The 1870s-1880s saw the development and final formation of St. Petersburg's Jewish community. In the 1870s the Community Board acquired a house on the Fontanka Embankment. The first floor was occupied by the office and the second by the prayer hall. This building was supposed to be their temporary premises while the synagogue was being constructed. In the opinion of the community's leadership, the synagogue was to be not only a prayer place for St. Petersburg Jews but also a symbol of the coming emancipation of Russian Jewry. These illusory hopes were based on the government's liberal reforms as well as on the very fact of the legal existence of a Jewish community in the capital.
In the same year, 1870, St. Petersburg Police Chief Trepov made an attempt to prohibit the Jewish festival of Sukkoth. In a report to the Interior Minister he provided the reasons for such a prohibition. Trepov warned that the candles lit in Jewish "huts" could start fires, the Christian population, annoyed with the mournful Jewish chants, would riot, and, finally, the festival should be abolished because it was so old that it had lost any meaning. However, the period of liberalism was not yet over and the official answer to the police chief instructed him that his direct responsibility was keeping order, and that holding the festival of Sukkoth was within the competence of the rabbinical commission.
The draft rules of the St. Petersburg Jewish community were submitted to the authorities for consideration in 1869. Approved in 1877, the "Temporary Rules for the St. Petersburg Jewish Community" operated until March 1917. According to this document, the Board of the Jewish Community of St. Petersburg, as one located outside the Pale, was in charge of only economic, not spiritual matters. However, the community or, to be exact, its leadership, had the right to elect this board and the electors of the rabbi.
The status of parishioners in the communal hierarchy depended on the amount of their annual fixed contribution to the community. Full rights belonged only to those who paid a minimum of 25 rubles a year, not a small amount at that time. The same people paid for lifetime use of the best seats on the first benches. Such seats cost 2,000 rubles. Womens' seats were also paid for. The minimum contribution amounted to 3 rubles a year. This was affordable for most Jews of St. Petersburg but they had no say in the community's affairs. The 1877 "Temporary Rules" of the St. Petersburg community served as a model for all other communities outside the Pale.
Unlike burial brotherhoods of communities located within the Pale, a cemetery commission was set up within the Board of the St. Petersburg Jewish Community. In 1872, by decision of the municipal authorities, the cemeteries of all religions were relocated outside the city. The Jewish community acquired not only the site offered to it but also the adjacent one intended for the Muslims, who refused to pay for cemetery land in accordance with the rules of Islam. Thus the Preobrazhenskoye cemetery became the only burial site for the St. Petersburg Jews.
The cemetery commission worked out burial tariffs (from the most expensive 1st class to the free 5th class). Sometimes the burial charges were paid by the community, as in the case of two Jewish laboratory soldiers killed in an explosion at the Okhtensky gunpowder plant and buried in the 2nd class section of the cemetery.
The period from 1870 to the early 1890s saw the rapid growth of the Jewish community of St. Petersburg, with the number of Jewish merchants and craftsmen growing at an especially high rate. Between 1883 and 1887 the number of Jewish merchants of the 1st guild rose by 25 members. The Jewish proprietors of craft, trading and lending establishments, referred to as the 2nd guild, included 108 men and 18 women. During these five years women accounted for one fifth of the proprietors of various establishments. Watchmakers, tailors, furriers and shoemakers had always been noticeable among craftsmen of the community. Now, in addition to bankers and wholesalers, proprietors of industrial enterprises - mechanical plants, drilling machine plants, axle grease plants and furniture factories - entered the elite of Jewish merchants.
The majority of Jewish children attended St. Petersburg gymnasiums and schools to which the Community Board would sent religious teachers. In 1885, ten of the city's gymnasiums and schools had six teachers of "Judaic law" with a workload of three to twelve hours a week. Most popular with the Jews of St. Petersburg were the German schools at the Lutheran churches of St. Peter (Peterschule), St. Anna (Annenschule) and the School of Reformed churches.
Not all Jews could afford to send their children to the city's gymnasiums and schools. Children from poor Jewish families studied at the talmud-torah, which in the late 1860s was converted into the Lazar Berman school. The director of the school for girls was his wife Anna Berman. This school provided a three-year free education for children from poor Jewish families at the community's expense. After 1891 the schools were run by the Community Board and after 1895 by OPE. A three-story building was constructed for the schools near the Synagogue. The period of education was six years for boys and three years for girls. Boys were trained in the trades of mechanical fitter, joiner and carver, girls in the trades of seamstress and tailor.
An increasing number of Jews were receiving higher education, primarily in medicine and law but also in engineering. Students of the higher educational institutions formed a new group in the Jewish community. From time to time they received support from the community but as a rule did not take an active part in its life, partly because they were too engaged in studies and partly because of the increasing tendency to assimilation and indifference to Jewish rites.