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Please enjoy our popular Armchair Tour of West Hartford History series presented by our former Executive Director Jennifer Matos. Each episode, Jennifer traveled to a new area of West Hartford to share a bit about the history. Some places you’ll recognize, some have been lost to time. All help to tell the story of West Hartford, Connecticut! Visit www.noahwebsterhouse.org for more!

In this week's Armchair Tour of West Hartford History, our Executive Director Jennifer Matos is joined by Jewish Historical Society of Greater Hartford's Executive Director Elizabeth Rose to discuss the Jewish Community Center complex and its impressive sculpture by Elbert Weinberg.
The first synagogue to be built in West Hartford was Congregation Beth Israel in 1936, the history of which we covered in an earlier Armchair Tour. A few Jewish families followed along, making West Hartford their home in the 1930s. But the main movement of Jewish families to West Hartford from Hartford's North End occured in the 1950s and 1960s. During this time, land between Bishop’s Corner and King Philip Middle School was developed into single family houses. Over time, West Hartford and Bloomfield became the center of Jewish population in the region.
Synagogues followed: Beth David in 1945; Beth El Temple and Emanuel Synagogue in 1956; United Synagogues of Hartford in 1967; Agudas Achim in 1968; and Young Israel of West Hartford in 1968.
With a growing Jewish community in West Hartford came a need for services. The Jewish Community Center (JCC) had been in operation in Hartford - first, operating out of a small Jewish Social Service building on Vine Street and later out of a new location at 1015 Asylum Avenue built in 1948 with expanded services. The JCC's membership grew in the late 1950s and the early 1960s, and as more of the Jewish population moved to West Hartford, plans for a new building there took shape. Walter Gropius and Norman Fletcher of the Architects Collaborative designed a modern building on a site purchased from the Fire and Casualty Insurance Company of CT. It opened in 1962 on Bloomfield Ave.
If you've been to the JCC, or even driven by, you may have noticed an impressive sculpture by Bloomfield Ave. This sculpture was designed by Hartford native Elbert Weinberg in 1981, and represents the rebirth of the Jewish people after the Holocaust.
It consists of a massive pair of arms holding aloft a huge shofar. This monument overwhelms in size, measuring 18 feet high (a significant number in Judaism symbolizing life), and the shape of the sculpture echoes the Hebrew word “chai” for life. The arms, each bearing a number from a concentration camp, appear to belong to a buried giant, thrusting up out of the earth. One arm of the sculpture is embossed with the number 135433, which was tattooed on the arm of the father of David Chase, a West Hartford developer and philanthropist – his father perished in the Holocaust. The other arm bears the number 67673, from the arm of Regina Jacobs, a West Hartford resident who survived the Holocaust. In this way, the sculpture commemorates both victims and survivors of the Holocaust.
The committee responsible for Weinberg’s commission wanted a monument that would be inspiring, and the sculpture Weinberg created is a potent symbol of the triumphant rebirth of the Jewish people in the aftermath of the Holocaust. This West Hartford Holocaust Memorial also serves as a focus for its community, a place where people come together to remember those who died under the Nazis and to celebrate the enduring presence of the Jewish faith.