Destinations - USA

How strange it seems! These Hebrews by their graves,
Close by the streets of this fair seaport town,
Silent by the never-silent waves,
At rest in all this moving up and down!
‘The Jewish Cemetery at Newport’, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

So wrote the poet about the cemetery linked to the oldest synagogue in the USA, the Touro Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island.

Touro Synagogue, Newport, Rhode Island

Popular history sends us pictures of the migration to the USA of Eastern European Jews fleeing the Czarist pogroms, queues of migrants at Ellis Island, scenes of New York - but religious liberty espoused by Roger Williams, who founded the colony that became Rhode Island following his banishment from Puritan Massachusetts sent a message of hope to others who had experienced religious intolerance.

A group of Sefardim came to Rhode Island perhaps as early as 1658, built a plot for a cemetery in 1677 and held services in houses and halls until 1763, when the synagogue was completed.

With the largest Jewish population outside Israel, American Jewish history can be divided into four main eras defined by the origin and period of immigration: Sefardi to 1841; German to 1914; East European to 1920 and finally the American period.

The first arrivals, from 1654 were a group from Recife, Brazil, seeking refuge in Dutch-ruled New Amsterdam. They settled along the Atlantic coast, in New York, Newport, Philadelphia, Charleston and Savannah.