page_title: Sephardic Bikur Holim Congregation
section_title: Rabbi Abraham Maimon
hierarchical_section_title: Sephardic Bikur Holim Congregation / History / Rabbi Abraham Maimon
caption_attribution_description: Tolliver Temple (Church of God in Christ), 1915 E Fir St, Seattle, Washington, USA. Former Sephardic Bikur Holim synagogue.
context_page_description: Sephardic Bikur Holim Congregation is a Sephardic congregation with a synagogue in the Seward Park neighborhood of Seattle, Washington. The name Bikur Holim means visiting or comforting the sick, an important mitzvah. The first official name of the congregation was Spanish Hebrew Society and Congregation Bikur Holim, shortened to "Sephardic Bikur Holim". For a time in the 1930s, after amalgamation with another congregation, it was known as Bikur Holim Ahavath Ahim Congregation.
  SBH is one of Seattle's two Sephardic congregations, the other being Congregation Ezra Bessaroth. With about 4,000 Sephardim, Seattle is in contention with Miami for having the nation's third largest Sephardic population, behind New York City and Los Angeles. According to Aviva Ben-Ur, the influence of the Sephardim within the Jewish community has arguably been greater in Seattle than anywhere else in the United States.
context_section_description: In 1923, Rabbi Abraham Maimon, who claimed descent from Maimonides and who had been the rabbi in Tekirdağ when many of the SBH members had lived there, indicated his interest in moving to Seattle. The matter was complicated by the Emergency Quota Act of 1921 and the Immigration Act of 1924, but matters were worked through, and in September 1924 he became the congregation's new rabbi. That same year, the congregation's Ladies Auxiliary was founded, with Mrs. Estraya Chiprut as its first president.
  Although Rabbi Maimon's tenure proved short—he died in January 1931—the congregation grew and prospered during those years. Attendance at the Shabbat services increased, and members of the congregation adopted stricter observance of Shabbat and of kashrut (kosher) practices. The congregation established the role of a gabbai to assist during services  and a shamash to open and close the synagogue daily. Avram Barlia was to perform the latter function for over 50 years. In the days before the widespread availability of telephones, he went house to house, extending invitations for engagements, weddings, and so forth. SBH began to outgrow its facility at 13th and Washington and, in 1928, SBH bought a property at 20th Avenue and East Fir Street, and managed to raise the funds to build a synagogue in time for the 1929 Rosh Hashanah services. The new sanctuary was officially inaugurated Sunday, September 29, 1929.
  Under Rabbi Maimon, SBH began to heal the breach with the rival Sephardic synagogues. Representatives of congregations Ezra Bessaroth and Ahavath Ahim gladly accepted an invitation to participate in SBH's 1925 Fruticas (Tu Bishvat) celebration. The local Sephardic social welfare group Seattle Progressive Fraternity (SPF), founded in 1921, already had members from all three congregations, and held several meetings in 1926 to discuss unity in the  Sephardic community. In 1927, the congregation elected as its president Henry Benezra, who in 1921 had become the first Sephardic Jewish graduate of the University of Washington. Benezra's central purpose in taking the office was to amalgamate the city's three Sephardic synagogues.
  Benezra and Jack Caston got the SBH board's permission to attempt amalgamation with Congregation Ezra Bessaroth; the matter was discussed between the institutions for over half a year without finding a mutually acceptable basis to merge. The SPF and the local Jewish newspaper The Jewish Transcript would continue to discuss and urge amalgamation for many years, but without success.
  Meanwhile, Rabbi Shabetai Israel left the Ahavath Ahim congregation in 1929, and they did not readily find a successor. The majority of the members of Ahavath Ahim voted in 1931 to amalgamate with SBH; a few joined Ezra Bessaroth and a smaller number decided to continue as an independent synagogue, with Morris Scharhon (who by now also operated the Talmud Torah) as their religious leader. For a time after this, SBH was known as Bikur Holim Ahavath Ahim Congregation; this was eventually shortened back to the original name.
caption: The 1928 synagogue of the Sephardic Bikur Holim Congregation, at 20th and Washington, is now the Tolliver Temple (Church of Christ).[9]
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