New York (VINNEWS/Rabbi Yair Hoffman)  “I would rather be a street-sweeper in America, where I have the religious freedom to learn Torah, than a Rav in Communist Russia.”
— Rav Moshe Feinstein zt”l

The sentiment cited above by Rav Moshe Feinstein did not begin with those who reached these shores in the twentieth century. It runs back much further — back to a leaking French ship that limped into a Dutch harbor in the autumn of 1654, carrying twenty-three exhausted Jewish souls who had nowhere else on earth to go.

The story of how those twenty-three became a community, and how that community helped build a nation that would one day promise “to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance,” is one of the most remarkable and least told chapters in all of Jewish history.
A Malchus Shel Chesed
Rav Moshe Feinstein zt”l, who fled Soviet Russia in 1937 and became the foremost posek of American Jewry, understood exactly what this country offered.  Elsewhere he described the United States as a malchus shel chesed, a kingdom of kindness, whose very purpose was to benefit its inhabitants — a government that had taken in the shattered remnant of European Jewry and allowed both its ancient institutions and new ones to be rebuilt on free soil.
What the great rabbanim of the twentieth century recognized, however, the first Jews of this land had already lived. Almost two centuries before Rav Moshe’s drasha, a handful of Sephardic refugees had staked everything on the wager that America might be that rarest of things — a country where a Jew could live in peace as a Jew. This is their story.
The Road to a Leaking Ship
To understand why twenty-three Jews would risk their lives on the open ocean to reach a swampy Dutch trading post at the tip of Manhattan, one must go back to Sefarad — to Spain, and to the catastrophe of 1492.
For centuries, Jews had flourished on the Iberian Peninsula. The great Torah luminaries of Sefarad — among them the Rambam, the Ramban, and Rabbeinu Bachya — belong to the golden age of Spanish Jewry. But that world was destroyed in stages. The massacres of 1391 drove tens of thousands of Jews to accept baptism under threat of death. In 1478, Ferdinand and Isabella established the Spanish Inquisition, whose particular obsession was hunting down these conversos — New Christians suspected of secretly clinging to the faith of their fathers. And on the 31st of March 1492, the Catholic monarchs signed the Alhambra Decree, ordering every Jew who refused conversion to leave Spain forever. The last openly practicing Jews sailed from Spanish ports at the very moment Columbus set out across the Atlantic.
Many fled to neighboring Portugal, only to be forcibly converted there in 1497. And so was born the tragic and heroic phenomenon of the anusim — the crypto-Jews, families who lit Shabbos candles behind shuttered windows, who whispered Shema in cellars, who passed a hidden Jewishness from parent to child across generations while the Inquisition’s spies watched for any sign of “Judaizing.” When Holland threw open its doors to religious refugees in the seventeenth century, many of these Sephardic families finally emerged into the light in Amsterdam. From there, some sailed to the Dutch colony of Recife in Brazil, where they built the first organized Jewish community in the Americas and even a synagogue.
It could not last. In 1654 the Portuguese wrested Recife back from the Dutch — and with the Portuguese came the Inquisition. Recife’s roughly six hundred Jews scattered. Most returned to Amsterdam or dispersed among the tolerant Dutch outposts of the Caribbean. But one group of twenty-three — men, women, and children — boarded a vessel remembered by history as the Ste. Catherine and set a course that would, after being blown off track, seized by pirates, and rescued by a French privateer, deliver them to a place called New Amsterdam.
Twenty-Three Souls at the Edge of the World
They arrived in September 1654 with little more than the clothes on their backs, owing money they could not pay for their passage. A Jewish merchant named Jacob Barsimson had in fact reached the port about a month before them, so the newcomers were not quite the very first Jews on the ground — but the arrival of an entire group, families and all, marked something new: the intention to plant a permanent Jewish community on North American soil.
They were not welcomed. Peter Stuyvesant, the hard-nosed director-general of New Amsterdam, wanted them gone. In blunt and ugly letters to his superiors at the Dutch West India Company, he described the Jews as deceitful and repugnant and warned that admitting them would open the door to other undesirables. What Stuyvesant did not reckon with was the leverage of the Amsterdam Jewish community — whose members were shareholders in the very company Stuyvesant served, and who had lost fortunes in the fall of Dutch Brazil. The company overruled its governor. The Jews could stay, on the condition that their poor would be supported by their own and not become a burden on the colony — a condition that would echo through the centuries in the vast web of Jewish tzedakah and mutual aid this community would build.
One of those first settlers, Asser Levy, refused to accept second-class status. When Jews were barred from standing guard with the militia and forced instead to pay a special tax, Levy fought for the right to serve — and won. He would go on to own property, trade widely, and die a respected man in New York in 1682. In the story of one stubborn refugee insisting on his rights as an equal, the entire future of American Jewry is already visible in miniature.
