Chaim Nasan Shohet, a distinguished Talmudic scholar, was the rabbi at Shaarey Tphiloh until 1916.
He wrote the Secher Chaim, a "responsa" in which a rabbi puts forward religious questions, then writes answers based on a wide range of sources of Jewish texts.
The cover is in Yiddish. The English portion reads: "Secher Chaim, By Rabbi H.N. Shohet, Portland, Maine, Published by the Author, Second Edition, 1913."
It was not until the arrival of Rabbi David Essrig in 1917, that English became the language for official synagogue documents and for services.
But switching from Yiddish was not always easy. The name of the synagogue was written in many different ways in English before "Shaarey Tphiloh" became the accepted spelling.
