European Jewish immigrants came to the gold camp at Last Chance, where business and religion brought them together, and the Jewish community provided a firm financial foundation to the early settlement. Jewish pioneers, with ties to resources in larger cities, repeatedly rebuilt their businesses after the ruinous fires that plagued early Helena. Helena’s Jews worshipped together as early as 1866, but the congregation went more than twenty years without a temple. In 1890, Governor J. K. Toole ceremoniously laid the cornerstone for the first Jewish temple between St. Paul and Portland. Helena architects Heinlen and Matthias designed the Romanesque and Moorish style synagogue under the guidance of a building committee, incorporating strong Eastern influences such as keyhole windows and star-studded domes that once topped the corner towers. The grand temple reflected the congregation’s generous intent “to ornament the city” that had become home. By the 1930s the congregation had dwindled, and the State of Montana acquired the building with a promise to use it for social purposes. After religious symbolism was removed and a second story was added, the former temple became an early model of adaptive reuse. It housed Social and Rehabilitative Services until 1976, then stood vacant until the Catholic Diocese of Helena purchased it in 1981. On April 21, 2002, descendants of Jewish pioneers and the Catholic community together celebrated the centennial of this regional landmark, while the Hebrew date on the cornerstone, 5651, remained as evidence of its original purpose.