches for a collegial dinner prepared and served by all three sisterhoods.

We also maintain strong, cordial ties with several of the evangelical Christian churches in Casper, in recognition and strengthening of the ties of those churches with and to the State of Israel and their appreciation of the issues that commonly face Christianity and Judaism in the world today. Their members and ministers often attend our regular and festival services.

Introduction___Services/Calendar___News___Location___History___Membership

Temple Beth-El
P.O. Box 50933, Casper, WY 82605
Tel: 307-237-2330_____Fax: 307-472-5158_____Cell: 307-267-2534
utopialtd1@aol.com_____http://www.jewishcasper.org

This page last updated 24 Dec 2007.
Website created 30 Aug 2007 by Greg Zsidisin. Masthead photos by Sam and Denise Wiseman.