Initially located in the Solon Spencer Beman-designed Neoclassical building at West 178th Street and Fort Washington Avenue, it sold the church building to provide land for the George Washington Bridge.

The building at 551 Fort Washington Avenue, across from Bennett Park on West 185th Street, was designed by architects Cherry & Matz of Manhattan and built during the years 1931 to 1932.

[6] It is Art Deco, with a bold and chalky limestone facade, with stainless steel and brass.

The Hebrew Tabernacle Congregation, founded in 1905 in Harlem by German-Jewish founders, had outgrown its 1920s building on West 161st Street between Broadway and Fort Washington Avenue, and its Jewish congregants there were becoming increasingly isolated.

[9][10][11] As of 1982, many of the synagogue's members had come to New York in the 1930s as Jewish refugees from central Europe (in fact, so many German Jews were in the neighborhood, that it was jokingly referred to as "Frankfurt on the Hudson"), and the synagogue had 500 families as members.