So it seems to be the case that for most of this country's Jews, there is no real sense of personal ties to Jewish life in America throughout the years of this nation's history. Today's American Jews, by and large, do not see themselves as part of a community rooted in the very origins of the United States-indeed, rooted even in the colonial seedbeds of the American people. A change may well be anticipated, however. With the continuing succession of American-born generations, the current family-experience vista of the Jewish presence in America must fade. The year 1948 or 1983 or 1921 or 1898 or 1871, or, for fewer, 1848 or 1821 - all such time boundaries, respective tidemarks, of family beginnings, will doubtless fade from personal consciousness as the sense of identity as American Jew attaches itself to the foundations of American Jewish life, as part of a community whose history is entwined with the story of America, going back as far as the year 1654.

For the Jew of America, the year 1654 holds the same meaning as does the arrival of the Mayflower for his fellow American of British origin or Anglo-Saxon Protestant tradition. As told by Dr. David and Tamar deSola Pool in their epic work, An Old Faith in the New World¹.'

Early in September, 1654, a, small group of Jews, twenty-three in all, providentially reached the port of Niew Amsterdam. They were the founding fathers of Congregation Shearith Israel in the City of New York and of the Jewish community in the United States of America, a community destined to become the largest Jewish (Diaspora) settlement in all the long history of the Children of Israel. The story of their momentous journey has been transmitted through the generations as a proud and precious tradition.

Perilous adventures had beset the Founding Fathers, beyond the measure common to pioneers in those days. Early in 1654, they sailed from Recife²,' Brazil when the Portuguese conquered the Dutch. Hither and yon went the defeated, and many reached the safety of Holland. Others who clung to the New World were storm-driven to a Caribbean port and held by the very Inquisition they had fled. A ship of that convoy was captured by pirates.

Here the authors quote from an eighteenth-century source³ wherein it is recounted:

"But God caused a savior to arise unto diem, the captain of a French ship arrayed for battle, and he rescued them from out of the hands of the outlaws who had done them violence and oppressed them, and he conducted them until they reached the end of the inhabited earth called New Holland, and then (the ship) also came to our encampment here. And so no man was missing, thanks be to God."

The authors then note that:

The time of their arrival [in Niew Amsterdam, later to become New York] preceded by but a few days the Jewish New Year. . . . In the soul-searching communion of those Holy Days they must have found strength to face their still uncertain future, and courage to believe with the prophet of old that "a remnant of Israel" - for that is what Shearith Israel means in Hebrew-was to be a new fount of life.

Adding to the dire straits of the newcomers was the hostility of the governor of the Dutch colony, Peter Stuyvesant. All hardships were endured, however. Standing their ground in the face of want and efforts to eject them, the pioneers-joined by other arrivals from Amsterdam, and with the intercession of the Amsterdam Jewish community-were accorded the right of residence and the means of livelihood.

While religious life was devoutly maintained by these stalwarts, it was not until the end of the eighteenth century-by which time Niew Amsterdam had long since come, as New York, under British rule-that "the synagogue of New York's Jewish community was given [official] recognition and the right of the Jews to conduct worship in a publicly recognized synagogue was never again questioned.'

Well do David and Tamar deSola Pool declare, in the quoted work:

The Jews who came to Niew Amsterdam did not find freedom, they fought for it. Their unrelenting struggle to secure freedom of worship in no small measure enlarged the very conception of religious liberty and helped lay the foundations for its achievement. What they did with simplicity and assurance, assumes an importance far beyond what might have been expected of their small numbers. It helped open the road to the American credo of full, free, and equal right for all. For what the Jews secured for themselves, they furthered for others . . . men of all faiths.... Those who battled for freedom molded the face of the future.

For several decades, the congregation's services were held in rented quarters on Mill Street (which had become known as "Jews' Alley"), until 1728, when a piece of land on that street was purchased for the construction of a synagogue, "at the price of 100 Pounds, one loaf of sugar, and a pound of bohea tea." Thus was erected the first synagogue built by Jews in North America.

The Mill Street Synagogue was consecrated on the seventh day of Pesah - April 9, 1730. It was a brick building, 35 feet square and 21 feet in height, including the women's gallery. Six months later, the congregation's cabana (sukkah) was built in the yard behind the synagogue. A mikveh (ritual bath), early on, drew water from the spring that powered the mill for which the street was named.

As great an object of fascination as this first synagogue was to others, the ner tamid excited particular interest in Christian neighbors and visitors.

The quoted work states:

Gabriel P. Disoway, who remembered the first Mill Street Synagogue, tells that as a boy "very often have I looked in at the window to see if the 'Holy Light' was burning before the altar. This ever burning Jewish light was the wonder and mystery of the First Ward."

