Two grand Moorish-style temples rose in Cincinnati in the 1860s. One of them, Plum Street Temple, still stands downtown as a National Historic Landmark. The other stood at Eighth and Mound Streets in the West End until it came down to make way for Interstate 75.

Mound Street Temple was built by Congregation K.K. Bene Israel, the oldest Jewish congregation west of the Allegheny Mountains, founded in Cincinnati in 1824. The congregation dedicated its new home on August 27, 1869, an architectural twin spirit to Plum Street Temple.

Like Plum Street, the building was deliberately called a temple. For the early Reform movement, that word was a declaration: Jewish life could be fully at home in Cincinnati.

The building holds a place in the history of American Judaism for another reason. When Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise founded Hebrew Union College in 1875, its first classes met at Mound Street Temple.

In 1906, K.K. Bene Israel moved to Avondale, where it became known as Rockdale Temple; the congregation worships today in Amberley Village. Congregation Beth Tefila bought the Mound Street building and kept it alive as a house of worship until 1958. Then urban renewal came for the West End, and the temple came down for I-75.

Today the streets no longer even intersect. Drivers pass over the site every day with no idea a synagogue once stood there. But its twin still stands. Every service, wedding, and ordination at Plum Street Temple carries an echo of the West End sanctuary we lost.