By VERENA DOBNIK, Associated Press Writer
NEW YORK - They were only "23 souls, big and small," exhausted after surviving storms and pirates on the high seas.
Those five words in an early Dutch document describe America's first Jews, who had fled persecution in Brazil. They were captured by buccaneers in the Caribbean before a French ship, the St. Catherine, rescued them and brought them to what is now New York.
The exact day the ship docked is unclear, but the document dated Sept. 7, 1654, mentions the 23 men, women and children who stepped off the St. Catherine, starting Jewish history in America.
In the coming months across the United States, which now has about 6 million Jewish residents, the 350th anniversary of the refugees' landing is being observed with lectures, exhibits and gatherings.
The Library of Congress (news - web sites) is hosting an exhibit on Jewish life called "From Haven to Home." The National Foundation for Jewish Culture will recognize Jewish talent behind about 100 movies, from the Marx Brothers' "Duck Soup" to Steven Spielberg's "Schindler's List."
And in Orlando, Fla., an exhibit opening Nov. 14 — called "Beauty, Brains and Brawn" — highlights the lives of some great Jewish women of North America, from Illinois labor leader Rosa Sonnenschein and comedian Gilda Radner to Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (news - web sites).
A New York-based organization called Celebrate 350 serves as a hub for hundreds of activities surrounding the anniversary.
The tiny Jewish community was at the mercy of the Dutch who ruled what was then New Amsterdam. The Dutch Reformed governor, Peter Stuyvesant, who had voiced his personal prejudice even against other Christian denominations, viewed the Jewish refugees as "very repugnant." Still, the 23 demanded to stay. They had no choice.
"But the Jews had to be unobtrusive, and the governor said that if they got sick or were in need, they had to take care of their own," said Rabbi Marc Angel, spiritual head of today's Shearith Israel congregation, which was founded 350 years ago by those first Jewish Americans.
Jews could practice only a few trades, and couldn't hold civic office or public religious services. Their de facto leader was Asher Levy, a Kosher butcher who insisted on showing up with two friends for guard duty, defending the Dutch colony like other residents and winning the Jews' first legal rights in America.
He dared to lead "an uprising, an act of civil disobedience for a great and high purpose," said Judith Kaye, New York state's chief judge and a member of Shearith Israel.
After decades of worship in private spaces, America's founding Jewish community consecrated its first synagogue in 1730 on the site of an old mill in what today is lower Manhattan.
Shearith Israel's small Mill Street synagogue was for years North America's sole Jewish house of worship, until a synagogue was erected in Savannah, Ga., then others in Philadelphia, Charleston, S.C., and Newport, R.I., where the Touro Synagogue opened its doors in 1763. Touro is now the oldest synagogue still standing in the United States.
The worn millstones from the 18th century synagogue site still greet worshippers entering Shearith Israel's current, 107-year-old edifice on Manhattan's Upper West Side. A new exhibit there features a Torah scroll that was damaged by fire and water during the Revolutionary War.
Elie Wiesel, the Nobel prize-winning Holocaust scholar and survivor who lives in New York, said: "They came here, chased by persecution, fanaticism, intolerance and meanness. But they managed to transform memories of suffering into an American vision of moral harmony among cultures, religions and society."