The de Sola Pools point out that the pioneering Shearith Israel, composed as yet of but a few dozen families, was still the only Jewish community in North America, and that:

It was still early in the history of even the Atlantic coast states of colonial America. Plans were being laid out for a city to be called Baltimore. Three years later, 1738, Jews arrived with the earliest settlers in Savannah, Georgia. It was not until two decades later that there were the beginnings of organized Jewish settlement in Philadelphia, Lancaster, and Charleston.

Intriguing glimpses of the life of the community in early generations were presented in a talk given in 1927 to the Shearith Israel membership by Captain N. Taylor Phillips⁴ of a family that had belonged to the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue since 1700. In his address, Captain Phillips (who had participated in the founding of the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America in 1898 and served on its executive board for many years thereafter) drew upon his own family's store of reminiscence, including an account of   the manner in which Dr. Samuel Nunez, my grandfather's greatgrandfather, came here about 1788. He was a Marrano from Portugal and his family had lived there as secret Jews for many years, two or three hundred years. They finally were discovered by the Inquisitors and they were, in the parlance of New York, 'tipped off' by somebody that the Inquisitors were 'on to them.'  Dr. Nunez gave a great banquet on his estate, which was on the banks of the Tagus. He had previously arranged with the captain of an English brig to stand out in the bay, and at the proper time to take them away. So he invited all the highbrows to come there and enjoy themselves, and in the midst of the fiesta, the drinking and eating and merrymaking, the family slipped out, gathering as much silver and jewelry and other things as they could easily carry, and went on the brig. The brig shot out and they were carried to London.

One member of that family who had survived Inquisition torture, Captain Phillips related, was released, and, after fleeing to New York, was observed to have marks of the Inquisition torture on his hands.

The compact orderliness of the trail-blazing community came to an abrupt halt with the onset of the American Revolution and war for independence. Most of the congregation's leaders and members were ardent patriots of the Continental cause, and, upon the occupation of New York by British troops, left the city for parts held by the American forces. After the war, congregational life was pieced together again, but the environment of American life had changed - a change fully shared by the Jewish populace of the land, now increasing beyond the estimated two thousand of pre-Revolutionary days.

The sole surviving structure of colonial-era Jewish Americans is in Newport, Rhode Island. There, a small but historically significant Jewish community with close ties to the New York congregation took shape in the mid-seventeenth century. By the mid-eighteenth century it was flourishing sufficiently that a synagogue was built, but in the aftermath of the Revolutionary War, economic changes caused the congregation's decline. After a long lapse, a new congregation formed in Newport, now occupying, by due arrangement,  the site of the original group. This is the famed Newport Synagogue⁵, an architectural jewel built in 1763 and now a national historic landmark.

It was in the Newport Synagogue that a notable visitor of the pre-Revolutionary years, Rabbi Yitzhak Hai Carigal, delivered a discourse on Shavuoth in 5733 (May 28, 1773). Those present included, in addition to the congregants, non-Jewish government officials and the Reverend Ezra Stiles, prominent clergyman and distinguished scholar, later to become the third president of Yale College. Rabbi Carigal, the first. rabbi to appear in what was soon to be the United States, had been born and educated in the land of Israel, and had traveled throughout Asia, North Africa, and Europe before journeying to America. There, his personal qualities, as well as his status as a Holy-Land emissary and his rabbinic stature, won him high regard.

At Newport, Dr. Stiles, who had taught himself some Hebrew, pursued opportunities to meet and converse with Rabbi Carigal, and they became friendly. Extracts from Dr. Stiles's diary and other records of Rabbi Carigal's visit were compiled by the historian Lee M. Friedman and published in a privately printed volume (Rabbi Haim Isaac Carigal, 1940). We learn from this account that Dr. Stiles attended services at the synagogue numerous times to observe the distinguished visitor. Of the Shavuoth occasion, Dr. Stiles's diary states:

Went to the Synagogue at six A.M. At reading of Law the Rabbi was desired and read the Ten Commandments. But before reading the Law and the Prophets the Rabbi went to the Desk or Taubah and preached a sermon about 47 minutes long in Spanish. It was interspersed with Hebrew. His Oratory, Eloquence and Gestures were fine and Oriental. . . . He exhorted them not to perplex themselves with Traditions and Criticisms, but to attend to certain capital points and principal points of Religion-he expatiated upon the Miseries and Calamities of their Nation in their present Captivity and Dispersion and comforted them . . . by the assured Prospect of the Messiah's Kingdom.

Of all the treasures of the early American Jewish heritage, one stands in a place all its own: George Washington's letter addressing America's Jews through the Jewish community of Newport. In this letter are the immortal words:

It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were by the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights, for, happily, the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.

Well may all generations of America's Jews take pride and inspiration from the role of their pioneering forbears. The qualities of these early American Jews have been summarized elsewhere⁶ in these words: