DAVID NATHAN: Our family has been involved in the life of the congregation and in the life of Jewish New York since the beginning. The nicest part of it is that, on any given Saturday morning, my father, my kids, all of us, we're all here together, and we're praying together, as our family has done for centuries.

ABERNETHY: The senior rabbi of Congregation Shearith Israel is Marc Angel.

Rabbi MARC D. ANGEL (Congregation Shearith Israel): America was built on the Bible -- the idea of freedom, equality, human dignity. All of these things are deeply entrenched within the Jewish tradition going back to Moses. So Jews could naturally and almost automatically identify with the American adventure. So we could maintain our practices, we could assimilate because of the freedom, and some Jews chose both of those paths. But the overall thing was, we were American. We were part of the American tradition. So whether Jews are very Orthodox, whether Jews are less Orthodox, whether Jews are assimilated or less assimilated, secular or religious, in some basic gut way, every American Jew, by his own or her own historical tradition, is keyed into American ideals. This is the ideal country for people rooted in the Jewish tradition.

Wherever the Jewish community is in the United States, there's a sense of dynamism, there's a sense of participation in society. Whether through philanthropic work, whether it's through social action, whether it's through being models of religious faith, the Jewish community is diverse and creative. This possibility of having such a big and diverse Jewish community is a gift that America gave to the Jewish people and, I think, to the world. It gave us a possibility of being ourselves, of fulfilling our potential, of participating in a society as we chose to participate. It gave us that freedom which we didn't have prior to the American experience.

The 350th anniversary is a significant event, not only for our congregation but for American Jewry and for all of America. It shows the possibility of a small minority coming to this land, fighting for freedom, fighting for its basic civil rights, winning those rights, developing into a fine, beautiful community spread out throughout the entire country, where the Jewish people have not only been true to their own faith and had the freedom to celebrate their own faith, but they were able to contribute to the entire American community, whether it be in politics, whether it be in science, whether it be in literature. The Jewish community has been so involved in so many different things, and that's a gift that America gave to the Jewish people, but I think it's also a gift that the Jewish people gave back to America.

ABERNETHY: As Jews celebrate their history in this country, one prized document is a letter George Washington wrote in 1790 to the Jewish congregation in Newport, Rhode Island. The president said in the U.S., the government gives "to bigotry no sanction, to persecution, no assistance."