A Passover Revolution in the American Colonies
by Yisrael Eliashiv – chabad.org
Philadelphia, April 1781.
A boy of about eight is shifting in his seat. His voice, clear and steady, rises inside the quiet room. Mah nishtanah halailah hazeh mikol haleilot?
“Why is this night different from all other nights?”
For those participating in the Passover seder, all crowding a small rented room just blocks from where Congregation Mikveh Israel holds its services, this is a loaded question. In a land with barely 2,500 Jews from one end of the 13 colonies to the other,1 fewer than one in every 10,000 souls,2 and almost everyone around the table is a refugee displaced by the Revolutionary War. Under those conditions, every seder feels like a miracle in itself.
As the candles flicker on the plain wooden table, a glance around the room offers a strong contrast to what used to be. There are no silver goblets, fine linen or any other luxuries. The basic seder plate holds a roasted chicken neck for the zeroa, and bitter herbs pulled from a nearby garden plot serve as maror. The matzot were made locally and baked in a makeshift brick oven that the congregation set up in a nearby rented yard.
There is no grape wine, a luxury impossible to import while trade routes are disrupted and major ports are under British occupation. Instead, sweet, non-fermented raisin juice, which American Jews have learned to prepare3 when kosher wine is unavailable, will be used for the four cups.4
At the head of the table sits Gershom Mendes Seixas, the leader of Mikveh Israel.5 He is determined to ensure that the men, women and children around the table will retell the story of the Exodus exactly as their fathers had for centuries, in the midst of their own personal exodus.
A National Experience
Moments like this were not unique to one table in Philadelphia. Across the scattered settlements of the American colonies, Jewish families were gathering under similar circumstances to observe Passover. Their numbers were tiny, their communities isolated, and the resources needed for the seder often difficult to obtain. Even something as simple as matzah required coordination, improvisation, and communal effort.
On July 4, 2026, the United States will mark the 250th anniversary of its founding. As Americans celebrate the birth of a nation built on the promise of freedom, that makeshift Passover gathering reminds us how a tiny Jewish community managed to keep the festival alive without any of the structures we take for granted today.
Their strenuous efforts to ensure they had handmade matzah for the seder parallel the later matzah campaign launched by the Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, of righteous memory, in 1954. The campaign was created to ensure that no Jew, anywhere, is left without the means to properly fulfill the mitzvah of matzah at a seder table. What once had been a challenge for America’s earliest Jews became a mission: not simply to have matzah for oneself, but to help another Jew obtain it as well. The humble matzah of the early American seder and the Rebbe’s global matzah campaign are connected by the same idea—that freedom is expressed through observing a mitzvah.
A People Scattered Throughout the Land
On the eve of the Revolution, most of the entire Jewish population of the 13 colonies lived in just a handful of port cities: New York, Philadelphia, Charleston, Savannah and Newport.6 Outside those centers, Jewish life was almost nonexistent. A single family might live hundreds of miles from the nearest synagogue or kosher butcher.
The war upended even that delicate network. When the British captured New York in 1776, many Jews fled the city along with thousands of other patriots. Gershom Mendes Seixas, the leader of Congregation Shearith Israel, refused to remain in New York and be forced to pray for the British crown. He convinced most of his congregation to close the synagogue and leave the city before the British invasion. They walked out of the city with Seixas at their head, holding the synagogue’s Torah scroll, and made their way to Patriot strongholds.7 Over the years, he and many members of his congregation would eventually make their way to Philadelphia, joining the already small Jewish community centered around Congregation Mikveh Israel.
Philadelphia soon became the temporary hub of American Jewish life.8 Refugees from New York, along with Jews from smaller towns and trading posts, found themselves praying together, rebuilding communal infrastructure and trying their best to maintain their traditional Jewish observance in the middle of a war. By Passover 1781, Mikveh Israel had swelled to roughly 500 souls.9 It was the largest gathering of Jewish families the young nation had ever seen. Yet even here, the community’s situation remained unsteady. They were all men of trade, with little spiritual guidance; a handful of merchants, shopkeepers and tradesmen trying to keep Passover alive while the war raged around them.
Passover presented some of the greatest challenges for Jewish life in the nascent nation. Even in peacetime, obtaining the foods required for the seder could be difficult in colonial America. During the war, those difficulties multiplied. As a result of the trade routes being disrupted and ports being blockaded, the staples of Jewish life that Jewish communities normally imported from Europe or the Caribbean became scarce.
Matzah, the centerpiece of the seder, could not simply be purchased in a store. There were no commercial kosher bakeries in America at the time, much less matzah bakeries. Communities often had to organize the baking themselves, constructing temporary ovens and carefully supervising the process to ensure that the dough was mixed, rolled and baked within the halachically required 18 minutes. Congregation Mikveh Israel set up a makeshift brick oven in a rented yard near Cherry Street.10 There, under Seixas’s supervision, they baked matzah by hand. They would eventually build a matzah oven as part of the synagogue building.11
Imported kosher wine was nearly impossible to secure.12 Jewish households therefore had to rely on substitutes, the most common being sweet raisin wine. They would place a few pounds of raisins in a large jug or jar, cover it with water and add sugar for extra flavor, if available. The mixture was then set by a warm spot near a fire or stove, covered, and left to steep for a week to allow the raisins to release their sweetness and grape essence.13 After a week, the liquid was strained, filtered and bottled, and the sweet, non-alcoholic drink would serve as kiddush wine or, in this case, the four cups.
Kosher meat also required deliberate planning. Jewish communities depended on trained shochtim, ritual slaughterers, who were sometimes difficult to find during wartime disruptions. Congregations had to coordinate supplies carefully so that families would have what they needed for the festival. Salted beef had to be shipped from distant suppliers, often arriving weeks late.14
Under such conditions, celebrating Passover required the cooperation of the entire community. Synagogues and communal leaders helped organize the baking of matzah and the distribution of essential foods. Wealthier members often assisted poorer families so that everyone could participate in the seder. These efforts reflected more than logistical necessity. They expressed a deep determination to preserve Jewish life even in the face of uncertainty.
