Leadville’s Jewish community, largely rooted in Germany, tended toward assimilation and practiced Reform Judaism with worship services largely in English, women as members of the congregation, and the use of a choir and organ. Later immigration brought a larger proportion of Eastern European Jews who were more orthodox, and in 1892 the congregation split when orthodox members established Kneseth Israel in a former church on West 5th Street. Jews accounted for some 300 residents in the early 1880s, were especially prominent in retail trade, and included merchant David May and the mine-owning Guggenheim family, while also supporting social, philanthropic, political, and religious organizations such as a B’nai B’rith lodge, men’s and women’s Hebrew Benevolent Societies, and a religious school. On August 7, 1884, the congregation’s officers met to let the contract for a new synagogue on land Horace A.W. Tabor had gifted to David May as trustee of Congregation Israel. The temple cost $4,000 to build and was dedicated on September 19, 1884, and together with the Hebrew Cemetery established in January 1880, it reflected the size and strength of Leadville’s Jewish community. Without rabbis, lay leaders held regular services until about 1908, but the Jewish population began declining in the mid-1880s as many moved to larger cities, and that decline accelerated after the collapse of Colorado’s mining industry in 1893. The last recorded events there were in 1912, the congregation had dissolved by the 1920s, and the building later passed through private ownership and served as a residence, radiator repair shop, World War II dormitory, Episcopal vicarage, and apartment house before being acquired by the Temple Israel Foundation in 1992. After heavy damage from an electrical fire in 2006, reconstruction culminated in the temple’s return to service in December 2008 and the opening of the museum in 2012.