Washington Jewish Week recently recognized the 103rd birthday of Silver Spring resident Sylvia Potash, one of the founding members of Shaare Tefila Congregation, which was originally established in the Riggs Park neighborhood. Most probably know a little bit about the Jewish roots of the neighborhood and that Shaare Tefila was located where Faith Moravian Church now sits at 405 Riggs Road NE before moving to the Silver Spring area.

Random fun fact. When I served as president of the Lamond-Riggs Citizens Association from 2017 to 2019, I applied for a grant on behalf of the association to do an oral history project of the neighborhood. I reached out to the then executive director of Shaare Tefila to see if they would be interested in being part of the project. We had a nice conversation, and they ended up providing a letter of support for the application. We did not get the grant. But during our conversation, I learned that the executive director and I grew up in the same neighborhood back in California. Her father had a dental practice in a building at the end of the street of my childhood home. This was before my time of course. My neighborhood, like many urban areas and inner ring suburbs, saw white flight during the 1960s and ’70s and by the time I was born, there was only one white family remaining on the block. Anyhow we had a nice time chatting about other random coincidences of having grown up in the same neighborhood during different periods of time and both making our way to the DC area as adults.

Anyways, the Washington Jewish Week article provides some interesting history about Shaare Tefila’s establishment in Riggs Park.