Rebecca Gratz רבקה גרץ

Born in 1781 at Philadelphia into a wealthy merchant family. She never married—she said she had found few men who would be agreeable company in a house; after her sister Rachel's death in 1823 she raised her six children.

She began with charity in general: in 1801 she helped found a women's relief association, not a Jewish one. Eighteen years later, in 1819, she founded the Female Hebrew Benevolent Society—the country's first Jewish charity not attached to a synagogue.

But the chief thing is the Sunday school, opened in 1838. The task before it was new: America had neither cheder nor the communal order that teaches of itself; children grew up among Christian neighbours and attended common schools. She took a form familiar to everyone around—the Sunday school—and filled it with her own: faith, history, custom, in English, boys and girls together. She was superintendent herself and wrote the curriculum herself.

The model spread through the country and became the standard. One further thing came of it: Jewish women gained for the first time the place of a public teacher of religion—the teachers in those schools were women.

In 1855 she founded the Jewish Foster Home for orphans, as the great immigration began. She died in 1869.

It is said of her that Walter Scott drew Rebecca in Ivanhoe from her. The legend took shape by the time of her death, and American Jews held to it willingly: it meant one could belong in this country and remain oneself. The legend has no proof.