BANGOR – Bruce Moore grew up in an apartment house on York Street near the city’s synagogues. All he knew about the people who went into Beth Abraham and Beth Israel on Saturday mornings was that once a year at Passover they visited their neighbors and offered them unleavened bread or matzo and wine.

Moore, who now lives in a different section of Bangor, was one of 27 people who took a walking tour of Jewish Bangor Sunday afternoon. Sponsored by the Bangor Museum and Center for History, the tour was part of the museum’s current exhibit, titled From Away: Exploring Bangor’s Cultural Heritage.

The exhibit includes information on the Native Americans, Irish, Greek, African-American and Jewish influences on Bangor. The idea for a walking tour of the city’s Jewish roots came from the Jewish Community Council of Bangor, according to Sara Martin, deputy director of the museum who guided the two-hour walk.

The tour ranged from sites where synagogues whose names have almost been forgotten were lost to urban renewal and modernization to the city’s well-known delicatessen.

Bangor’s first Jews arrived a few years after the Civil War ended and rented space at the True Building on Court Street for religious services. That first informal synagogue lasted only five years, but it was a glimpse into the future as more German Jews arrived in the latter half of the 19th century.

Although they faced many challenges, by the 1890s, these German Jews had established a substantial place in the city’s commercial and social life. A building on Central Street, across from the state’s only kosher restaurant, Bagel Central, still bears the name of one of Bangor’s first successful Jews, Louis Kierstein.

The German Jews were not alone in the city for long. In the late 1880s Russian Jews fleeing the pogroms and conscription in the czar’s army traveled up the Penobscot River in steamships to work as peddlers. They did not mingle much with the German Jews, who looked down on them because they spoke Yiddish rather than Hebrew and were illiterate.

The Russians formed their own synagogue that met above Julius Waterman’s clothing store on Exchange Street. These men peddled their goods on foot through the city and to farms on its outskirts. Slowly they obtained carts, horses and business success.

The first synagogue in Maine was built on Center Street in 1895, on the site where the Jewish Community Chapel is located today. Father Hennessey, a priest at St. Mary’s Catholic Church on the other side of the city, helped Simon Kominsky, Morris Rosen and others raise funds for Beth Israel, which, like the nearby Baptist, Universalist and Congregational churches, was destroyed in the 1911 fire.

It was rebuilt on the same site, but in the 1930s moved to its current location on York Street, where a “fire-proof” building was constructed. Although it began as an Orthodox synagogue, Beth Israel is now part of the Conservative movement.

Beth Abraham, today the city’s only Orthodox synagogue, was founded by the Russian Jews living in the York Street area in a two-story building on nearby Carr Street, which ran between Grove and Boyd streets. Congregation leaders had the house turned, according to Martin, so that the shul faced east. It was destroyed in a fire in 1932.

Jewish life flourished mid-century as the community purchased a private school on Somerset Street for a Jewish community center and school. There were clubs, sororities, fraternities, Boy and Girl Scout troops as well as social and cultural events sponsored by the community.

The 1980s brought the city its first Reform congregation, Beth El. Now located on French Street, it, like the Conservative and Orthodox synagogues, began renting space. Beth El shared space with the former Unitarian Church on Union Street.

Jeff Swimmer of Santa Monica, Calif., was impressed by what he learned on the tour. A documentary filmmaker, he spends the summer in Newport with his wife, Gayle Gilman Swimmer, and his in-laws.

“Whenever I’ve walked around Bangor, I’ve seen the Jewish last names on the buildings and wondered how they got here, so far from the urban centers where most Jewish immigrants settled,” he said, explaining why he took the tour. “I think it would be a fascinating story for a film.”

Martin said that the walking tour was such a hit, the museum could not accommodate all who wanted to participate. She said that the tour will be repeated next month.

For more information on From Away: Exploring Bangor’s Cultural Heritage at the Bangor Museum and Center for History and the center’s activities, call 942-1900.