A Modern Exodus
At the same time that Jews were retelling the ancient story of the Exodus, the colonies themselves were engaged in their struggle for independence. The message of Passover, of freedom after oppression and redemption after hardship, must have resonated strongly for families living through such trying times.
Many Jews supported the patriot cause. Jewish merchants supplied goods to the Continental Army,15 and Jewish soldiers served alongside their neighbors in the fight for independence.16 Haym Salomon would later become famous for helping finance the revolutionary effort; he sacrificed everything he owned to help a fledgling America win the war and achieve its independence.17 Yet the most enduring legacy of these early American Jews was neither political nor military. It was their quiet persistence to continue living as Jews without compromise, no matter the conditions.
For every single Jew, Passover during the war required effort, planning and sacrifice. Still, they persisted. In doing so, they demonstrated that Jewish life in America would not depend on comfort or abundance. In a country with almost no Jews or infrastructure and in the midst of a war, they proved that faith did not need grandiose buildings or easy access to your every need. It only needed determination and a table so that the seder would still be held as it had always been. And every year, the same question would still be asked: Why is this night different from all other nights?
Washington’s Letter to the Jewish Community
In 1790, after America had achieved its independence and American life regained a sense of normalcy, George Washington wrote a letter to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport18 elucidating the Jewish community’s place in the newly founded nation. It was widely circulated and reached Jews all over the country.
In it, Washington wrote:
It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was 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.
He continued with the ancient biblical promise:
May the Father of all mercies scatter light and not darkness in our paths, and make us all in our several vocations useful here, and in his own due time and way everlastingly happy.
For the families who had gathered in rented rooms, baked matzah in makeshift ovens and asked the Four Questions under wartime uncertainty, these words were not empty platitudes. They were the living answer to the seder they had fought to keep alive. The freedom they had tasted in their homemade raisin juice and backyard matzah was now being promised to them by their new President himself. The Exodus had found its echo in the founding document of American liberty. America might not be the land promised to Avraham and his descendants, but they would at least be free to serve G‑d according to their conscience in the new land they called home.
The Evolution of a Mitzvah
As the young American nation grew, so did its Jewish population. Beginning in the 1840s, waves of German and later Eastern European immigrants swelled its Jewish community, increasing its numbers from a few thousand to hundreds of thousands.19 Abundance replaced scarcity. Commercial matzah bakeries appeared, kosher wine became easier to obtain, and backyard matzah ovens and homemade raisin juice faded into memory. Comfort, however, came at a price. Many families drifted away from the traditional observance that had defined those early years as conditions improved.
Jewish life in America grew in numbers, but for many, it grew colder in spirit. By the late 1800s, the Lower East Side of New York had become the vibrant heart of American Jewry.20 It was dense, bustling and full of new possibilities, but also a place where the revolutionary faith of the Revolutionary era was being lost amid the pressures of assimilation and daily survival.
Then, in the darkest hour of the 20th century, the Sixth Rebbe, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, of righteous memory, arrived on American soil in 1940, barely escaping the Nazis. Leaving the Old World for the New, he looked at this growing but spiritually drifting community and saw concealed within it the same revolutionary spirit that had burned in the Revolutionary era. He set out to revive it and rekindle the resolve that had once made every seder a quiet miracle in a land with almost no Jews.
His son-in-law and successor, the Rebbe, carried that mission forward with global reach. He launched his matzah campaign in 1954 to ensure that no Jew, no matter how far from a community or how assimilated, would be left without matzah or a place at the Passover seder table.
Once, kosher matzah in America had been a logistical headache for a handful of refugees in wartime. Today, America has become the headquarters of a worldwide matzah campaign; volunteers deliver matzah to isolated families, and public seders attended by hundreds are held in the farthest-flung corners of the world.
Some 250 years after the Declaration of Independence, thanks to the Rebbes’ vision, the same resolve that drove those early American Jews to hold a seder no matter the circumstances is alive and well, and spreading worldwide.
Footnotes
1. Sachar, Howard M., A History of the Jews in America.
2. https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2025/07/fourth-of-july.html
3. Jonathan D. Sarna, “Passover Raisin Wine, the American Temperance Movement, and Mordecai Noah: The Origins, Meaning, and Wider Significance of a Nineteenth-Century American Jewish Religious Practice,”
4. Shulchan Aruch HaRav 472:27
5. https://mikvehisraelhistory.com/2013/06/12/rev-gershom-mendes-seixas-1745-1816
6. https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/haventohome/haven-haven.html
7. https://acjna.org/articles/the-first-american-jew-a-tribute-to-gershom-mendes-seixas-patriot-rabbi-of-the-revolution
8. https://hsp.org/blogs/archival-adventures-in-small-repositories/mikveh-israel-synagogue-of-the-american-revolution
9. https://www.mikvehisrael.org/history
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Jonathan D. Sarna, “Passover Raisin Wine, the American Temperance Movement, and Mordecai Noah: The Origins, Meaning, and Wider Significance of a Nineteenth-Century American Jewish Religious Practice,” https://www.jstor.org/stable/23507858
13. https://daily.jstor.org/when-passover-meant-raisin-wine
14. https://newporthistory.org/history-bytes-how-jewish-was-aaron-lopezs-mercantile-operation
15. https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1314&context=ghj
16. https://www.unsunghistorypodcast.com/jewish-patriots
17. https://www.chabad.org/5175340
18. https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/05-06-02-0135
19. https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/german-immigrant-period-in-united-states