The common practice of many local historians to speak of Frost Town in the context of a much larger neighborhood has only compounded the problem. This "greater Frost Town area" has no specific boundaries, but, at times, includes areas south of the Frost Town Subdivision as far as what is now the George R. Brown Convention Center. It is in this area, south of Frost Town, an area that is more appropriately a part of the Second and  Third Wards, that there was, indeed, the center of Houston's Jewish community during the nineteenth century.

The first Jewish settler in Houston is generally recognized to be Eugene Chimene. An immigrant from France, Chimene made his way to Texas and fought at the Battle of San Jacinto. Like many veterans of that battle, he decided to settle in the Houston, the new capitol of Texas. But, we know little else of Chimene.

Not surprisingly, Houston's potential for enterprise attracted large numbers of merchants and entrepreneurs in the late 1830's. Among them was Jacob De Cordova, who successfully pursued business as a real estate investor, a surveyor and a newspaper publisher. Born in Jamaica about 1808, De Cordova was a devout Sephardic Jew, that is, a Jew who is of Spanish or Portuguese descent. He lived in Pennsylvania from about 1832 to 1836 before moving his family to Louisiana where they resided until about 1838. He immigrated to Texas after that and received a third class headright of 320 acres on Dec 12, 1839. De Cordova was to play an important role in the Jewish community of Houston.

As an original member of the Houston Chamber of Commerce when it formed in 1840, Jacob De Cordova became influential in local politics and was elected a city alderman. In 1847, he was elected as Harris County's representative to the state legislature. By 1850, De Cordova, at age 42, was living with his wife and five children on the edge of the well to do neighborhood Quality Hill in a house that was located on the site of today's Minute Maid Park. In 1852, however, De Cordova left Houston and moved to Austin.

It was through De Cordova's influence that a group of Jewish immigrants came to Houston in the early 1840's. In 1844, these Jews, bound together by religious belief into a community, purchased a tract of land on the San Felipe Road, just west of the City Cemetery, for a Jewish Cemetery which is known today as the Beth Israel Cemetery. With this core group of believers, Jacob De Cordova, in 1845, helped establish Houston's first local Minyon.

A minyon is a quorum of ten men required for the observance of certain Jewish prayers. It derives from the biblical story of Sodom and Gemorra in which Abraham pleads for God to save the cities from destruction if only ten just men could be found in them. Considering the town's proliferation of saloons and it's reputation at the time for gambling and other vices, the comparison may be apt.

In the census of 1850, there were seventeen Jewish adults, eleven men and six women, in Houston, comprising about one percent of the white population of 1,863 persons. The community continued to grow and the Hebrew Congregation of Houston was formed in 1854 and was chartered by the State Legislature on December 28, 1859 with a membership of twenty-two adults, most of whom came to Texas from western Europe. The Hebrew Congregation was an Orthodox congregation and it could be described as a typical German Jewish community. Services were held in a room on Austin Street, between Texas Avenue and Prairie Avenue, until a frame building on La Branch Street and Prairie Avenue was built for their worship services.

By 1860, there were sixty-eight Jewish adults and forty children in Houston. Most of them came to Houston among the waves of German immigrants to Texas during the 1840's and 1850's. And, like many Germans, they settled in the Frost Town area and the Second Ward amid their German speaking neighbors. As observant Orthodox Jews, they generally tended to live within walking distance of their synagogue as prescribed by the tenets of their faith.

With the steady increase in the size of their congregation, the Jewish community planned for a prominent synagogue for their services. By 1869, the construction of a temple on the southeast corner of Crawford Street and Franklin Avenue had begun. The synagogue, facing Crawford Street, was an imposing gabled structure with a twenty-five foot ceiling. Five tall windows along the length of each side of the temple provided light to the main hall of the building.

The completion of this elegant and, at last, permanent place of worship in 1874 did not mean that the Hebrew Congregation was free of internal controversy. Many of the older German members of the congregation preferred a version of their faith that seemed more in accord with the style of life they had come to know in Houston, and by 1877, the congregation had begun a transformation to classical Reformed Judaism.

A group of new Eastern European immigrants, mostly from Russia and Poland, however, were opposed to reforms adopted by the congregation, and they broke away to form the Orthodox Congregation of Adath Yeshurun in 1889. They built a new brick synagogue and associated frame buildings a few city blocks south of Temple Beth Israel on land that became Union Station in 1910.

It may have been at this time of division in the Jewish community that the Hebrew Congregation of Houston began to identify itself more precisely as the Congregation Beth Israel. Although some historians say that congregation called itself Beth Israel as early as 1854, the name does not become prominent in public documents until the early twentieth century when the synagogue is identified specifically as the Temple Beth Israel, perhaps to distinguish it from the Adath Yeshurun and the other congregations that subsequently arose, such as Congregation Adath Emeth on Houston Avenue in the Sixth Ward.

During the last decade of the nineteenth century, the Hebrew Congregation of Houston, more specifically, the Congregation Beth Israel, continued to flourish at its location at Franklin Avenue and Crawford Street. By 1885, a meeting hall for the congregation had been built on the lot south of the synagogue. This hall, constructed with a unique architectural design of its front facade, was named Montefiore Hall by 1896 in honor of Moses Montefiore, a prominent British Jew who supported the causes of the Jewish people around the world.
 
Moses Montefiore grew up in London, was very successful in business and retired in 1824 to devote himself to community affairs. His humanitarian interest in the poor and in the Jews in Eretz Israel resulted in him being knighted by Queen Victoria. One of Montefiore's favorite causes was Eretz Israel, "the Land of Israel", which refers to the area west of the Jordan River and south of present day Lebanon. Montefiore aided efforts to settle Jews in this land which was a part of Palestine at that time. He died a few months after his 100th birthday in 1885. The fulfillment of the dream of a Jewish homeland would not come for another sixty-three years, until 1948.
                                       
By the turn of the twentieth century, the Frost Town Subdivision, the Frost Town area and adjacent areas of the Second Ward had become a largely commercial and industrial district. The residential neighborhoods declined and were inhabited predominantly by low income families and the poor. Families with the financial means to do so followed the trend to move south of the downtown district, and their institutions relocated to these more prosperous areas of town. Congregation Beth Israel moved to a location on Lamar Street in 1908.

Subsequent shifts in residential patterns ensued as well. The congregation built a new temple farther south at Austin Street and Holman Avenue in 1925. And, today, the Congregation Beth Israel, which formally changed its name from the Hebrew Congregation of Houston in 1945, is located in southwest Houston at 5600 N. Braeswood Boulevard.

By 1924, the former synagogue on the corner of Franklin Avenue and Crawford Street housed a blacksmith shop. The adjacent hall became a tent making business and electric motor repair operation. In 1951, the former location of the synagogue was a filling station owned by a predecessor of Exxon, and a tent and awning factory occupied the former hall. Today, the lots are vacant and offer an excellent view of the center field corner of Minute Maid Park.