Heritage

While Dutch colonial law permitted the Jews to maintain a cemetery, they were forbidden to formally establish a synagogue. When New Amsterdam fell to the British in 1664, the legal and social situation of the Jews changed. The new regime permitted Jews to hold public office and to erect synagogues. New York City's first Jewish congregation, Shearith Israel, was organized ca. 1706. By 1730, the congregation had built its first synagogue on Mill Street (present-day South William Street). Shearith Israel followed the Sephardic ritual (even though, as time went by, more and more of its members were Ashkenazim), and also came to be known as the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue.

1825
In 1825 a group of Ashkenazi Jews broke off from Shearith Israel to found New York's second congregation, B'nai Jeshurun. Dissatisfied with the Sephardic rite practiced at Shearith Israel, B'nai Jeshurun's congregation modeled themselves on the Great Synagogue of London, and they contacted Britain's Chief Rabbi Solomon Hirschel for advice and support. B'nai Jeshurun's first synagogue was located on Elm Street.

1901
By the turn of the century New York City, swelled by the arrival of thousands of Yiddish-speaking immigrants, was emerging as a new center of Yiddish culture.
In 1901 Der Morgn Zhurnal (The Jewish Morning Journal), a daily Yiddish newspaper, began publication in New York. That same year a Yiddish production of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice premiered at Jacob Adler's People's Theater on the Lower East Side.

1911
On March 25, 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, a garment factory near Washington Square Park, went up in flames. 146 women workers, most of them Jewish and Italian immigrants, died in the fire. Many jumped to their deaths from windows, unable to escape any other way from a building which had locked exit doors and no fire escapes. The tragedy galvanized the labor movement. Public outcry forced the passage of legislation mandating safer working conditions and tougher fire codes.

New Amsterdam
New York City

1654
In September 1654, a group of 23 Jewish refugees from Recife, a Brazilian colony which had recently been conquered by Portugal, arrived in New Amsterdam. The governor of New Netherlands, Peter Stuyvesant, wanted to bar their entry. The Jews appealed to influential officers of the Dutch West Indies Company in the Netherlands. As a result of their intercession, the Jews were allowed to settle in New Amsterdam, becoming the first Jewish settlers in North America.

1695 to 1730
The first organized Jewish worship service in New Amsterdam took place in a private home in 1695.

Philadelphia

1740 to 1761
Jewish frontier traders had lived and worked in Pennsylvania since the 1650s, but it was not until the 1730s that Jews first permanently settled in Philadelphia. In 1740, Nathan Levy purchased a piece of land for use as a Jewish cemetery. Another milestone in Philadelphia Jewish communal life was reached in 1761, when a small group held high holiday services with a Torah scroll borrowed from Congregation Shearith Israel in New York.

1790s to 1812
Philadelphia's was the first American Jewish community to have more than one congregation. In 1795 a group of Ashkenazic Jewish immigrants expressed their dissatisfaction with the Sephardic rite practiced by Mikveh Israel by forming the German Hebrew Society. In 1802 this group adopted the name Rodeph Shalom. By 1811 Rodeph Shalom had 21 members, and, in 1812, was granted a charter from the state of Pennsylvania authorizing it to form a separate congregation.

Newport
1750s to 1789

During the 1740s, Newport's Jewish community revived with the arrival of Jewish merchants, drawn by the town's growing prominence as a port. By the mid-1750s, the community was large and prosperous enough to commission the construction of a permanent synagogue. Today, the Touro Synagogue, as it is known, is the oldest extant synagogue in North America.

Newport's Jewish community was shattered during the Revolutionary War. Some Jewish merchants supported the British, and with their defeat, decided to flee the U.S. Others left when the town lost its status as an important port. By 1822, not a single Jew remained in Newport.

Maryland
1825

On February 26, 1825, the legislature of the state of Maryland passed the so-called "Jew Bill," which, for the first time, allowed Jews to serve as public officials.

The Federal Constitution and the Bill of Rights had prohibited religious qualifications for office-holding, but some state constitutions did not uphold these principles. Long after federal laws guaranteed these rights, some states, such as Maryland, continued to exclude Jews from public office. Rights granted by the federal constitution were binding on the states only in 1868, when the 14th amendment was passed.

Washington, DC

1914 to 1916
Louis Dembitz Brandeis had long served as an advisor to Woodrow Wilson on issues related to political and social reform. But in 1914 fierce opposition kept the eminent jurist from receiving a position in the President's cabinet.

In 1916, when Wilson proposed Brandeis for a seat on the Supreme Court, conservatives once again bitterly contested the appointment, opposed to both Brandeis's ethnicity and his liberal politics. His appointment went through, however, and he became the first Jewish justice of the Supreme Court.

1930s
During the 1920s the majority of American Jews changed their allegiance from the Republican to the Democratic Party. By the 1930s Jews were the Democratic Party's most loyal ethnic constituency. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal met with overwhelming approval in Jewish neighborhoods, consonant as his social welfare programs were with the agendas of the Jewish labor movement and other progressive forces within the community. The high number of Jewish appointments to New Deal agencies and other governmental branches also served to increase Jewish support for Roosevelt and the Democratic Party.

For many Jews, Roosevelt was a mythic figure. As the quip went, the Jews believed in three velts (worlds): di velt (this world), yene velt (the other world), and Roosevelt.

Baltimore
1860 to 1912

In 1860, Henrietta Szold, the daughter of a Hungarian-born rabbi, was born in Baltimore. The eldest of eight daughters, she was raised in an intensely intellectual environment where she learned three languages and became an expert in botany. She went on to organize classes for new Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe; edit the American Jewish Yearbook; and in 1912, found Hadassah, the Women's Zionist Organization.
Hadassah became one of the largest Jewish organizations in the U.S. Under Szold's leadership, it created the rudiments of a health care system in the emerging Jewish community in Palestine, establishing clinics and a hospital in Jerusalem.

Savannah, Georgia
1733 to 1740s

The third oldest Jewish community in America was founded in the port town of Savannah in 1733, when 42 indigent Jews, sponsored by London's Jewish community, arrived from England. Savannah's first Jewish congregation worshiped in a rented house, equipped with prayer books, a Torah scroll, and a Hanukkah lamp donated by their benefactors in London. The community constructed a ritual bath in 1738. By the 1740s, however, Savannah's Jewish population was dwindling, as most Jews left the Georgia colony for the nearby town of Charleston or New York City, places that offered better business opportunities.