PENSACOLA, Florida (JTA) — Mention the Jewish exodus to Florida, and people immediately think Miami Beach, Boca Raton, or Aventura.

But it was here in Pensacola — along the Gulf Coast’s fabled “Redneck Riviera” — that German-speaking Jewish pioneers first put down roots in the Sunshine State. In 1876, when Pensacola’s Temple Beth El was founded, Florida had 200,000 inhabitants, just 2,000 of them Jews.

Today, Florida is home to 24.3 million people, and a Jewish population exceeded only by New York and California. Most of the state’s 762,000 Jews reside in three South Florida counties — eclipsing much older congregations in Tallahassee, Jacksonville and Pensacola that thrived long before the advent of air-conditioning and interstate highways.

Pensacola is home to only about 1,800 Jewish adults, according to the American Jewish Population Project — a number that has remained constant for a century. Yet locals in this laid-back resort in Florida’s Panhandle, more than 600 miles northwest of the bustling Jewish communities of South Florida, say it is ripe for a Jewish renaissance.

“I’d like to make the case that this is also Florida, even though we’re only 10 miles from Alabama,” said Rabbi Joel Fleekop, 47, spiritual leader of Beth El since 2012. “The cost of living here is very low, we have no traffic or congestion, and there are plenty of good jobs.”

Pensacola also has three synagogues: a Chabad House, an Orthodox-style congregation, and Beth El, which this month marks the 150th anniversary of its founding, with a weekend of prayers, local art, Israeli music, and dancing.

Beth El’s celebration began on Friday with a Shabbat service led jointly by Fleekop and Cantor Richard Cohen, former director of the Hebrew Union College’s School of Sacred Music and a Pensacola native.

In a sermon, Fleekop told the story of the children’s book “Bone Button Borscht,” in which a wandering man helps the people of an impoverished town to create soup from their own meager ingredients that somehow taste far better together than separately.

“For 150 years, this temple — our temple, Temple Beth El — has thrived because similar to the people making soup in the story, its members have contributed and done what they could to nourish and enhance and better our community,” he said. “Our founding families, like the man who set up the pot, provided the vision that this little corner of the world could have a thriving Jewish community. Others provided the resources to build the sacred spaces our congregation has called home and to keep on the lights and, this being Florida, the air conditioning also on.”

Summarizing the wide range of contributions that members have made over the decades, Fleekop also noted changes that Temple Beth El experienced over the last 150 years: the number of stars on the American flag grew, the Israeli flag was created, the amount of Hebrew in the service increased; and congregants are wearing “fewer neckties and fewer fancy hats” but more kippahs and tallits than they once did.

“Inevitably, each generation had its own taste and so added their own ingredients, the spiritual equivalent of maybe some okra, or zaatar, or even some sriracha,” he said to laughs. “At 150 years, our congregation is no doubt very different from what was imagined at its inception. … The soup that is our temple has gone from a Bavarian borscht to a Gulf seafood gumbo to a gluten-free, Asian fusion matzah ball soup. But in many ways, in the most essential ways, we........

© The Times of Israel