Philadelphia פילדלפיה
The city where what American Jewry still uses was invented: the Sunday school, the English Bible, the first newspaper and the first college.
There has been a community here since the eighteenth century; the Mikveh Israel synagogue is among the oldest in the country. But Philadelphia is known not for its antiquity but for what was done in it in the first half of the nineteenth century.
Rebecca Gratz founded here America's first Jewish Sunday school (1838) and its first non-synagogal Jewish charity (1819). Rabbi Isaac Leeser, hazzan of Mikveh Israel, was the first to preach in English, published the first English Bible translated by a Jew, founded the Occident, and in 1867 Maimonides College, the first Jewish college in the country.
That is, the patterns on which the whole American community was later built took shape in one city and almost in one circle of people.
On the timeline
Related
Sources
Scholarship
- American Jewish Archives — Mikveh Israel, the Sunday school, the Occident, Maimonides College
Basis: documents and evidence.