AJA Educational Articles
“We could not say no to Martin Luther King, whom we always respected and admired and whose loyal friends we hope we shall be in the days to come,” read a letter from 16 rabbis who were arrested with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in St. Augustine, Florida in 1964 at a protest…
The American Jewish Archives contains records of Jewish leaders serving as chaplains in the US military dating back to the Civil War; however, not until 1986 did the first commissioned active-duty female chaplain join such ranks. Cincinnati native Julie Schwartz was a student at HUC-JIR in Cincinnati in 1985 when she received ecclesiastical approval from…
Founded in 1929, the Bake Shop, a Jewish bakery in Cincinnati, employed over thirty women in need of work. Funded by the United Jewish Social Agencies, the Bake Shop served the Walnut Hills and Avondale communities for upwards of forty years. Recipe cards from the Bake Shop, preserved at the American Jewish Archives, reveal Jewish…
On November 16-19, 1885, a meeting of the convened at the call of Kaufmann Kohler. The meeting produces the “Pittsburgh Platform” – a document which set forth American Reform positions on such topics as the idea of God, the Jewish mission, and the need for Jews to be actively involved in social justice causes for…
Although Mikveh Israel, Philadelphia’s first synagogue, was not founded until 1782, the land for its cemetery has an earlier history. A burial plot was first bought by Nathan Levy in 1738 when he suddenly needed a burial place for one of his children, and land was made available to him by Thomas Penn, the son…
The first known Jew to arrive in America was Jacob Barsimson on August 22, 1654, and he was joined by twenty-three more Jews four months later, although most of them stayed in New Amsterdam only for a short time. Peter Stuyvesant, Governor of New Amsterdam, was not happy about having a Jewish population in the…
Although America was intended as a land of liberty, religious freedom was not always guaranteed. In many colonies and later states, Jews struggled for the right to vote, the ability to serve in the government, and for recognition of their religion as equal before the law. Thomas Jefferson, a strong believer in freedom of religion,…
The first Jewish sermon preached and published in North America was delivered at Newport’s synagogue by an emissary from the Holy Land, Haim Isaac Karigal. The sermon was delivered on May 28, 1773, to celebrate Shavuot. According to Dr. Jacob Rader Marcus, in The American Jew, “He [Karigal] spoke in an Iberian patois that at…
Major General Maurice Rose is said to be the “greatest forgotten commander of World War II.” He joined the military in 1916 as a private and served along the Mexican border before fighting in the 89th division in France in 1917. He rose through the ranks and during World War II he fought in the…
Haym Salomon (1740-1785), a Polish immigrant and New York City financial broker, was one of the largest Patriot financiers of the Revolutionary War. During the war, he was arrested by the British as a spy and forced to work as a German translator. Salomon used his position to convince German mercenary soldiers to disband and…