The name Bikur Holim (which can be transliterated various ways into English) means visiting or comforting the sick, an important mitzvah.

With about 4,000 Sephardim, Seattle is in contention with Miami for having the nation's third largest Sephardic population, behind New York City and Los Angeles.

[2] The first Sephardic arrivals held services for the High Holy Days in a rented hall; an Ashkenazic rabbi came over to blow the shofar.

[2] In an effort to improve religious education, in 1915 SBH and other Seattle Sephardim formed a Sephardic Talmud Torah, with a Mr. Benezra from New York City as its first teacher.

In 1921, the Marmara group decided to build the Ahavath Ahim synagogue, completed 1922; some SBH members left to join them.

Representatives of congregations Ezra Bessaroth and Ahavath Ahim gladly accepted an invitation to participate in SBH's 1925 Fruticas (Tu Bishvat) celebration.

[2] Benezra and Jack Caston got the SBH board's permission to attempt amalgamation with Congregation Ezra Bessaroth; the matter was discussed between the institutions for over half a year without finding a mutually acceptable basis to merge.

The majority of the members of Ahavath Ahim voted in 1931 to amalgamate with SBH; a few joined Ezra Bessaroth and a smaller number decided to continue as an independent synagogue, with Morris Scharhon (who by now also operated the Talmud Torah) as their religious leader.

For a time after this, SBH was known as Bikur Holim Ahavath Ahim Congregation; this was eventually shortened back to the original name.

Around 1931 SBH first introduced a choir, trained by Samuel E. Goldfarb, recently arrived music director of Seattle's Reform Jewish Temple De Hirsch.

In the 1920s, Seattle had seen a good deal of amateur theater performed in Ladino, and the plays even helped raise money for the Sephardic synagogues.

The Sephardic Talmud Torah could no longer pay Morris Scharhon, who attempted for a while to operate a smaller cheder out of his home and functioned as hazzan (cantor) for Ahavath Ahim.

Albert Levy, editor of the Ladino newspaper LaVara moved from New York in summer 1931, and temporarily reinvigorated the Talmud Torah, adding women's classes and gaining recognition from the broader Jewish community, but finances nonetheless deteriorated, and Levy returned to New York in 1934.

SBH women participated sufficiently in home front activities as to be recognized by the Seattle Red Cross as a separate unit.

[2] Speaking perfect English, and fluent not only in Ladino and Hebrew, but also in Yiddish (which he had learned for his Talmudic studies at YU) over the next four decades Solomon Maimon brought SBH into a new era, successfully balancing Sephardic roots and the claims of American modernity.

He helped his congregation navigate such arcana of American society as properly filed marriage certificates and Social Security registration.

The latter, in particular, was no small matter for Jews born in Turkey, whose only record of their birth was liable to be a Hebrew date noted in a family holy book.

The aftermath of World War II also brought a new group of Sephardic immigrants: Holocaust survivors from in or near Salonika, bilingual in Modern Greek and Ladino, a number of whom arrived in the early 1950s.

However, the quota for Turkish-born immigrants was already full, and according to the government a special provision for rabbis did not apply to cantors (a distinction that made more sense in Ashkenazic tradition than Sephardic).

Leo Azose, president of the SBH congregation, managed to get the assistance of Senator Warren G. Magnuson, and Benaroya and his wife and daughter arrived in Seattle in 1952.

[2] Although as late as the mid-1950s most of the SBH congregation remained in the Central District,[2] the neighborhood was becoming increasingly African American,[14] its Jews were becoming increasingly educated and prosperous, and most of the Jews were moving out, especially to the Eastside suburbs, Mercer Island in Lake Washington, and the south Seattle neighborhood of Seward Park.

The Ezra Bessaroth congregation built a new building in Seward Park in 1957, and SBH members began to gravitate in the same direction.

Solomon Gaon, Sephardic Chief Rabbi of the British Empire, attended both the 50th anniversary celebration and the inauguration of the new synagogue.

[2] The early 1970s also saw an increase in formal connection among Sephardic congregations in the United States, in which SBH participated strongly, sending some of the largest contingents to several national events.

The film largely focused on several religious ceremonies at Sephardic Bikur Holim on a single day, as well as a concert in Seattle by the Israeli singer Rivka Raz.

In 1985, the synagogue hired Frank Varon, a Seattle native and a student of Benaroya's who had been serving as a hazzan in the New York City area.

Born in the Spanish North African enclave of Melilla, he had studied from the age of fourteen in England, where he served in the rabbinate for a decade before moving first to Venezuela and then to Seattle.

Shlomo Ben-Ami, Israeli ambassador to Spain, was the keynote speaker, and among the panelists were news correspondent Wolf Blitzer and Carlos Rizowy, an authority on international law.

[3] For many decades, SBH used traditional Hebrew-English prayer books compiled by Rabbi David de Sola Pool.

In 2002, SBH, together with Congregation Ezra Bessaroth, published their own prayer books, the Siddur Zehut Yosef, the Seattle Sephardic Community Daily and Shabbat Siddur, corresponding precisely to their own requirements and indicating explicitly the differences in their order of services (with the Ezra Bessaroth variations designated as "R" for "Rhodes" and SBH's as "T" for "Turkish").