When neighbors crossed the threshold

Above the entrance to the University of Rochester’s Interfaith Chapel, a verse from Isaiah 56:7 is carved into the stone:

“Mine house shall be called an house of prayer for all people.”

It is easy to pass beneath those words without realizing they describe more than an aspiration. They also describe Rochester’s history.

Before Rochester had its first mosque, Muslims gathered to pray in the Interfaith Chapel. Friday prayers were regularly held there. Sunday school met nearby at the Wilson Commons. By 1976, the Muslim community had grown large enough that campus spaces were no longer large enough for major holidays and so the local Islamic Center held a Ramadan break-the-fast at the YMCA. About a year later, the land for Rochester’s first Islamic Center was purchased from the Diocese of Rochester.

As a graduate of Catholic schools, I thought about that history this past spring as I accepted an invitation to Eid prayers at a Rochester mosque. Unsure of the customs, I sat toward the back of the prayer hall. I assumed the front belonged to elders and community leaders. A young man seated beside me smiled and corrected me. Everyone is equal, he said. There is no front row reserved for important people.

Before prayers began, another congregant asked where I worshipped. When I told him I belonged to a synagogue, he smiled and replied, “Muslims and Jews are cousins.”

On my way out, someone handed me a box with cake and a samosa.

Hospitality often looks like very ordinary things.

As I have spent the past two years researching Rochester’s religious history, I have begun noticing the same pattern in older newspapers.

In December 1857, a correspondent to The Israelite, a Jewish newspaper in Cincinnati, described Thanksgiving Day services at Rochester’s B’rith Kodesh synagogue. Nearly 300 Christians attended. Carriages lined the street. Many wanted to know when the next English sermon would be preached. According to the writer, they left “much edified with the simple and solemn rites of our service.”

Three years later, another report described the conversion of a Protestant woman before a congregation “crowded to excess,” with many non-Jewish visitors present. Rochester’s Jewish population at the time was estimated to number only around 150 people, yet local Jews evidently believed their neighbors would come if invited.

Rochester was not alone in witnessing such scenes of interfaith hospitality.

In 1888, after a fire destroyed St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Buffalo, nearby Temple Beth Zion offered its sanctuary for Sunday worship. The Buffalo Courier described Episcopalians gathering beneath the synagogue’s roof while a temporary altar was arranged near the Torah ark. The newspaper praised the “generous action” of the rabbi and trustees.

A synagogue became, for a season, the home of a church.

The stories point in different directions, but together they reveal a pattern. Christians entered synagogues. A Jewish congregation sheltered a church. Rochester’s growing Muslim community gathered in a university chapel and at the YMCA before it had a permanent home of its own. Years later, Muslims welcomed a Jewish neighbor into a mosque.

No one community was always the host. No one community was always the guest.

We often describe religious pluralism as tolerance. Rochester’s history suggests something richer.

Tolerance asks only that we leave one another alone.

Hospitality asks us to open a door.

That distinction feels increasingly important. Many Americans today know remarkably little about one another’s religious traditions. Many have never attended a worship service outside their own faith. Rochester’s history suggests a different way. Again and again, neighbors crossed one another’s thresholds because they were curious enough to enter and generous enough to invite.

Our predecessors did not agree with one another. Nor did they minimize their convictions. Their convictions were often precisely what gave them the confidence to welcome one another.

They believed that neighbors could cross a threshold without surrendering who they were. Rochester still possesses that inheritance.

It can be found in the stone above the Interfaith Chapel.

It can be found in a newspaper report of Christians filling a synagogue to hear a sermon.

It can be found in the story of Muslims praying before the community had a mosque of its own.

It can be found in our sister city, Buffalo, where an Episcopal congregation was welcomed into a synagogue after a fire.

And sometimes it can still be found in a simple gesture during Eid prayers, when a stranger is invited to come forward.

Rochester’s religious life has never been free of suspicion or misunderstanding. Neither has it been without people willing to open a door. These stories remind us that a city’s civic and religious life is shaped not only by the buildings it erects, but by the neighbors willing to share them. That is an inheritance worth keeping.

Austin Albanese is a Rochester-based writer and historian whose work focuses on local histories, civic memory, and interfaith life. 

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