Shearith Israel: A Remnant Endures
Out of these beginnings grew Congregation Shearith Israel — the “Remnant of Israel” — the oldest Jewish congregation in what would become the United States, and for nearly two centuries the only synagogue in New York City. Denied at first the right to worship openly, its members davened in rented rooms and private homes. They secured a cemetery in 1656, before they had a shul — a poignant order of priorities, for a community can gather to pray in any parlor, but the dead require ground of their own.
In 1730, at long last, the congregation consecrated its own building on Mill Street in Lower Manhattan — the first purpose-built synagogue in North America, dedicated on the seventh day of Pesach. A year later, in 1731, Shearith Israel established its first yeshiva, named Minhat Areb, a beis midrash for the young members of the community. Boys and girls alike were taught to read and write Hebrew and to know the Jewish calendar and its mitzvos. By 1755 the congregation had expanded its school to teach English, Spanish, and mathematics alongside limudei kodesh — an early ancestor of the yeshiva day school that would one day educate hundreds of thousands of American Jewish children.
Shearith Israel became known also as the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue, and though its liturgy followed the Sephardic minhag, its membership from the earliest days included Ashkenazim as well. That blending was itself a lesson. In the Old World, Sephardim and Ashkenazim had lived largely apart, divided by language, custom, and pronunciation. In America, their numbers were too small to indulge in division. When the first Ashkenazic Jews — arriving from Germany and Poland, and by the 1720s outnumbering the Sephardim — reached these shores, they did not rush to found rival congregations. They joined the Sephardic shul. Two groups became, of necessity and then of conviction, one people.
Keeping Kosher at the Edge of the Wilderness
What did it actually mean to live as a Jew in colonial America? It meant improvisation, sacrifice, and no small amount of mesirus nefesh. There were no kosher supermarkets, no established batei din, no ordained rabbanim at all — the first ordained rabbi would not set foot in America until Rav Avraham Rice arrived in 1840, nearly two centuries after the first Jews landed. When a difficult shailah in halacha arose, colonists wrote letters across the ocean to rabbanim in Europe and waited months for a reply.
A community fortunate enough to have a shochet could eat meat; a community without one turned vegetarian by default, subsisting on fish, eggs, grains, and produce rather than eat what was not properly slaughtered. Jews learned from their Native American neighbors to prepare corn, squash, pumpkins, beans, and maple sugar — foods unknown in Spain — while carefully eating only fish that bore fins and scales. Torah scrolls, tefillin, and siddurim were imported at great expense from Europe. A chazzan led the tefillos; a shochet provided the meat; a shammash kept the shul. Every element of a Torah life had to be built by hand, from scratch, on the far edge of the civilized world — and yet it was built.
The Women Who Held It Together
It is easy, reading old accounts, to imagine colonial Jewish life as an affair of merchants and chazzanim and male communal leaders. But the survival of Yiddishkeit in America rested, then as always, in very large measure on its women. It was the women who kashered the kitchens, who prepared for Shabbos and Yom Tov, who guarded the rhythms of Jewish time in the home.
Some of them left a record. Abigail Franks of New York — whose husband Jacob helped lay the cornerstone of the Mill Street shul and served as its president — wrote a remarkable series of letters to her son in the 1730s and 1740s, letters that survive as perhaps the richest portrait we possess of colonial Jewish family life. In them we watch a devoted Jewish mother laboring to raise her children as observant Jews while navigating a wider gentile society, wrestling openly with the tension between remaining faithful and fitting in — the very tension that would define American Jewish life ever after. Others, like the widowed Abigail Minis of Savannah, ran plantations and businesses of their own, supporting large families through their own enterprise. These were not passive figures. They were the load-bearing walls of a community.
Busy in Business, Spread Along the Coast
Most Jewish men in colonial America made their living in trade. Many kept small shops, family enterprises where father, mother, and children all worked side by side selling cloth, candles, pins, and needles. Others built substantial merchant houses, shipping lumber, grain, fur, and molasses to Europe and importing iron goods and tools to sell in the colonies. In Charleston, Jews grew rice on plantations and shipped it to England and the West Indies. In Newport, Aaron Lopez rose to become the wealthiest merchant in the city, his fortune built on candles, whale oil, and trans-Atlantic commerce.
As new colonies opened, Jews moved into them, and a chain of communities took root along the Atlantic seaboard: New York, Newport in Rhode Island, Philadelphia in Pennsylvania, Savannah in Georgia, and Charleston in South Carolina. Congregation Mickve Israel in Savannah was founded in 1733, only months after the colony of Georgia itself was established — its Jewish settlers arriving almost with the first ships. Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim took shape in Charleston by 1749. Up and down the coast, business partnerships turned into marriages, and marriages knit the scattered communities into a single extended family. By 1776, the Jewish population of the colonies had grown from those original twenty-three to roughly two thousand five hundred souls.
