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Congregation Shearith Israel was the first Jewish congregation established in North America, and the only Jewish congregation in New York City from 1654 until 1825. Between 1654 and 1730, it used…
The very lack of a self-contained territory that has so far disqualified the study of Yiddish from NDEA [the National Defense Education Act] support endows Ashkenazic Jewry with exemplary value for a…
Food was important not just as a means of survival, but also because, as Ma repeatedly told me, “it’s made with love that makes it taste so good.” As a toddler, perched on a chair, I watched each step…
This rare example of an eighteenth-century American snuff box made of gold may have been made by its goldsmith Myer Myers in honor of the opening of a new Masonic lodge in New York. The cover of the…
The ketubah is a religious and legal contract of marriage. Traditionally, it outlines the conjugal and economic conditions of a marriage and is written in Aramaic. This printed ketubah created by…
“Prayer is to religion what thinking is to philosophy. The religious sense prays as the intellectual organ thinks.” Prayer, to carry this saying of Novalis a step further, is a significant…
Religious Liberty was commissioned by the Jewish fraternal organization B’nai B’rith in honor of the American centennial in 1876. It was Moses Ezekiel’s first major commission. Freedom and…
Louis Gottschalk wrote “The Water Sprite—Polka de Salon” soon upon his return to the United States after spending most of his teenaged years in Europe, where he was sent by his father to study music…
Five years after the death of his second wife Reb Meshulam Moskat married for a third time. His new wife was a woman in her fifties, from Galicia, in eastern Austria, the widow of a wealthy brewer…
Mar Abramowitz did not attend services in our temple. With a dozen or so other Ashkenazi refugees from Eastern Europe he worshiped in a tiny downtown loft that was said, by those who had never been…