Jewish Americans contributed to Colorado’s cultural, economic, and political life from the territorial period onward. Abraham Goldsmith and his brother Henry Goldsmith, the first known Jewish immigrants to what was then the Territory of Colorado, traveled from Bavaria, Germany to the United States in 1854, arrived in Denver in 1859, gained American citizenship, and married Rosa and Clara Strauss, sisters who also immigrated from the Bavarian region of Germany. After flooding in the area now known as Cherry Creek forced them to leave, the Goldsmith families moved to Pueblo in 1864, becoming the first documented Jewish Americans in the Pueblo region. By 1870, Pueblo was home to twelve Jewish families, and before Temple Emanuel was established, Jewish families worshiped in a building on South Union Avenue. By 1895, about fifty Jewish families in Pueblo County had organized an Orthodox congregation there, while Reform Judaism, active in Jewish communities across the United States since 1873, led the Ladies Temple Association to establish the Temple Emanuel Congregation in 1898. By 1900, the Pueblo Jewish community was large enough to build a new synagogue, designed by Pueblo architect Jacob M. Giles and built by George Reynolds. Construction began in March 1900 and was completed by July, and the synagogue was dedicated on September 7, 1900 by Rabbi Emil G. Hirsh of Chicago, then leader of the largest Reform synagogue in the United States, with Colorado Governor Alva Adams among the honored speakers. Temple Emanuel is notable for eclectic architecture built largely in the Queen Anne style, then seldom used for religious structures, with a rectangular form, two prominent octagonal gables at the entrance, a Syrian archway of hand-hewn regional limestone framing two wooden doors, a massive Colorado limestone foundation, red brick walls, and extensive leaded stained-glass windows that records suggest made it the first house of worship in southern Colorado to use stained glass. Its interior includes opera-style seating for about 130 congregants with rows sloping gently toward the bimah, from which the Holy Torah is read, while the Torah scrolls are kept at the rear of the sanctuary in the Aron Ha-Kadosh, the Holy Ark.