Temple Beth El:
Designed by Albert Kahn in 1902. Kahn's signature is all over Detroit; those buildings which have fallen and those which remain are traces of his sense of design.
This is the oldest synagogue in Detroit. Now owned by Wayne State University, it has served in the more recent past as a theater. Today, you can make it out slightly when you sit inside Atlas Bistro near the window on the Woodward side. Look across the street.
I drive by or near this site several times a week. But this is not my photograph; it comes from Wayne State's Virtual Motor City collection. This image as well comes from that collection:
They are both images of two synagogues named Temple Beth El. The second one is today a church (The Lighthouse Tabernacle), and sits at Woodward and Gladstone. Its size dwarfs its predecessor; its style Greek and ornate in a neighborhood which reflects neither today. This building, which sits just prior to the New Center area, caught my attention the first time I drove down Woodward. The inscription on the building's south side (which escapes me right now) indicated it was a synagogue at some point in its past.
I've been wanting to stop and photograph the larger Temple Beth El. That I haven't is as intriguing to me as the site itself: I feel something allusive.
I cannot find much information on either site - outside of basic history. My borrowed copy of Ferry's massive Buildings of Detroit has no listings for synagogues or Jews in its index. Among its many pictures of sites and buildings, I cannot find a single synagogue. I am wondering about the people who met at the Beth El sites on weekends, who celebrated here, who mourned here, who prayed here, who recognized their identity's importance here. Without a physical trace of history or these people, what kind of history can I imagine?
All history of place is imagined. Each imaginative moment is an encounter with place, whether or not I physically enter the place in question. But that imagination is also framed by what Barthes calls the "I" of every reference. Those moments of "I" (what I also want to call the basis of folksono(me) ) are fragments. Barthes popularizes the fragmented "I" as encyclopedic entries (A is for....B is for...) contextualized by juxtaposed moments of history, culture, literature, desire, etc; I want to situate those fragments as places. This situation makes for a documentary of sorts - an effort to document place. But it is a mythological documentary because, following Barthes' sense of myth, "its language does have a meaning, but this meaning is the empty form of a conceptual signified, which here is a kind of technological unsatedness" (135). My desire to document leaves me unsatisfied; I cannot achieve any sense of total meaning; I cannot project a claim or support that claim. I can only write with a series of fragmented impressions, thoughts, observations, contexts, situations, places. This is choral documentation as well then. Its technological basis is not in finding an exact meaning system from which to work within, but in working within empty systems of meaning: meaning without resolution, meaning without agreement. That is what I understand by a meaning established by encounter. The lack of permanent meaning is the result of a continuing set of encounters; each encounter changing meaning.
In this type of writing, the question is where does one begin? With impression, or with intuition – without regard or fear of a wrong intuition. One merely begins with a first feeling. That feeling, which I may develop here (or elsewhere) is with the odd and troubling relationship between Temple Beth El’s outspoken rabbi, Leo Franklin, and the anti-Semitic Henry Ford. The odd relationship whose core, at first, seems based on contradiction and paradox makes for a provocative metaphor for mythological documentation: encounter and work with incongruence when such moments arise. That encounter is not meant as a moment of exposure or ah-ha (the unveiling of codes of meaning - a staple of most cultural studies work) but instead the exploration of unexpected encounter (a proposed digital methodology).
