Congregation Mount Sinai was organized in 1898 and moved from its first building (not extant) to this monumental cubic block in 1916. Faced with dark red brick, the building features a gabled frontispiece, a triple-arched entrance, and paired stained glass windows to each side. The temple could seat 750. The congregation moved again to a new building (EP40) in 1962, and the 1916 structure subsequently was acquired by El Paso Community College.
Two blocks away at 715 N. Oregon, the El Paso Holocaust Museum and Study Center occupies a one-story brick building of 2008 that replaced its 1994 building, which burned. Nearby at 906 N. El Paso Street is the former Congregation B’nai Zion Synagogue (1912). This small, narrow, rectangular red brick building has a portico carried on four fluted Tuscan columns, supporting a pediment over shallow modillions. The synagogue was built by El Paso’s Orthodox congregation, which broke from Congregation Mount Sinai in 1900 after Mount Sinai’s embrace of Reform. After B’nai Zion’s congregation moved to another location in 1917, the building became St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church and subsequently had other uses.
This neighborhood, just north of downtown, was a new elite residential sector of El Paso when both houses of worship were built. It retains, in fragmentary form, impressive houses, apartments, and institutional buildings of the 1900–1940 period, especially the 1200 to 1400 blocks of El Paso and N. Mesa streets.