Yeshurun purchased for $1,500 (today $) its first owned premises, the building of a Baptist church whose congregation was moving to Main Street. The structure required "extensive remodeling", and Lebensburger, as building chairman, led the campaign to raise the necessary $9,000 (today $). Funds came not only from the membership but also from non-Jewish members of many local societies, including the Odd Fellows and Masons. Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise assisted B'nai Yeshurun's then–religious leader Rev. Mr. Delbanco with the dedication of what became "the seventh congregation-owned Jewish House of Worship in Ohio." Move to Reform, and early rabbis Influenced by Wise, the congregation implemented many reforms in its services. In 1861 they adopted Wise's Minhag America prayer book. In that same decade they added an organ, did away with the prayer shawl, and started a religious school. In the 1870s the congregation removed yahrzeit candles from the sanctuary, and added family pews and a mixed choir (men and women together). In 1873 B'nai Yeshurun was one of the first thirteen founding members of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (UAHC), now Union for Reform Judaism. By 1889 B'nai Yeshurun had outgrown its original cemetery, and the congregation purchased on West Schantz Avenue in Oakwood. Oakwood was a "restricted community"; Jews were not allowed to reside or own stores there. According to Leonard Spialter, president of the Dayton Jewish Genealogical Society, "if you were dead, you could be buried in Oakwood, but if you were alive, you couldn’t live there". Relatives began moving those buried at the Rubicon cemetery to the new "Riverview Cemetery", including Lebensburger, who had died by this time. This process was not completed until 1967. In its first forty years the congregation had a series of generally short-tenured religious leaders. These included Delbanco (1862–63), Moses Bauer (1863–64), L. Liebman (1864–67), Abraham Blum (1868–69), Leon Leopold (1870–72), Ben Weil (1872–76), Ephraim Fischer (1876–81), Godfrey/Gottheil Taubenhaus (later rabbi of Congregation Beth Elohim of Brooklyn, New York) (1881–85), and Israel Saenger (1885–89). During this period the membership also transformed from immigrant-born to native-born. In 1881 the congregation's "language of record" was changed from German to English, and in 1889 the synagogue hired its first American-trained rabbi, Max Wertheimer. A graduate of Wise's Hebrew Union College, Wertheimer had been born in Germany to Orthodox parents. He was popular with the congregation, and Dayton's Christian community highly respected him. Non-Jews attended his