If before Monday you had driven or walked by the west side of Ministry of Peace Christian Center in Sheboygan, you may have looked twice at the wall and wondered what on earth a stained glass window with a Star of David on it was doing there.
That window reflects a piece of the building’s, Sheboygan’s and Wisconsin Jewry’s history. The building, now home to Ministry of Peace, was originally built for Congregation Adas Israel. That synagogue, known locally as “the White Shul,” was one of three synagogues in Sheboygan.
Now, thanks to New York City investment banker David Schoenkin, who grew up in Sheboygan, that window was removed from the church on Monday and will be donated to the Wisconsin State Historical Society in Madison.
In a telephone conversation, Schoenkin told The Chronicle that he would come back to Sheboygan for business and, last year, for four funerals; and he would drive through the neighborhoods he lived in.
“My family used to live up the block” from the White Shul, Schoenkin said. “It really is kind of a miracle that the window is still in existence.” Still, he feared that one year he would visit and the window, or even the building, would no longer be there, he said.
In fact, Rev. Michael Wilson, pastor of Ministry of Peace, which has owned the building since 2000, told The Chronicle that the church “probably will” sell the building and construct for itself a bigger church elsewhere, ‘but not right now.”
Wilson said Schoenkin contacted him this past October offering to purchase the window. Schoenkin added that he offered to replace it with “high end thermal panes” to help make the building more energy efficient.
In an e-mail, Schoenkin said that he keeps a collection of Sheboygan memorabilia in his office and his beach house. “[It is] my way of keeping a tenuous connection with the town that I grew up in.”
“I would have loved to have taken this window for my own use,” he wrote, “but that would have seemed so undemocratic. The synagogue served so many different people over so many years and it only seems right to keep [the window] for the public than to bury it away in my home where only I can enjoy it.”
According to Shirley Wilson, the pastor’s wife, the window was removed Monday, intact and without incident.
Today, only one synagogue remains in Sheboygan, Congregation Beth El, a Conservative shul with membership of fewer than 100 families.
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