In the early twentieth century, the Evansville city directory listed three Jewish congregations. One was the Adath Israel congregation, which had built a new synagogue in 1904 on NW Sixth Street, a block from Central High School.
A newspaper reported in 1916 that local churches were “unusually active†that year building or expanding their places of worship, including Adath Israel; it erected the United Hebrew Institute at the rear of the synagogue around the corner on Vine Street.
The spacious Institute leased rooms to the new Evansville College, which held its first classes there in 1919. The synagogue was vacated in 1955 when the congregation moved to the 3700 block of Washington Avenue, and the buildings were razed in 1968.