The Newport community would raise one of the enduring treasures of American Jewish history: the Touro Synagogue, dedicated in 1763 and still standing today as the oldest surviving synagogue building in the United States. Shearith Israel of New York remains the oldest congregation; Touro remains the oldest building. Together they bracket the whole colonial story in brick and mortar.
Freedom Was Not Yet Complete
It would be a distortion to paint colonial America as a paradise of tolerance. It was not. Jews were barred outright from settling in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Hampshire. Even where they were permitted to live, most colonies forbade them to vote or to hold public office. Anti-Semitism, the old inheritance of the Old World, had crossed the ocean along with everything else.
And yet — compared to anything these families had known in Spain, in Portugal, in the ghettos and exiles of Europe — colonial America offered something almost unimaginable: the possibility of building a full Jewish communal life without the constant terror of expulsion. One could own land. One could trade freely. One could, quietly and then not so quietly, be a Jew. It was not equality. But it was a foothold, and on that foothold everything else would be built.
A Fight for Freedom — and the Jews Who Joined It
When the thirteen colonies rose against England in 1775, the Jews of America did not stand on the sidelines. Their stake in the new nation’s promise of liberty was, if anything, greater than most. Roughly six hundred Jews are said to have served in the Continental Army under General George Washington.
Some gave more than service. Francis Salvador of South Carolina, the first Jew elected to public office in the American colonies, became the first Jew to fall in the Revolution when he was killed in 1776. Mordecai Sheftall of Savannah rose to become one of the highest-ranking Jewish officers in the Continental cause. And Haym Salomon, the Polish-born Jewish financier in Philadelphia, poured his own fortune and his brokerage genius into keeping the Revolution solvent — lending and raising enormous sums, by common estimate well over half a million dollars, much of it never repaid. He died in 1785, not many years later, having spent himself in the cause of a country not yet certain it would have him as an equal.
On the fourth of July 1776, the colonies declared themselves a free nation, and the United States was born. Five years later the war was won. By taking up arms and opening their purses in the fight for independence, the Jews of America had staked an unmistakable claim: this was their country too, and they had helped to build it.
“To Bigotry No Sanction, To Persecution No Assistance”
The claim was answered — and answered by none other than the first President of the United States. In 1790, George Washington visited Newport, Rhode Island. Among the dignitaries who came to greet him was Moses Seixas, warden of the Jewish congregation that worshipped in the Touro Synagogue. Seixas addressed the President with a letter expressing the hope that the new government would grant its citizens dignity and safety regardless of their religion.
Washington’s reply, sent shortly afterward, is one of the founding documents of religious freedom in America. In a few hundred carefully chosen words, he swept aside the very idea of mere “toleration” — as though liberty were a favor one class of people granted another — and spoke instead of the inherent natural rights of all. “The Government of the United States,” Washington wrote, “gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.” Drawing on the words of the Navi, he blessed the community: may the children of the stock of Avraham who dwell in this land continue to merit and enjoy the goodwill of the other inhabitants, while everyone shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.
Sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and none to make him afraid. To Jews whose grandparents had lit Shabbos candles in secret for fear of the Inquisition, whose ancestors had been driven from Spain and Portugal and Brazil, whose own parents had crossed an ocean in a leaking ship to a governor who wanted them expelled — those words must have landed like a revelation. This was not the grudging endurance of the Jew that Europe had perfected over a thousand years. This was a President of a new nation writing, in his own hand, that the Jew belonged.
The Line Drawn from 1654 to Today
There is a straight line — improbable, providential — from those twenty-three refugees stepping off the Ste. Catherine in 1654 to the great Torah empire that American Jewry would become. From a community with no rabbi and no shul, davening in a rented room and burying its dead before it could build a house of prayer, would eventually grow the yeshivos and batei midrash and communities that today make America one of the two great centers of Torah in the world.
That growth was possible because of a single, precious thing: freedom. It is the same freedom that the Rosh Yeshiva had in mind when he said he would sooner sweep American streets than sit as a Rav in Communist Russia. It is the same freedom Rav Moshe Feinstein praised when he called this country a malchus shel chesed, a kingdom of kindness carrying out the will of Heaven. And it is the same freedom that George Washington promised the remnant of Israel gathered at Newport — that here, at last, they might sit in safety under their own vine and fig tree, with none to make them afraid.
The twenty-three did not know, as their battered ship came into harbor, what they were beginning. They knew only that they were, once again, refugees at the mercy of a hostile governor, owing money they could not pay, in a raw settlement at the edge of the known world. They could not have imagined the millions who would follow, the Torah that would be learned, the freedom that would be won and secured and handed down. They knew only that they had come, as the very first Jews to reach these shores had come, for the one thing that had been denied them everywhere else on earth.
They had come to be free — free to learn, and free to teach, and free to live openly as Jews. Everything else that American Jewry became is the fruit of that first, desperate wager on freedom. And it is a wager that, more than three and a half centuries later, has more than repaid itself.

Rabbi Yair Hoffman can be reached at [email protected]