George Washington’s iconic letter written to the Jews of Newport, Rhode Island, in 1790 is finally on public display after a decade in the shadows. The timing of its emergence as the centerpiece of a new exhibit at the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia is exquisite. But then, it was bound to…
Imagine a country where Jews are prevented from serving as lawyers, where men must swear on the New Testament to enter public office and where people are denied the vote because of their faith. Welcome to America during the late 1700s, when a republic was forged in the heat of revolutionary ideas such as liberty…
The letter has been liberated. We’ve been waiting to write that for a long time, ever since our Paul Berger went on a national search for George Washington’s original, iconic 1790 letter to the Jews of Newport, Rhode Island, the one famously promising a new United States government that would give “to bigotry no sanction,…
After a decade hidden from view, one of the most important documents in American history is set to burst back onto public display, the Forward has learned. George Washington’s 1790 letter to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island, in which the first president vowed that America would give “to bigotry no sanction, to persecution…
The Forward’s campaign to return to public view George Washington’s iconic letter on religious freedom started when reporter Paul Berger attended a lecture more than a year ago. Jonathan Sarna, one of the foremost historians of American Jewry, told the group that the original letter – one of the most important documents in American history…
Richard Morgenstern just wants to be left alone. But when you are the multimillionaire owner of one of the most important documents in American Jewish history — George Washington’s Letter to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, R.I. — avoiding the limelight is not easy. Especially when that document disappeared from public view 10 years ago…
Just a little more than a year after George Washington became America’s first president, Levi Sheftall, a Jew from Savannah, wrote him a letter. Sheftall, president of Congregation Mickve Israel, congratulated Washington on behalf of his fellow Savannah Jews, who had high hopes for religious freedom in their new country. But as if to prove…
An annual ceremony held on Aug. 21 in Newport, R.I., commemorated George Washington’s famed letter to the Jews of Touro Synagogue. Gov. Lincoln Chafee attended and Malcolm Rogers, director of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, recited Washington’s text, all 337 words of it, considered the defining expression of religious tolerance in the new…
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