The community came first, and waited a long time for a home. Jewish families had been settling in Queensland from the time it separated from New South Wales in 1859, and in 1865 they formed the Brisbane Hebrew Congregation. For two decades they worshipped wherever they could, in rented rooms scattered across Queen, Edward, George and Albert Streets, raising money through careful land dealings toward the day they could build. That day came in the mid-1880s. The foundation stone was laid on 7 July 1885, and beneath it the congregation buried a bottle of coins, newspapers and documents, a time capsule from the Jewish Brisbane of the 1880s that still lies sealed under the building today.

The design has a tangled, very human origin. Plans were first accepted from the architect Edward Wells Russell, who then withdrew and passed the commission to his brother-in-law, Arthur Morry, who worked in the Queensland Colonial Architect's office. The result is a striking exercise in the Byzantine, or Neo-Moorish, style favoured by many nineteenth-century synagogues, a deliberate visual language that set Jewish houses of worship apart from the Gothic churches around them. Built of stuccoed brick on concrete foundations by the contractor Arthur Midson, it carries circular motifs everywhere: in the great tracery windows front and back, in the rosettes and ventilators, in the octagonal upper stages of its turrets. When it opened in 1886, the ceremony was described as imposing and crowded to excess by people of all faiths, a colonial city turning out to see something genuinely new.

The interior was built to hold a community at prayer. Octagonal columns divide the space into a central nave and side aisles, with broad semicircular arches springing between their capitals and a timber ceiling above. Following Orthodox tradition, a gallery for women wraps around the upper level, over the entrance and down both sides. Brightly coloured stained glass, supplied by the noted Sydney firm Lyon, Cottier and Co, glows in the circular windows, scattering light across the worshippers below. The building was designed to seat around four hundred worshippers, most on the ground floor and the rest in the women's gallery above, a generous capacity for a community still numbered in the hundreds, and a quiet statement of faith in its own future. Some of those windows carry a heavier meaning: they form a rare Brisbane memorial to the Jewish people who died in the Second World War, so that remembrance is built into the very walls of the room.

More than 130 years on, the synagogue remains a working house of worship for Brisbane's Jewish community, not a relic but a living congregation in continuous descent from those families of 1865. Added to the Queensland Heritage Register in 1992, it endures as the city's first synagogue and a marker of how a small minority put down deep roots in colonial Queensland. To stand before its turrets and circular window on a busy city street is to be reminded that Brisbane's story has always included many faiths, and that this particular community has been part of the city's life for well over a century and a half, quietly keeping its traditions in a building that still wears them with pride.